Russian Deer Hunter Roulette with dice

I think in terms of odds, this has to be up there with almost impossible, especially given the state of mind I was in at the moment things went down.

I was at my friend Dan’s apartment a night or two before his wedding and we were playing drinking games with a number of people. On hand was “3-man,” which is a 2 dice rolling game. It involves drinking or doing an action based upon the numbers you roll.

Doubles equals (as the picture states) “Give away;” something special. For if you roll doubles (for example a 3 and a 3), you can pass the dice to whomever you please and they have to try to roll doubles as well or face the consequences. If they do not roll doubles, they have to drink the amount they roll. In other words, if they roll a 5 and a 6, they have to drink for 11 seconds.

However, if the other person rolls doubles, say a 6 and a 6, then the dice come back to you. At that point, you have to try and roll doubles again or be subject to the “drink the amount you roll X2” rule.

On it goes this way, with each pass back and forth multiplying the total drinks to be taken by the number of passes. So again, if you were able to roll doubles again in this instance, the dice would be passed back to the other person and they were subject to the “drink the amount you roll X3” rule; and so on.

Now here comes the interesting part; you can also split up the dice. If you roll doubles, you can give one die to player A and the other die to player B. Players A and B would then have to try and roll the same number, each person rolling only 1 die, resulting in doubles.

Of course, it’s much harder to roll one die and have it match up with what another person rolls. Hence, the hilarity of it the game and it’s competency getting large amounts of people drunk.

In any event, this is how things played out:

My friend Brian rolls doubles and decides to split the dice, giving one die to me and another to my friend Carl. We roll and manage to get doubles, both landing on the same number, so we pass the dice back to Brian. He rolls doubles again and gives the dice back to Carl and myself. We look at each other and kind of give a head nod, suggesting rolling doubles again is definitely a possibility. Then, we actually manage to do it. When we passed the dice back to Brian, this multiplied his possible drink total by 4 because the dice had already changed hands 4 times.

Brian grits his teeth and in no short order somehow manages to roll doubles again, passing the dice, times 5, back to Carl and I, who have now called bullshit on the entire endeavor.

That is… until we decide that we are just going to have to roll doubles again, to spite Brian’s evil. At this point, Carl and I have some sort of “Deer Hunter” Russian Roulette moment.

The Deer Hunter, for those not in the know, is a film with Robert Deniro. It portrays some American POWs in Vietnam playing Russian Roulette for the entertainment of their captors, amongst other things. The POWs find themselves entering into some type of trance, apathetic at the possibility of death, but with enough power seemingly focused that they seem to will an empty chamber to stop when it’s their time to pull the trigger.

So Carl and I are sitting there, both sort of weird dudes. We rise the level of importance and intensity, zoning out, but projecting strength and focus into the moment. Things go quiet in the room. We glare into each others’ eyes, psyching ourselves out, and decide to roll .

And boom! We do it! Another double roll.

Male posturing followed, with high fives and stare-downs all around.

After things settled, we passed the dice back to Brian, who managed NOT to roll doubles again. This multiplied his 5 and 6 by 6 and required him to drink for the equivalent of 66 seconds, with 4 beers on hand.

Now, I’m not 100% certain on this, but general google searches have led me to believe the probability of rolling 5 consecutive “doubles” with 6 sided dice are roughly 1 in 8000.

However, in our case, you have to take that number and account for the fact that 3 of those rolls are being done by two parties, each holding one dice. Keeping this in mind, I’m pretty sure that we accomplished something that night, which has in all likely-hood, never been done before.