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Online Roulette Variations
Online Roulette has a number of variations, of which the most popular are French Roulette and American Roulette. In addition, online casinos offer a progressive roulette game. Microgaming casinos offer Roulette Royale, where players from many casinos contribute to the progressive jackpot, which can bring millions to lucky winners. But Roulette also has a dark side.
Russian Roulette is a Good Game Turned Bad
Russian roulette is casino roulette's evil twin sister. One game is great and the other is downright deadly.
Everybody - Don't Try this at Home
Casino roulette is usually depicted as a glamorous, posh game played by men in tuxedoes and women in clinging dresses. In reality, roulette - especially when it's played online - is a down-to-earth game with many bets and bad odds. But as bad as the odds are in European or American roulette, they are a whole lot better than in Russian roulette.
Russian roulette has nothing at all to do with wheels, tables, and croupiers, though it is most definitely a gambling game. Russian roulette is a deadly version of the luxurious casino roulette game in which participants place a single bullet in the chamber of a revolver and spin the cylinder so that the location of the round is unknown. They then take turns putting the weapon to their temples and pulling the trigger until the weapon discharges, blowing someone's brains to kingdom come. The game is usually played with a six-shot revolver, and so each turn entails a one in six chance of death. In other words, the odds of winning in Russian roulette (staying alive) are about 84%.
There's Nothing Glamorous About Russian Roulette
The real question is: why would anyone play Russian roulette? The game is played for various reasons, sometimes as a form of sadistic high-stakes gambling before a crowd of betters, or sometimes as a show of bravado. Usually the game is played by someone with nothing to lose, a potential suicide, for instance. Legend has it that 19th-century Russian prisoners were forced to play the game while the prison guards bet on the outcome. In another version of the legend, desperate and/or suicidal officers in the Russian army played the game to impress each other. Both these legends have led to modern-day versions of the game, such as the one played in the movie, "The Deer Hunter."
Russian roulette first came into the public eye in a short story written in 1937 by a writer named Georges Surdez; the story was appropriately called "Russian Roulette." A character in the story claims that when he was with the Russian army in Rumania, around 1917, and things were falling apart, some of the officers felt they were being dishonored before their colleagues in the Allied forces. A desperate officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, wherever he was, remove a bullet 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" Surdez wrote, "sometimes not."
Note that in this case, there were 5 bullets still left in the chamber (with one removed); today, it's usually assumed that the game is "played" the other way around - 5 bullets are removed, leaving only one. The story, however, was just a story and no one knows if it was based on fact. True instances of Russian roulette being played today are not mere fiction, however. Russian roulette is nothing but a sick version of casino roulette; only the desperate or the insane would participate.
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