The Story Behind the Game

For some of us, carousels and merry-go-rounds evoke cherished childhood memories. Mine are especially so, thanks to what I called The Ring Game. Alongside the amusement ride I loved was a downward-sloping dispenser, which encased a row of metal rings. The ones in front were all the same, but the last one was special.   Those rings were so precious to me that I called the leading ones “silver” and the last one “gold”, even though I suspected they were made from baser stuff.

My merry-go-round rotated in a counter-clockwise direction which, I realize now, favored right-handed children. A rider passing the gravity-drop dispenser used his/her index finger to snatch an exposed ring. If that were silver, another ring would roll down in its place. A rider taking the last silver ring made the gold one available to his/her successor. The lucky customer who took the gold ring won a free ride. Taking silver rings was fun, but we kids all wanted the gold.

Was winning simply a matter of luck? Ring-taking is not a trivial exercise for youngsters. Very small children cannot reach exposed rings, even with horses at the apex of their cycles. Riders must allow for rotational speed of the platform and vertical displacement of their mounts to guide index finger thrusts towards an exposed ring.

Suppose that riders on a carousel/merry-go-round have sufficient size and coordination to take rings. Was there an intellectual component to the game I loved? Was there a strategy to increase the odds of my securing the gold ring?

As a ten-year-old in the summer of 1950, I often twisted my body and craned my neck to observe the color of an exposed ring when my horse was moving away from the dispenser. Knowing the initial number of silver rings, I might have been able to anticipate the appearance of the gold ring by keeping track of the number of silver rings already taken. But an early line on the winner was not my objective. Rather, I was speculating whether it could ever be in my interest to pass up a silver ring.

Eventually curiosity overcame shyness, and I asked the ride attendant whether he always placed the same number of silver rings before the gold one. I thought an indirect approach less confrontational than simply asking how many silver rings were in the dispenser. The ride attendant made no response, in fact he simply ignored me, and I was too embarrassed by his dismissive treatment to ask again. That rebuff did no lasting damage, for, at the time, a proper formulation of the problem was quite beyond me.