Credit Card Roulette

1. A way of gambling for bills, usually played for the purpose of settling restaurant checks, by randomly drawing one participant's credit card.

How to Play

The most popular and suspenseful method is the "elimination" method:

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 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.

CCR Alternatives

"Price is Right" is the preferred method for Poker Terms contributor Shane Schleger:

This method involves placing a blind bid on the amount of the check (each participant enters the number on a mobile phone or piece of paper), and the person farthest away is stuck with the tab (going "over" the amount does not count against the player, unlike the TV show Price is Right).

Other alternatives may involve randomly picking a number from 1-100, or using a deck of cards to draw a "high card" or doing "Omaha Flips" in which four cards are dealt to each participant, a flop is dealt, and the player with the losing hand pays.

Opting Out

Not everyone wants to gamble on the possibility of paying for x-number of other people's meals. It is perfectly acceptable for this person to opt out and just pay his share of the meal, while the others gamble for the remainder of the tab using CCR.

Other times, one participant is wandering around the casino drunk, flirting with divorcees from Brooklyn, and he is opted-out as a default.

Video

That is a video from the 2008 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. The total bill was around $1,000 and the guy just to the right of the camera lost the game of credit card roulette. In this instance, the last card picked had to pay and it was a good thing to be picked early.