Lessons Learned: Night 1 of 4 at the Casinos

Let It Ride is my casino game of choice. (I separate table games between "poker games" where I have a positive expected value (EV) and "casino games" where I have a negative EV.) It is not my game of choice because the house edge is smaller than other games but instead is due to the fact that I always seem to do pretty well at it.

I was recently playing Let It Ride at the Barona Casino near San Diego, CA. They had a setup there that I was unfamiliar with. Normally, when you play Let It Ride, you make 3 bets of equal value and then have the option for a 4th “Bonus” bet of $1. However Barona offered a 5th betting option. It is known as a PairPlus bet. Basically, you place a bet on the 3 card poker hand that you are dealt. I didn’t play this one because I figured it was a sucker bet just like the bonus bet is. The guy sitting to my left was playing it for me but then stopped because it wasn’t paying off. That’s when it happened. I got dealt a straight flush. 9-10-J of hearts. Now I was only playing the 3 main bets. I won nothing from those and I would have won nothing from the bonus bet because I missed everything on the next two cards. However, I would have been paid 40:1 if I had been betting PairPlus. I felt so dumb. There was no solace in knowing that it is a sucker bet when I hit the highest possible paying hand and missed out on what would have probably paid for the rest of my vacation.

There is a positive twist to my story of missed riches. I headed over to the Wizard of Odds when I got home to see just how big of a sucker bet it is. First, the PairPlus bet wasn’t as bad as I thought. The house edge is only between 2% and 3.5%. In comparison, the house edge for the three main bets is about 3.5% and the edge on the bonus is approximately a whopping 25%. The bonus bet is officially the king of all sucker bets in my book. The comforting thing was that the chances for making a straight flush were about 1 in 500. And the house only pays 40 to 1?!? What a rip.

Anyways, I still am going to be kicking myself for a while on this one. But it does show the importance of knowing the odds ahead of time. If I knew the house edge was that small, I probably would have been playing the PairPlus bet and would have a few extra hundred dollars fattening my wallet.