The calculations also produce the mildly surprising result that when one uses 9 boiled and 3 raw eggs, the game is fair, and there is no advantage or disadvantage in being the first to take an egg. Does this mean that the guest is playing with a disadvantage? The answer is ‘yes’: the person who takes the first egg will lose the game with probability 5/9, which will be explained further later. By convention it is the guest who has to take an egg and crack it on their head first. It’s a silly game, though a popular one among the general audience: no better entertainment than schadenfreude about a celebrity who’s got raw egg dripping from their forehead. The first person who cracks two raw eggs on their head has lost the game. The carton contains 12 eggs, of which 8 are boiled and 4 are raw. The game works as follows: the guest and Jimmy take turns taking an egg from the carton and crack it on top of their own respective heads. Counted among his guests were Magic Johnson, David Beckham, Tom Cruise, and Jodie Foster, to name but a few. Usually the guest he played it with was a celebrity from sports or film. A few years ago, this game was played daily on the popular NBC Tonight Show hosted by Jimmy Fallon.

Sometimes probability-theoretic gems are right around the corner, and Egg Russian Roulette is such a gem. STAtOR and all authors have granted permission to translate the original Dutch texts and to use them for SECTOR.

The player with the headphones has three chances to successfully guess something on one of the cards in the stack, and then the players switch roles, and the other person puts the headphones on and tries to guess.This article appeared, with the title “Russisch Ei Roulette”, as a column in the June 2020 issue of STAtOR, a quarterly magazine published by VVSOR, the Dutch Society for Statistics and Operations Research.

The person wearing the headphones has to try to guess what phrase the person reading the card is saying.

The other person then picks up a card from the stack of cards and reads it out loud, facing the person with headphones on.

The music has to be loud enough so that they can't hear the other player talking.

One person puts the headphones on and turns on loud music.

They do not reveal the phrases they have written to each other. Both players write 5 random phrases on index cards and place them face down in front of them.Each player gets a stack of five index cards.Watch more on YouTube! HOW TO PLAY THE WHISPER CHALLENGE Materials:

Egg russian roulette rules