Russian roulette is a risky game where a player puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger. If the gun doesn’t fire, the player keeps playing; if it does, he or she is dead.
There’s no set number for how often the gun must fire for the game to be considered a success; it can be as simple as one pull of the trigger. In Russian roulette, however, the odds of survival are highly unlikely.
The game is often played with a revolver, which has six chambers. The gun is loaded with six bullets, and the player must choose which chamber to put a bullet in.
If the bullet is placed in any other chamber, it’s simply a waste of time; there’s no real danger involved. However, if the bullet is placed in one of the first five chambers (the “load”), then the gun can fire by pulling the trigger once – and that’s when things can get deadly serious. .
Each time the gun fires, it sends a bullet ricocheting around inside of it – and that means that there’s always a chance that any one of those bullets could end up hitting someone in the head. Even if you’re lucky enough to survive an initial shot from the gun – which is unlikely, given how dangerous it is – you still have to worry about subsequent bullets that may hit you before you can make your escape.
So what’s the point? Russian roulette isn’t actually all that dangerous – at least not compared to some other activities out there that can be much more deadly. But its inherent unpredictability makes it an extremely risky proposition, one that many people find difficult to resist.
