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.
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.
