In some variants of Russian Roulette, you don't pull the trigger once; the gun is handed around in a cyclical fashion until someone gets unlucky. It's used in extreme situations where only X people can survive and you have a group larger than X (or as a game by handicaps with no self-preservation). Thus, someone
will die, and your odds of surviving are dependant on how large the group is, how many chambers the gun has, and what position you are in the cycle.
For a six-chamber gun and with two or three players, all players have equal chances of surviving. This may seem counterintuitive, since in a two-player "game" the second player always has worse chances than the first player.
| Player 1 | Player 2 |
| 1 in 6 | 1 in 5 |
| 1 in 4 | 1 in 3 |
| 1 in 2 | 1 in 1 |
This seeming-paradox is resolved by two facts: Player 1 always goes before Player 2, thus balancing the odds, and the chamber that the round is in is predetermined before anyone ever even pulls the trigger. The players simply don't know which chamber it's in.
With four players, however, the six-cylinder "game" changes dramatically. Because players one and two will both pull the trigger twice, their odds are both 2/6 of catching the bullet, while players three and four both only have a 1/6 chance of catching the bullet.
However, the statistic seems to use an eight-cylinder gun, which is
fair for a group of 2, 4, or 8 participants. For a three-player group, the first and second players are once again at a disadvantage, with a 3/8 chance each of shooting themselves in the head, while player three only has a 2/8 chance of doing so. A five-player game puts players 1, 2, and 3 at a disadvantage, with a 2/8 chance of death as opposed to players 4 and 5's 1/8 chance of death.
As for the validity of using statistics like a crutch, claiming that it's unsafe to date men because you might be dating a rapist is dubious at best. It's difficult to find good figures, but somewhere around 2/3rds of all rapes were committed by someone that the victim already knew. So I suppose the moral of this post is: it's safer to be the fourth person in a five-player game of Russian Roulette with an eight-cylinder revolver than it is to assume you will never be raped by a member of your own family.
What a depressing moral.
