Russian roulette

For other uses, see Russian roulette (disambiguation).

Russian roulette is a grimly humorous name given to the ultimate form of gambling. Participants of Russian Roulette place a single round (sometimes, but rarely, more than one) in a chamber of a revolver. A revolver almost always contains six chambers, and once the round is placed, the cylinder is spun rapidly and then closed (put back into the gun) so that the identity of the loaded chamber is unknown to anyone. The player then places the revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger, accepting a one in six chance of death. The game is played for various reasons, often as a form of high-stakes gambling before a crowd of bettors, or sometimes as a show of bravado before a witness or as a form of less-culpable suicide, performed alone or with others. Russian Roulette is a highly secretive practice, and the number of deaths caused by it is unknown.

History

Legends abound regarding the invention of Russian roulette. Most of these, predictably, take place in Russia, or occur among Russian soldiers.

In one legend, 19th century Russian prisoners were forced to play the game while the prison guards bet on the outcome. In another version, desperate and suicidal officers in the Russian army played the game to impress each other.

The earliest known use of the term is from "Russian Roulette", a short story by Georges Surdez in the January 30, 1937, issue of Collier's Magazine. A Russian sergeant in the French Foreign Legion asks the narrator,

"Feldheim… did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?" When I said I had not, he told me all about it. When he was with the Russian army in Romania, around 1917, and things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not only losing prestige, money, family, and country, but were being also dishonored before their colleagues of the Allied armies, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a cafe, at a gathering of friends, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head, and pull the trigger. There were five chances to one that the hammer would set off a live cartridge and blow his brains all over the place. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not.

Whether Tsarist officers actually played Russian roulette is unclear. In a text on the Czarist officer corps, John Bushnell, a Russian history expert at Northwestern University, cited two near-contemporary memoirs by Russian army veterans, The Duel (1905) by Aleksandr Kuprin and From Double Eagle to Red Flag (1921) by Pyotr Krasnov. Both books tell of officers' suicidal and outrageous behaviour, but Russian roulette is not mentioned in either text. If the game did originate in real life behavior and not fiction it is unlikely that it started with the Russian military. The standard sidearm issued to Russian officers from 1895 to 1930 was the Nagant M1895 revolver. A double-action revolver, the Nagant's cylinder spins clockwise until the hammer is cocked. While the cylinder does not swing out as in modern hand-ejector style double action revolvers, it can be spun around to randomize the result. However, it holds seven cartridges not six, which throws some doubt on the accuracy of the reference in Collier's. It is possible that Russian officers shot six and kept the seventh cartridge live. Because of the deeply seated bullets unique to the Nagant's cartridge, and because the primers are concealed, it would be very difficult to tell from the outside where the live round was and which were spent and would add to the uncertainty of the results.

The only reference to anything like Russian roulette in Russian literature is in a book entitled A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov (1840, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in 1958), where a similar act is performed by a Serbian soldier in the story The Fatalist: the dare however is not named as "Russian roulette". Russian officers did play a game called "cuckoo" with a Nagant revolver, in which one officer would stand on a table or a chair in a dark room. Others would hide and yell "cuckoo" and the man with the gun would fire at the sound.

Cinematic Depictions

Russian Roulette was brought to the American forefront of consciousness by the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter. The Best Picture winning movie that followed the lives of three men from Clairton, Pennsylvania, a small steel town, as they enlist in the Vietnam War. The men are played by Robert DeNiro, John Savage, and Christopher Walken. The film shows very little combat footage, and cuts to the men being captured by Viet Cong soldiers and forced to play Russian Roulette as their captors gambled on the results. They are caged and forced to play against each other; i.e., pointing the gun at another's head. Their captors demand an especially brutal variation of the game: the game is played until all but one contestant is killed. The contestant's cage is placed above other prisoners, so that the losers' blood drips down on future contestants.

According to one website claiming to offer insight into the practice of Russian roulette, Valerie Douglas, whose father's cousin and father were in the Vietnam War states that Russian roulette occurred both for gambling and murder. [3] Several teen deaths following the movie's release caused police and the media to blame the film's depiction of Russian roulette, saying that it inspired the youths. There is also an interesting Russian roulette scene in the Japanese film Sonatine, directed by Takeshi Kitano.

In the Film A Man Apart, the main character plays a type of Russian roulette with a criminal until, on the third pull of the trigger (not spinning the cylinder each time), the criminal reveals the information. This also occurs in the film L.A. Confidential, and is spoofed in 2004's remake of Starsky and Hutch, and again in the 2005 comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In all three films Russian Roulette is used as an interrogation technique.

Attempts to Game the Odds

In the Lee Child book Persuader, the main character relates to another character that, given that the revolver is well tuned and oiled, the odds of killing oneself in Russian roulette is fairly low, "...closer to 6000 to 1 than 6 to 1..." This is, supposedly, because the weight of the single round is enough for gravity to cause the cylinder to stop with the bullet in the lowest position, particularly with heavier bullets such as the .44 Magnum cartridge used in that particular instance. The phenomenon is akin to loaded dice weighted at the bottom in order to tend to land with the weight down. It should be noted, however, that this fact, if true, will not necessarily save the life on one relying on it, as some guns fire the round in the lower position, such as the Mateba Autorevolver. This claim is more thoroughly debunked by the fact that the operator of a Russian roulette revolver typically does not simply load one round into the chamber, spin it, and allow the chamber to settle after time (which may indeed favor the heavy round to settle to the bottom.) Rather, the round is inserted, the chamber is spun quickly, and then while spinning is slapped back into the revolver. The odds are therefore indistinguishable from one in six.

Versions that Unintentionally Eliminate Chance

A semi-automatic pistol, unlike a revolver, will automatically load and fire a round if it has any rounds in the magazine. It is the rotating cylinder of a revolver that makes it possible to have an empty strike and make Russian roulette a game of chance; any pistol without a distinctive cylinder simply draws up and expels the next round in the magazine. Semi-automatic pistols, to much surprise, also store the next round to be fired in the barrel itself; common in lore is one who has fired a fatal shot after removing the magazine and considering the sidearm unloaded. One Darwin Award, which grants the dubious honor of having removed oneself from the human gene pool due to an act of extreme foolishness, was awarded to a man who "played" Russian Roulette with a non-revolver pistol, apparently unaware that his odds of survival were not 5 in 6 but 0 in 1.

Russian Poker

"Russian poker" is a variation of Russian roulette – the difference being that in Russian poker, one's opponent places the gun up to the other person and pulls the trigger. This distinction is rarely made. For instance, the prisoners of war in The Deer Hunter were generally forced to place the gun to their comrade's head, but only the term Russian Roulette is associated with the film. Russian Poker is only used in the rare games where each participant is linked with a specific opponent, rather than Russian roulette's every-man-for-himself approach in which the gun is simply passed to the next participant. Russian Poker is a more depraved game, as it ensures the death of half of the participants, although its appellation "Poker" does not refer to any elements of the card game, but was rather apparently chosen simply for its recognition as a famous wagering game. By contrast, Russian roulette darkly suggests the spinning wheel of the popular casino game roulette. The physical similarity between the revolver's spinning cylinder and the spinning roulette wheel is matched by the fact that a casino's roulette wheel is the exemplar of pure chance: skilled players of card games such as blackjack and poker can increase their chances of winning by remembering the cards left in the deck and calculating the odds of other cards accordingly, or by divining other players' hands through astute observation of their behavior (in poker, tells--involuntary motions that correlate to the quality of a player's hand) as well as using deception to induce them into unwise plays (in poker, known as bluffing). By contrast, while players of roulette can make money by betting on several numbers, all number of one color (18 red, 18 black, and 2 green [0 and 00]), and a few other variations, the spinning of the wheel marks roulette as the ultimate game of chance, and only an occasional diversion for serious gamblers.

This discussion of casino games serves to illustrate that Russian roulette is not comparable with casino games, which aim to provide the gambler with just less money than he or she will put in. For instance, a player of the dice game of craps will give out to players 98 percent of what the house takes in, and most popular games such as blackjack and poker range in the 90% player/house ratio. Casinos make money on the fact that these small differences are replayed millions of times, and that 2% of $1bn is $20m.

Version One

Russian roulette, by contrast, is played in two versions. The first is to randomly place the one live round in the six-chamber cartridge and fire. The odds of success are just short of 84%, although probability in such event is typically computed by multiplying the (Probability of Bad Outcome) by (Gravity of Bad Outcome). For instance, if the Navy wants to send a display of Blue Angels over a city, the probability of failure is equal no matter where they fly, but their flight plans nonetheless avoid landmarks and heavily-populated areas. Therefore, a risk of 16 percent is not only relatively high compared to most regulated wagering games, but is dramatically enhanced by the fact that its gravity for an individual is maximal: death [which may be calculated as infinite gravity and thus negate any probabilistic factor, even if it was an asymptote of 0. Hence, even this relatively mild form of Russian roulette, in which the spinning of the cylinder produces a 1 in 6 chance of death for every participant, is typically indulged in as an ultimate show of bravado and fearlessness. However, even the most self-assured person cannot completely ignore the significance of a 1 in 6 chance; participation in the game suggests at least a willingness to die. It is almost always played under the heavy influence of alcohol or other narcotics. It may be sometimes played by those who believe in the fallacy that the bullet will settle at the bottom of the cylinder and so they can impress friends at little risk.

Version Two

The second version of Russian roulette is not a game of self-induced recklessness but more of a common agreement to cause death. While spinning a single round in a six-cylinder and firing at one's head betrays anything from despair to reckless excitement to bravado to the desire to win esteem and money from friends, the harsher version of the game does not end until one participant is killed.

This can be accomplished in two ways:

1. A group of participants take turns spinning a revolver's cartridge that contains one bullet. Each player has a one in six chance of dying, and the outcome is wagered on by the players (and possibly viewers). The players continue until one is killed. While each player has an equal chance of dying, each player has a small chance of dying.

2. A group of participants load a round into a revolver's chamber, and spin it. The first participant fires, but if surviving, does not spin the chamber again. Therefore, wherever the round lurks, each survivor turns the cylinder one step closer. In a game of six players and a six-round cartridge, therefore, each successive player has a much larger chance of losing. This is typically reflected by much larger payouts to later players. If by chance the first five players fire blanks, the sixth player is guaranteed to die. Whether the player accepts this fate or uses the round to escape is a matter of personal temperament.

The mathematics of Russian roulette games are described in detail below:

Odds

Once the cylinder is spun, the weight of the bullet tends to make the cylinder rest with the bullet toward the bottom, thus increasing the odds that a pull of the trigger will cause the hammer to fall on an empty chamber. Therefore, the argument that each chamber is equally likely to be under the hammer is contestable. One way that this 'bullet bias' could be eliminated is to spin the cylinder with the barrel pointed down, so that the cylinder spins on a vertical axis instead of a horizontal one.

More simply, the 'bullet bias' is eliminated by the fact (noted above) that the cylinder is typically spun quickly and then, after a short time, slapped back into the body of the gun. It is not akin to a Wheel of Fortune which comes to rest. By ending the cylinder's spin at a random point, but while still spinning rapidly, the weight of the round has no effect on its placement in the cylinder.

For the purpose of this section, the effect bullet bias would have on the odds is ignored for simplicity reasons.

The terminology for this section:

Player: One participant in the game

P1, P2 ... Pn: Player 1 to Player n respectively

T: The total number of players in the game.

B: The number of bullets in the gun

C: The number of chambers in the gun

Round: A round occurs when a player takes one shot at his head with the gun. For example, the normal game with B = 1 and C = 6 and the cylinder isn't being spun would have a maximum of 6 rounds. Without re-spinning the chamber, subsequent players have an arithmetic disadvantage, as their odds decline from (1/5 to 1/4 to 1/3 to 1/2 to finally 1/1. It is assumed that P1 goes first, then P2 and so on.

R1, R2 ... Rn: Rounds 1 to n respectively

Losing a round: the gun gets fired.

Winning a round: the gun wasn't fired.

The game stops on the first losing round.

A player Pn dies if Rx results in a death and ${(x-n)}\mod {T}$. For example, if there are 2 players (T = 2) then player 1 dies if round 13 is a death : ${(13-1)}\mod {2}$. Put another way, Pn loses if any of the rounds n, n + T, n + 2T... results in a loss (these can be represented by the formula $n+xT$ where x is a positive integer or 0).

The most common Russian roulette game has T = 2; B = 1; C = 6; P1 loses on rounds 1, 3, 5 and P2 loses on rounds 2, 4, 6.

If the cylinder is spun after every shot, the odds of losing a round is ${\frac {B}{C}}$. Alternatively, the odds of winning a round is $1-{\frac {B}{C}}$. However, the odds of making it to round n drop as n gets larger. This is because to make it to round n, rounds n-1, n-2... must have been won. So the odds for the game to stop on round n is $(1-{\frac {B}{C}})^{(n-1)}*{\frac {B}{C}}$. Then, the odds of Px to lose is $\sum _{k=0}^{n}(1-{\frac {B}{C}})^{(x+kT-1)}*{\frac {B}{C}}$ as n approaches infinity. This can be simplified to $A^{x-1}.{\frac {B}{C}}.{\frac {1}{(1-A^{T})}}$ where $A=1-{\frac {B}{C}}$.

For a standard game, P1 has a 6/11 chance of losing, while P2 has a 5/11 chance. Hence it is better to go last. Also, note the $A^{x-1}$ part of the equation. A is always less than 1, so as (x-1) increases, the chance to lose decreases. Hence it is always better to go last independent of number of players, and other parameters.

If the cylinder is not spun after each shot, the probability of losing a game can be determined by looking at each possibility of the bullet configuration in the gun. For example, in a standard game, if the bullet was in position 3, player 1 would lose. There are six possible positions for the bullet to be in a standard game: 1,2,3,4,5 or 6. Player 1 would lose if it is in position 1,3,5 (a 3/6 chance) and player 2 would lose if it is in position 2,4 or 6 (a 3/6 chance). Therefore both have an equal probability of losing (1/2).

Another example is with 6 players and 9 chambers with 1 bullet. There are seven possible positions for this game: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9. Player 1 would lose if it is in position 1,4,9 (a 3/9 chance), player 2: 2,5 (2/9), player 3: 3,6 (2/9), player 4: 4,7 (2/9), player 5: 5,8 (2/9), player 6: 6,9 (2/9) and player 7: 7 (1/9). In this case, it is much better to go last as compared to going first.

Notable Russian roulette incidents

Reality

British author Graham Greene claimed that in his youth he often played Russian Roulette as a means to provide "excitement and get away from the boredom". But he later decided that "it was no more exciting than taking aspirin for a headache".

In his autobiography, Malcolm X says that during his burglary career he once played Russian roulette, pulling the trigger three times in a row to convince his partners in crime that he wasn't afraid to die. (In the epilogue, Alex Haley says that Malcolm told him that he palmed the bullet.)

On December 24, 1954 the American blues musician Johnny Ace shot himself to death in Texas playing Russian roulette in a dressing room during a break in a concert.

John Hinckley, Jr., the man who attempted to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981 was known to play Russian roulette, alone, on two occasions (although neither time he pulled the trigger was the bullet in the firing chamber). Hinckley also took a picture of himself in 1980 pointing a gun at his head.

On June 12, 2001, Clinton Pope, a 16-year-old young man with a criminal record who had been drinking for the night, fired a bullet into his face while playing Russian roulette before his friends in St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. He was sent to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition.

On March 29, 2003, Evan Below, a 14-year-old boy, shot and killed himself while playing Russian roulette with a .38-caliber revolver in the kitchen of a friend's house in Casper, Wyoming, U.S. The weapon was taken by the houseowner's son from his mother's bedroom.

On August 7, 2004, Samantha Goodson, 16, shot her boyfriend, Michael Gerald Henry, 18, dead while they were playing a version of Russian roulette in a house in Jamaica, Queens, New York, U.S. She was charged with manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.

On August 23, 2004, a 25-year-old Greek soldier, Antonis Syros, was shot in the forehead by a revolver that had held a single bullet at the gates of an Olympic village at Mount Parnitha in Athens, Greece. He was playing Russian roulette "jokingly" with Christos Chloros, a policeman, while he was standing guard.

On June 8, 2006, 16-year-old Sean Jones from Jacksonville, Florida shot himself to death while playing Russian roulette on the front porch of his friend's house. He only fired once.

On November 22, 2006, 13-year-old Kyle Alredge from Centralia, Texas shot himself while playing. He died later in a Lufkin hospital.

On December 20, 2006, 16-year-old Jacob White from Prairieville, Louisiana, shot himself while playing the game with six friends. White and his friends passed two handguns around. White took one of the two guns, and loaded it with at least one live round and put the weapon to his head. It discharged after he pulled the trigger several times. His six companions were booked on weapons charges.

In addition to these specific incidents, it has been alleged that William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics attempted suicide by playing a solo game of Russian roulette.

Entertainment

In season three of 24, Jack Bauer is forced to play Russian roulette with a prison guard after the prisoners take over the prison. The guard is visibly terrified and doesn't pull the trigger until the prisoners threaten to shoot him if he doesn't. Jack tells him that if he plays the game, at least he has a chance of living. The gun turns out to be on the live round and the guard dies after eventually pulling the trigger.

Russian roulette is featured heavily in The Deer Hunter (1978), where the main characters are forced to play Russian roulette as prisoners of war. Subsequent to his release, Nick, played by Christopher Walken, is introduced to the world of "professional" Russian roulette, which becomes for him an addiction.

Russian roulette inspired a TV Game show of the same name. Players stood on trapdoors, arranged in a circle, and following rounds of answering questions, a spotlight would travel around the circle (mimicking the spinning of the cylinder of a revolver) before stopping on one of the trapdoors. This then opened, dropping the player from sight.

On October 5, 2003, famous mind control magician Derren Brown played Russian roulette on British television Channel 4. Even though the stunt was apparently being broadcast live, it was broadcast on a slight delay and if anything had gone wrong the programme would have cut to a black screen. The stunt was condemned by some as being irresponsible, and a statement by the police that they had been informed of the arrangements in advance and were satisfied that "at no time was anyone at risk" made it clear that the incident was at least partially a hoax. However, it was proved on the prerecorded segment of the programme that at point blank range even a blank cartridge may cause concussion to the head, deafness or burns. Exactly what precautions Brown took to avoid this are still unknown.

In Illusion of Gaia, a "Russian Glass club" in Watermia has a similar high-stakes concept. Five glasses are placed, one of which contains deadly poison, and two players take turns drinking them. Will, the hero, plays against a terminally ill man known only as "the opponent" who is trying to raise money for his family before he passes on. The opponent loses and, rather than be disgraced, drinks the poisoned final cup and dies.

In the Internet flash film Mystic Island, Sam attempts to shoot Norm with a pistol that only has one bullet in it due to being intended for "Russian roulette" if the island's coconut reserves were exhausted. Unfortunately, the bullet is in the bottom chamber of the pistol, and as Sam is about to pull the trigger with the bullet in the chamber, Norm, knowing that the bullet is in the chamber, takes the gun and shoots Sam.

Pico vs. the Überkids features "Rock Paper Scissors Roulette," wherein Pico and his friends and their Überkid rivals do Rock, Paper Scissors to determine who must pull the trigger of a six-chambered revolver with one bullet. The chance of the bullet being in the current chamber increases as the game goes along (until it is guaranteed on the sixth pull of the trigger), and the team that wins two or more rounds wins the game.

In the video game Killer7, Garcian Smith is challenged to a game of Russian roulette by Benjamin Keane. Keane goes first, pulling the trigger and revealing the chamber is empty. They pass the gun back and forth until Keane pulls the trigger for the fifth time, revelaing yet another, and supposedly the last empty chamber of the gun. After Keane gloats about his victory, Garcian puts the gun to his head, pulls the trigger, and puts it down unharmed. It is revealed that the gun in question holds seven bullets, not six, which Garcian knew beforehand. Frustrated, Keane takes the gun one last time and fires, killing himself and losing the game.

Toy gun version

Equipment

The primary piece of equipment used to play modern Russian roulette is a toy gun that has a 1/6 probability of activating when the trigger is pulled. Examples include a cap gun with a rotating cylinder and a single loaded cap, a Nerf gun (such as the Maverick Rev-6) with a rotating cylinder, an electronic toy gun similar to those used for laser tag, or a video game light gun connected to a computer programmed for Russian roulette simulation. There is also a toy version available in Japan that uses a balloon, with one chamber containing a pin used to pop the balloon.

Play

All players put money in the pot. Each player in turn pulls the trigger. If the gun discharges, the person holding the gun is eliminated from the game. The last player remaining wins the pot.

Drinking game

Some students on campuses have created a drinking game based on the concept of "Russian roulette". Similar coloured shot glasses are collected and shots of water are poured into all but one. Into the last one is poured a strong alcohol such as Everclear. The drinks are then mixed up and people randomly take a shot as a group. The game originated in Lethbridge; a small city in Alberta, Canada. It is known there as "Mindstone Roulette" and is played widely on campuses such as the Lethbridge Community College and the University of Lethbridge.

Another version popular on college campuses in the 1980s was "Beer Hunter" (an obvious play on words from the most famous film depiction of the game). One can of beer in a six pack is shaken and returned to the other five. A player selecting the shaken can will have it "explode" in his face when he opens it, and must "chug" it down, as well as the other five.

See also

• Roulette

External links

• The Deer Hunter death roll
• Teen Wounded Playing Russian Roulette
• Man, 18, Dies in Russian Roulette
• "Russian Roulette" Olympics Death
• Kablamo, a tongue-in-cheek board game with a Russian roulette theme.
• Gimp Roulette, a Shockwave webpage game that simulates Russian roulette.
• 2000 Darwin Award Runner-Up, Man wins Darwin Award after playing Russian roulette with a semiautomatic pistol.
• Deathmatch Sudoku EmptyChambers.com