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Contents |
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 Rumania, 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 Czarist 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 Petr 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 primitive double-action revolver, the Nagant's cylinder spins freely 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.
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: 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.
In the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, the game is also depicted as being played in Vietnam. 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. [1] 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.
A semi-automatic pistol, unlike a revolver, will automatically load and fire a round if it has any rounds, Or may contain a round in the chamber even when the Magazine is removed. There has been at least one Darwin Award resulting from an attempt to play Russian roulette with such a pistol. This variation is sometimes referred to as "Polish roulette,"—a bigoted play on the stereotype of Polish people being of low intelligence—though its actual origins are disputed.
"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.
Notable Russian roulette incidents
Reality
On December 24, 1954 the American blues musician Johnny Ace shot himself to death in Texas playing Russian roulette in a dressing room before a concert.
John Hinckley, Jr. 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 February 28, 2000, Rashaad, A 19-year-old Houston resident attempted to play Russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol, apparently unaware that the mechanics of the game change with a weapon other than a revolver. However, the Darwin Award sources are often suspect. [2]
On June 12, 2001, Clinton Pope, a 16-year-old young man with a criminal record who had been drinking and smoking marijuana 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.[3]
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 March 17, 2006, a 15 year-old teen named Astrid Uytterhaegen shot herself dead while being peer pressured into the whole incident & game by her associates. Her body was supposedly found in a ditch, where she had been left to hide any evidence. Traces of alcohol had also been found.
On April 14, 2006, a 16-year-old teen from Peoria, Arizona shot himself to death while playing Russian roulette on his porch with a friend.
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.
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 [4].
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. The gun may be a dedicated device, or it could be a video game light gun connected to a computer programmed for Russian roulette simulation.
Play
All players put money in the pot. Each player in turn points the gun at their head and pulls the trigger. If the gun activates, the person holding the gun is eliminated from the game. The last player remaining wins the pot.
Odds
Assuming a six-shot revolver and that each hole is equally likely to be under the hammer[1], the probability of losing in the first round is 1 in 6 and the probability increases with each trigger pull. On the 6th trigger pull the probability of losing is 1 in 1 (100%).
| Turn | p(Loss) |
| 1 | 1/6 = 0.166.. |
| 2 | 1/5 = 0.2 |
| 3 | 1/4 = 0.25 |
| 4 | 1/3 = 0.333.. |
| 5 | 1/2 = 0.5 |
| 6 | 1/1 = 1 |
If the cylinder is spun after every shot, the odds of losing remain the same, 1/6 each time the trigger is pulled; in this case, in a two-person to-the-death game, it is better to go second (if the first person loses, the second person wins, even if he would have lost on his next move — this is equivalent to the house advantage in blackjack, where the house wins if the player busts, even if the dealer himself also is going to bust).
See also
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 pistol.
- ^ The argument that each hole is equally likely to be under the hammer is contestable. It has been argued that the weight of the bullet will tend to make the cylinder rest with the bullet towards the bottom. This would lower the probability of losing somewhat on early rounds, and increase the mid-game odds in games where the cylinder is not re-spun. One way that this 'bullet bias' could be eliminated is to spin the cylinder with the barrel pointed down, so the cylinder spins on a vertical axis instead of a horizontal one.
Categories: Roulette and wheel games
