Your best bet : Russian Roulette

Russian Roulette is a 'game' where you put 1 bullet in a revolver (thus leaving 5 chambers blank). Each player, in turn, puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. The gun is passed around until it fires. The one who dies, looses.

It looks like a strange way of gambling, but if you're so desparate that losing your live seems acceptible against whatever you're hoping to win in the game, it might not be so stupid. Rumour has it that Russian Roulette was invented by poor, unemployed Russians who, knowing they'd die from starvatian in a few days, were willing to bet their live. Other sources claim the game was first played by Rusian soldiers. In any case, there seems to be a win-win situation here : either you die on the spot, which deals with the prospect of dying from starvation quite adequately, either you win a reasonable amount of money, so you've overcome the danger of starvation.

On the scientific side, it does not look so bad either. On first sight, you wouldn't want to be the 6th player in a game of Russian Roulette : As the revolver has 6 chambers, with a bullet in 1 of them, player number 6 seems guaranteed to die. Player 1 would only have a change of 1/6 to die, player 2 a chance of 1/5, etc. So Playing first seems to be the best bet.

Wrong.
Player 1 has indeed a 5/6 chance (approx. 83 %) to survive. Player 6 also has approx. 83 % to survive : each player before him can get the bullet, so there's a good chance that someone will shoot himself before the gun reaches player 6. That chance is 5/6, or - again - approximately 83 %.

So, whether you play first (less chance to get a bullet) or last (more chance some one else gets killed before it's your turn), you have 83% probability to win. That's better than any odds I've ever heard of. Maybe those Russians were not so stupid after all.

Still, there's one more thing to consider : the game doesn't stop until someone dies. So when there's only two players, one of them will die, whether it is at the first shot or the sixth. So in this case there's a 50% chance to win. Likewise, with 3 players, you get 66.67% chance to get out of it alive, with 4 players 75%, with 5 players 80%, and with 6 players 83%.

These are still extremely good odds. On a roulette, you have a 1/37 (or 1/38) probability to win a straight bet (bet on 1 number). That's barely 2.7 %. Even the outside bets (Red or Black, Odd or Even, ...) give less then 50% chance to win. While you might think that the odds here are exaclty 50%, the roulette table has 1 (European style) or 2 (American Style) numbers (0, American style also 00) where 'the house wins'. So the outside bets have only a probability of 18/37 or 18/38, i.e. 48.6 % and 47.3 % respectively. So even a 'risky' 2 player Russian Roulette game has better odds than the cheapest bet on an ordinary roulette.

I'm not a gambler (hm...) so i don't know the odds of other casinbo games such as slot machines or Craps, but I guess they'd be quite simlilar, or worse, to those in roulette. Take Poker. The odds in Poker show that there's a 42% probability you get dealt a pair (2 of a kind), little over 9% chance to get 3 of a kind, and so on. Then again, odds are not that important in poker, it is also about bluff, nerve, and measuring up your opponents. A sure win (4 of a kind, when playing without wild cards) has a probability of 0.00011% or 1 in 87847.5. Another quick look on the web reveals that you have a 1 in 643 chance to hit the jackpot on an average slot machine. That's 0.15%.

So Russian Roulette might well be your best bet ...

Don't try this at home

I'm not encouraging anyone to play Russian Roulette. Not even with toy guns. In stead, try a computer simulation. It's a lot safer. Less of a mess to clean up afterwards, too.
Russian Roulette v2 (rr2.bas) - courtesy of The Silly Software Company

Some more background to the origin of the name 'Russian Roulette' at the take our word for it web site.

(c) Useless Publications Unlimited - subject to disclaimer - More stuff like this  >>