Russian Roulette

Russian roulette is the practice of placing a single round in a revolver, spinning the cylinder and closing it into the firearm without looking, aiming the revolver at one's own head in a suicidal fashion, and pulling the trigger. The number of rounds placed in the revolver can vary, though as a rule there will always be at least one empty chamber. As a gambling game, toy guns are often used to simulate the practice. The number of deaths caused by this practice 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 primitive 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.

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.  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.

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. 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.

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.

"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.

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 the shot taken will be a blank. Therefore, the argument that each hole 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 the cylinder spins on a vertical axis instead of a horizontal one.

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. 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 . For example, if there are 2 players (T = 2) then player 1 dies if round 13 is a death : . 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 . Alternatively, the odds of winning a round is . 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 . Then, the odds of Px to lose is as n approaches infinity. This can be simplified to where .

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 Ax - 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

British author Graham Greene claimed that in his youth he often played Russian Roullette as a means to provide "excitment 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. While White and his friends smoked marijuana, they 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 drug and 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

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.

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 college campuses have created a drinking game titled "Russian roulette". Similar coloured shot glasses are collected and shots of water or vodka 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.

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.

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