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Games of chance have titillated the human race for millennia, and there is good reason why. If games of chance are applied, for example, to the world of gambling, they can make a person rich beyond his or her wildest dreams, or with a single roll of the dice, spin of the arrow or turn of the card, can put someone in the poor house in a matter of seconds.

It's all terribly exciting stuff.

But what makes a game of chance just that, a game of chance? First off, the game needs a randomizing device, or a tool that is used to initiate the game whereby there is no way to accurately and consistently predict the outcome without simply guessing. These tools include the aforementioned pair (or less than a pair or more than a pair) of dice, a deck of shuffled cards, a coin that is flipped, or even a bottle that is spun.

One of the world's largest randomizing tools is that of "The Big Wheel" on the hit television game show "The Price Is Right." This is basically a giant wheel that contains dozens of price amounts on it that contestants take turns spinning. Whoever lands on the highest dollar amount wins that round and goes to what's known as the "Showcase Showdown."

One of the most deadly randomizing tools is a gun, as in the case of the game "Russian Roulette," whereby one bullet is placed in a six-shooter, and the chamber is then spun and closed randomly. The player has no idea whether the bullet is in the chamber that is ready to be fired, or one of the other five chambers. He or she then places the gun to their head and pulls the trigger. Initially, there is a five in six chance that the player will come out alive, which brings us to the element of probability in games of chance.

In the simplest of terms, probability is another element that helps to make a game of chance a game of chance. Probability can work in many different ways. For example, for the sake of discussion let's say that you are playing a game with a friend called "flip the coin." Whenever the coin lands on heads, you get a point and whenever it lands on tails, your opponent gets a point. Most points at the end of the game wins.

Because the coin is flipped anew each time, there will always be a probability of 50/50 that your desired flip will occur. The same is true of the casino game "roulette." Because the ball is always rolled anew, the odds of landing on your desired number are always one in 38 (those odds get better for you if you bet on a color rather than a number.

Then there is the different kind of probability, whereby the likelihood of an event occurring becomes more probable with each new turn. The aforementioned game of Russian Roulette is a good example. If it's played where the cylinder is spun only once and then shot until a bullet is ejected, then the odds of hitting the chamber with the bullet increase each time the trigger is pulled. On the first turn, the odds of getting the bullet are one in six, and then one in 5 and so on until the bullet is found.

That is basically how the element of chance works in games of chance, however, when factoring in facets of probability, the subject becomes much more complicated, but fortunately there is information out there much more detailed to explain more specifically how games of chance work.

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