A game with four players (Q1892965)

In the gambler's ruin problem for \(n \geq 3\) players, each player tosses a fair coin, and if one of them gets a result different from those of the others, he collects one unit from each of the others. Starting with certain initial fortunes \(a_1, \ldots, a_n\), \(T(a_1, \ldots, a_n)\) denotes the time until at least one of the players is ruined. The author treats this problem for \(n = 4\) and computes \(ET (a,a,a,a)\) when the initial fortunes are equal.