I went hunting bear with a single bullet once.
In retrospect, it would have been easier if I had brought a gun.
And a casing, and some powder, and a primer.
Oh my God.
I just read a long and detailed article about the “Itzik Game”, which I had previously never heard of. Apparently it is quite common, not the act of an occasional suicidal soldier. And apparently most of the soldiers who don’t participate, don’t try and stop it, or report it!
That is FUCKED UP!
(Not necessarily worse than Russian roulette. But I’ve never heard that that was ever common, either.)
Umm, no insult meant to you or your military, for which i generally have great respect.
I realize that as a civilian, I don’t understand the stress etc. of combat, and I do realize that war can change a man in ways that can seem strange to civilians.
Could you link to the article about the “Itzik game” please? You’ve raised my curiosity.
The Itzik game is pulling the slide back, putting a loaded magazine in the pistol, hitting the slide and mag release at the same time and finding out the hard way if the magazine dropped before a round was chambered.
I think your sources are overstating things a bit. Every Israeli soldier has heard of a guy who’s done it or a unit that uses it as part of some hazing ritual, but it’s all “friend of a friend” stuff. I’m sure it happens every now and then, but it’s certainly not common practice.
I ran a run of 200 trials with my S&W .44 Magnum (Pre-Model 29): 33 of 200 trials would been kills.
Did you really do this? There is virtually no error there. It’s 5:1 against.
Yes, and it’s what theory predicts: 1 chamber in 6 is charged. On each trial, spin the cylinder, pop it in. In theory, spinning the cylinder randomizes the “firing chamber” - the chamber that is fired when the trigger is squeezed.
I suspect that repeating the experiment will produce noisier samples with replication, but n=200 is a good sample size for an event with probability 1/6.
If there are no witnesses, how can it be sure whether Russian roulette was involved or not? A body is found with a self-inflicted gunshot and a pistol with one casing in the cylinder. Who’s to say whether the victim put a round in the pistol and summarily shot himself, or played RR one time too many?
Una:
Thanks for doing that. It’s so cool that you did!
The results are so unexpected and counterintuitive that it makes me wonder if there is not something about your handgun causing it favor a particular cylinder when spun.
Obviously, the validity of the test depends on a fair cylinder where each cylinder would normally have a 1/6 chance per spin of landing at the death position.
May I suggest a followup? Mark one cylinder somehow, than spin the cylinder completey unloaded a number of times to see if your weapon is showing a preference.
Sorry, I know this is probably stupid, but can you define “better” please? Better as in “closer to 1” or better as in “less likely to die.”
The deer prefer it that way too.
As long as this thread is being resurrected…
One thought I had was that whenever you talk about coin flipping, the qualifier “unbiased coin” is always used. A typical US quarter, for example, is biased towards tails by ~1% because of weight.
In terms of russian roulette (RR) the same logic should apply: an unbiased gun. The weight of the bullet shouldn’t matter when calculating odds or probability.
That being said, it depends how you spin the gun. I have seen (in films) RR being played by rolling the cylinder against their sleeve, which would counteract the weight of the bullet.
On the other hand, if a biased gun is used, then there is a clear advantage for any player simply by holding the gun at a particular angle during the spin.
That being said, if RR was an Olympic sport, then they must spin the chamber before each player, and it is possible to go hundreds of rounds without a winner.