i always thought there was one gladiator match at a time and everyone in the crowd would watch that and when it ended the next pair got up and did their thing and so forth…but on these tv shows they always show like a half dozen or dozen different fights going on simultaneously all over the floor of the arena, so that no matter where you were sitting in the colosseum you were close to some action…this may explain why they ran through gladiators quicker than sharon stone runs through men
Well, that and the fact that they didn’t sterilize their surgical instruments.
the romans had surgery? next you’ll be telling me they had indoor plumbing
No but they did have a single slayer health care system.
Why wouldn’t the Romans have surgery? All sorts of cultures, many much more primitive than the Romans, had surgery. We’ve even seen it in pre-historic times.
Next we’ll be telling you they had central heating (well, the rich did).
For the love of Caesar none of you were there so how would you know any of this!
So one gladiator in eighty one would survive a year. Don’t fancy those odds much!
I guess you have to weight it against their options. As others have said, most gladiators were criminals to some degree. Compared to a certain execution, even a 1% chance of surviving will look pretty darn attractive.
Surely winning a fight was not as random as rolling dice. If you were good enough (and if they did not up the level of competition based on your victories), a few wins under your belt might mean better than 33% odds in your next match.
Did you see how things went for Conan?
cite: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film) - Wikipedia
How does a survival rate of only 33% per bout work? That means lots of times both combatants would end up dead. If one gladiator fights another gladiator and one survives and one dies, that’s a 50% survival rate. If the loser gets spared, that’s a 100% survival rate. If both die, that’s a 0% survival rate. For a 33% survival rate to work, both gladiators ending up dead has to be more common than both living.
Or does this include spectacles where people get killed by animals or melees? Because we know that lots of gladiators survived defeat in 1 on 1 matches.
Do you mean the opposite–that in a 1 on 1 match, you had a 1 in 3 chance of ending up dead, rather than the 1 in 2 that a strict “to the death” matchup would give you? That would mean, if you lost a match you’d only end up dead 2/3rds of the time and have a 1/3 chance of surviving a loss, if I’m doing the math correctly.
when the romans threw the christians to the lions, did the christians ever win?
So a reenactment of the Battle of Cannae with a suggestion that Hannibal defeated Paullus and Varro using alien technology?
And a steel chair.
No. But Best Post/Username combination in a while. 
As mentioned, the Romans had several forms of show involving wild animals. One form of these was to send condemned people to be killed by wild animals. They used a variety of critters including elephants, rhinos, and bulls in these along with bears and lions). In these events, no defense was permitted - the condemned were sometimes even tied up or otherwise bound, though not always. There was no escape or mercy.
Note that in these cases, massacres of Christians was not the result of a legal process. Bandits, rebellious slaves, murderers and so forth might be condemned to death. Execution in the arena, whether by being thrown to wild beasts or what, was just one particular form thereof. Christians weren’t exactly breaking the law or anything and purges of Christians was erratic and driven by emotion and not law. By throwing them to the wild beasts, Christians were being equated to the lowest of the low and the vilest of the vile, not being permitted to retain any dignity.
There were other spectacles in which the animals were actually fought against. The hunters were definitely not always slaves, although there was some risk. The glory was less than being a gladiator, but the risk of death much less.
Well there was Laser, Turbo, Nitro, Diamond, Lace and several others. They came from all walks of life, from bodybuilding to weightlifting. Ok maybe not so many walks of life. But deep down, they were just people who put their leotards on one leg at a time like the rest of us.
Bravo. Well played.
It was including bouts where both participants were allowed to live.
That makes the numbers even screwier!
Does it? It basically means the average gladiator would die after three bouts. Some sooner, some later. And they had very few bouts a year.
The statistic was originally presented as having a 33% chance of surviving, which implies that more than half of the gladiators died in their first bout, not third. Naturally, on this thread there was some skepticism of that.
If it was supposed to be a 33% chance of dying, then that’s a bit more reasonable, in that it doesn’t imply both participants dying most of the time. And if that’s the case then you’re statement that the average would die after three bouts is more or less true.