 Understanding “equal risk” here as “equal probability”, the probability of gain (winning the wager) and of loss (losing the wager) must each be 1/2. His hypothetically speaking of “two lives” and “three lives” may strike one as odd. It is helpful to bear in mind Pascal’s interest in gambling (which after all provided the initial motivation for his study of probability) and to take the gambling model quite seriously here. Indeed, the Wager is permeated with gambling metaphors: “game”, “stake”, “heads or tails”, “cards” and, of course, “wager”. Now, recall our calculation of the expectations of the two dollar and three dollar gambles. Pascal apparently assumes now that utility is linear in number of lives, that wagering for God costs “one life”, and then reasons analogously to the way we did in our expectation calculations above! This is, as it were, a warm-up. Since wagering for God is rationally required even in the hypothetical case in which one of the prizes is three lives, then all the more it is rationally required in the actual case, in which one of the prizes is an eternity of life (salvation).