Global Relaunch of Russian Roulette (part 1)

Fun for all the family, squared!

Today's Russian roulette is an updated version of that played in Bangkok’s underbelly by Corporal Nikanor Chevotarevich, in The Deer Hunter (spoiler alert - he dies in the end and so will we all). Forget yesteryear’s boring 1-in-6 odds of spreading one's skull contents across the audience. No wonder the game disappeared from Vegas to be replaced by The Britney Spears Poleganza. Today's version of the game involves a gun with an unknown number of chambers and an unknown number of rounds. This makes for a truly exciting twist on an old classic. Now our benevolent governments and their Big Pharma and Tech masters have reinvigorated the boring classic with unknown-in-unknown odds of going “blootey”, ending up on a quack candle or leaving our share of air to others who don't necessarily deserve it more than us (Spears excepted).

These new dynamics are certainly the spice that was missing from such a boring parlor game. Just ask BetBlastRoulette, which will now let you, in real time, stake any amount on a whole family's chances of surviving a go on the new game. “Fun for all the family, squared!”.

Are you a good gambler?

“How much are tickets?”, I hear you ask. That depends upon where you are in the world when you buy a ticket and which gun you wish to take your chances with.

If you're in Brazil you'll pay $10 for a chance to “pop”. In Albania you'll pay $12 per pull of the Pfizer Russian roulette trigger. Compare that to £22 per go in the UK (how did the G8 nation end up with worse negotiators than Albania?). Anywhere that offers the AstraZeneca Oxford firearm comes in cheaper at just $2-6 a hoped-for click but like the worst Chinese fireworks, due to the low price sometimes there's a misdirected BANG! This matters in a way that I'll explain later. Don't assume that's the better value-for-money ticket just because it's “cheap”.

Would knowing the ticket price change your decision about whether you played at all, or which gun you picked to play with? What if you knew that the odds of “winning” could be firmed up from unknown-in-unknown to approximately something-in-something if you just studied the game a little before you played it? The best gamblers learn the game before they play for real. Most other gamblers learn the game too eventually but they learn the hard way.

The icing on this cake is that you only have a single, limited line of credit. There's no more where that came from because no one plays the 2021 relaunch of Russian roulette for or with money. The only thing you can cash in with is your soul, and that's all you can ever walk away with, no matter how many goes you have.

The house always wins

“The House”. A somewhat abstract label, but adequate for most gambler's purposes. Who is the House? There's an easy shortcut answer: it's anyone who's involved in running the game, dealing you cards, handling your chips, bringing you complimentary drinks or watching you with hawk eyes and an electro shock baton. But in the South Las Vegas Boulevard’s newest venue, Covid's Palace, there's more people in the House now than there's ever been before. They’re all taking a cut and they're harder to spot because they often look like the rest of the punters. They even mostly decide to buy a ticket themselves for a turn on the most popular table in the place.

Radical changes in the job market have seen a huge proportion of society develop second careers. Previously respected professions across the board all decided to take sideline income from the ever shady casino business once the industry pulled off the greatest marketing trick and rebrand that the world has ever seen. Even run-of-the-mill employees are on the payroll and who can blame them? It's very, very lucrative and some even became far more famous than their previous role would ever have let them without Covid and it didn't really cost them anything to get the job. Or did it?

The casino business is now so virtuous, woke and inclusive that practically anyone can join the House and direct traffic, show punters to their seats, give instructions on how to play any game or hunt down the friends and family whom players lose as they nervously finger the trigger. Then there's the gigantic, recently spawned supply chain and dependent ecosystem that further provides for and “enriches” society. Covid has finally proven that trickledown economics is real, and not just a bullshit term invented by the rich to make themselves even richer by pocketing cash from the poor.

If you're forced to play at the table, is the game less fun?

But what if you just don't want to play or you're a terrible gambler with no mind for odds? Perhaps you're bad at losing (a mathematical inevitability if you play almost any of the games just enough) or you just wanted a free Jack ‘n Coke and a deck of pastrami on rye while you watch brains go flying by?

Maybe the payout isn't even worth the stake?

Well, if you're in this camp and you're booked in to Covid's Palace for a long weekend then you're going to need to be made of fairly stern stuff. The pressure to play is immense. All the standard tricks and enticements are there, combined with state-of the-art nudging, cajoling, othering, bribery, overt and covert messaging and slogan repetition based on the full gamut of human emotion from love (“Play for your gummy grandma's well-being and extra years eating baby food”) to abject fear (“Play or infected Grumpy Cat gets it!”).

To hold out against that lot takes some doing and it's easier done in a group or with friends or family. But Covid's Palace knows that and it's a big place where people get separated and sometimes never find each other again. It's designed that way. They even have a crêche full of One-Armed Bandits that pay out in school skiing trips to Austria or a place on the school football team. Yes, kids can and will play too. There's almost no age limit on Russian roulette these days, unless you live in Scandinavia where forcing your kids to gamble is a little less de rigueur.

Casino kingpins’ long term strategy to rebuild Vegas comes good

Research showed that most people mooching about Vegas aren't actually gambling junkies. Many are there on a one-off trip to take in the faux sights, experience the highs and lows of bunging cash at a woman who starts to look like Heather Graham after the seventh complimentary Jaegerbomb, and most leave just a gold tooth down and a facial tattoo up, never to return to the brightly lit, plastic insanity.

The research meant that barring a hardcore group of net losers and a tiny group of net winners, the casino customer base was bound to be finite. But come 2020, Covid's Palace broke out a new business plan backed by a winning formula that it had spent literally decades and near endless billions (of public money) developing.

In the late 90’s the Vegas kingpins saw the declining trend and set about reversing it. They patiently hatched a new, high risk game that required each player to pay for a ticket to play and then stake their lives for just a 1:0.9 payout. Then they set about slowly making the game so fashionable that on launch it would be all that anyone lived, breathed, watched, heard, talked about or clicked on.

The marketing went into overdrive to the point that people bored out of their tiny minds by the same four walls came to beg to play new Russian roulette just to get out of the house and away from the kids. For a time there was a nearly endless supply of players queuing for hours to have a turn. The shared thrill of becoming a survivor of seemingly unknown odds (that were actually known by a few from the beginning) bonded amateur gamblers across the globe.