play Russian roulette

1. To gamble foolishly on a risky or potentially ruinous business. The expression refers to a deadly game in which a participant loads a revolver with one bullet, spins the cylinder, and fires at his own head: “If you drink and drive, you're playing Russian roulette with your life and the lives of others.”

Example Sentences

He was “blindfolded, hung from a tree, and viciously beaten” and “his captors forced him to play Russian roulette while he swung in the air,” I wrote in a 2019 column headlined “Life and Death in Caracas.”

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“The problem isn’t electricity or aid; it’s living under a regime that wants to subjugate you, a regime that cannot show a single Armenian community that exists within its territory. You’re asking people to play Russian roulette with their lives.”

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You had to be a certain kind of person, after all, to show up at the home of a has-been writer, to disable Arete, to play Russian roulette with your soul.

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Like, for instance, Moore’s discussion in her book of when she’d get drunk and play Russian roulette with her car before eventually embracing sobriety, and, with it, the relief of confessing her flaws.

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“Mr. Baldwin chose to play Russian Roulette with a loaded gun without checking it and without having the Armorer do so,” the lawsuit alleges, according to Law & Crime.

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