Let It Ride
Three equal stakes, three cards, two community cards — and two chances to pull money back off the table. Both decisions are exact: 1,176 boards counted at the first, 48 at the second.
Ride them or pull them
- 1,176boards counted
- 2chances to pull back
Manual
- Three stakes go down at once.
- One deal costs three equal stakes. There is no dealer — the deck itself is the opponent.
- Two chances to pull back.
- After your three cards you may pull stake one; after the first community card, stake two. Stake three always rides.
- The final five pays the ladder.
- Your three cards plus the two community cards, floored at a pair of tens — anything less pays nothing.
- Each riding stake pays independently.
- A hand on the ladder pays every stake still out there at full odds, up to 1000:1 for the royal.
- A pulled stake nets zero.
- It comes straight back to your purse the moment you pull it — nothing won, nothing lost.
The game
Three equal stakes go down before the deal. You get three cards; two community cards complete everyone’s five. There is no dealer and no showdown — the deck itself is the opponent, and the final five simply pays a ladder or does not.
What makes the game is the two chances to take money back. After seeing your three cards you may pull stake one; after the first community card you may pull stake two. Stake three always rides. A pulled stake comes straight back — it nets exactly zero.
The ladder
The floor is a pair of tens — a lower pair or a bare high card pays nothing. Each riding stake is paid by the ladder independently: land the royal with all three out there and every one of them is paid at 1000:1.
| Pair, tens or better | 1:1 |
| Two pair | 2:1 |
| Trips | 3:1 |
| Straight | 5:1 |
| Flush | 8:1 |
| Full house | 11:1 |
| Quads | 50:1 |
| Straight flush | 200:1 |
| Royal flush | 1000:1 |
The numbers
Both decisions on this screen are exact. With your three cards known, only 1,176 boards exist and every one is counted; with four cards known, just 48. No sampling, no ±.
Played optimally, stake one rides on only about 7% of hands and stake two on about 15% — those rates are the strategy’s stable fingerprint, and the ones to trust. The average cost per hand is small, a few percent of one stake, but it leans on the 1000:1 royal tail, so any sampled estimate of it wanders however long you run it.
Tactics
A made hand — tens or better already among your three — always rides: it is paid whatever comes, and can only grow.
Big draws ride too: three to a royal, and the strong three-card straight-flush draws. The tail of the ladder is what pays for them.
Everything else pulls, and pulls again at the second decision unless the first community card has changed the arithmetic. The borderline cases are exactly what the ledger is for — it has already counted every board, so trust the row.