Credit Card Roulette or CCR is “a way of gambling for bills, usually played for the purpose of settling restaurant checks, by randomly drawing one participant’s credit card.” The website pokerterms.com (from which my definition of CCR is borrowed) offers the following illustration of the “elimination method” of playing this game:

For instance, after a meal involving 6 poker players, each person will place his card in a pile, the cards will be scrambled, and a number between 1-6 will be randomly generated by another participant. The card corresponding to this number will be taken out of the running and so on, until there is just one card left and that cardholder is the loser, responsible for paying for the entire meal. The less fun and less exciting method involves presenting all the cards in play to the server at the restaurant and letting him or her choose a card at random.

So why don’t more people play this game? One possibility is that CCR operates as a negative lottery. That is, if six friends are sharing drinks at a bar and they each end up ordering, say, $20 dollar’s worth of drinks, then each individual player has a 5/6th probability of “winning” the equivalent of $20’s worth of drinks (i.e. the amount of his or her individual tab) but has a 1/6th probability of losing $100 (i.e. the combined bar tab of the other five players). Although it is more probable that each individual will “win” a small amount (i.e. avoid having to pay his or her share of the tab), the small probability of having to pay a large amount (the entire tab) might dissuade all but the most risk-loving persons from wanting to play this game.

Bonus question: what is the legal status of CCR? Does this game violate any US gambling laws?

Hat tip: Ian Ayres (freakonomics.com)