No Whammies

This morning I looked up the 1980's daytime TV game show that featured the contestant battle cry "Big bucks no whammies" and found out not quite more than I ever wanted to know about the program Press Your Luck.

The most interesting thing was how one guy beat the system to win over $100,000 in a single day.

The game worked by contestants answering trivia questions to get opportunities to play against the Big Board, where a lighted square would move, seemingly randomly, around a square of spaces with dollar amounts or "whammies" that would take all the money you had earned. These squares themselves changed dollar values as the lighted square moved. The contestant would press their button, freezing the lighted square in place, and either get the money (or prize) on the square or lose everything to the annoying animated cartoon whammy.

Wikipedia writes:

"Through a careful study of the "random" movements of the 18-square "Big Board" on the CBS game show Press Your Luck, Larson was able to determine that there were only five patterns used to determine the movements of the spinner used to award money on the show. He was able to discover this by using a VCR to pause a recorded episode of the game, and proceed frame by frame to learn the patterns. Armed with this knowledge, he found that it would be theoretically possible to go on the game show, watch the patterns carefully, and hit squares containing money consistently.

Two of the 18 squares on the game board (usually referred to as 4 and 8) always contained cash in round 1 (square 4 held $1,000, $1,250, and $1,500, while square 8 held $300, $450, and $550), as well as cash and an extra spin in round 2 (square 4 held $3,000 + ONE SPIN, $4,000 + ONE SPIN, and $5,000 + ONE SPIN, while square 8 held $500 + ONE SPIN, $750 + ONE SPIN, and $1,000 + ONE SPIN). They never contained the Whammy, the character in the show who takes away all cash and prizes a contestant has earned. Therefore, Larson reasoned, if he used his knowledge of the board patterns to stop on only those two squares, he could play on as long as he dared, never at risk of losing his money.

Larson arrived in Hollywood from Lebanon, Ohio for a contestant tryout on Press Your Luck, having virtually no money to his name and using most of what he had to make the trip. In his tryout interview, he described himself as unemployed, but an ice cream truck driver during the summer season, who wanted to be a contestant on the show. Two producers discussed whether to have him on the show after his tryout interview; one was suspicious of Larson and his reasons for trying out—the other was not. The final decision was to let Larson on the show...[He appeared on May 19th, 1984.]...

In the second and final Big Board round, Larson's demeanor and behavior changed dramatically. He was completely silent during spins [as opposed to the "big bucks no whammies" cry that contestants were encouraged to make], concentrating carefully, and leaving Tomarken to fill the silence with increasingly amazed chatter. He immediately celebrated after many of his spins, instead of waiting the fraction of a second that it would normally take for a player to see and respond to the space he or she had stopped on. All of these habits were extremely unusual for a Press Your Luck contestant...

Early on in the second round, perhaps due to nerves or inexperience, Larson's pattern play was irregular. On four of his first eleven spins, Larson stopped the board at a point not called for by his patterns; but luckily, he avoided the Whammy all four times, instead hitting a trip to Kauai (worth $1,636), $700 + ONE SPIN, PICK A CORNER (where he selected $2,250 out of THAT, $2,000, or $1,500 + ONE SPIN), and a Sailboat (worth $1,015). Then his play became deadly accurate. A player stopping the Press Your Luck board randomly would expect to hit a Whammy approximately once in each six spins. By contrast, in this second round alone, Larson took over forty spins without a Whammy. On thirty consecutive spins, his pattern play was perfect, and he consistently landed on the two "safe spots" that always awarded money and a spin. Peter Tomarken and the other contestants were increasingly amazed as Larson pressed on and on, never coming near a Whammy, never even using up one of his spins...

Litras took both spins safely, but earned no spins that she could pass back to Larson. Her last desperate spin ended with her landing on a Mexican Cruise in Square #15, and no Mexican Cruise was worth more than $4,500. Thus the game was over, and Michael had won $110,237; of this $104,950 was cash...

[The head of the daytime programming department said] "Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy. He kept going around the board and hitting that box." Brockman contacted CBS lawyers to prove that he had cheated, but they failed. Larson won the argument, saying that what he had done was no different than if he had "[broken] the books to get on Jeopardy." When he threatened a lawsuit of his own, CBS finally gave in and awarded him his money...

Part of his winnings went to taxes and part of his winnings were invested in real estate, with the remainder left in the bank. The real estate deal turned out to be a fraudulent ponzi scheme and Larson lost his investment entirely. Larson then learned about a get-rich-quick scheme involving matching a one dollar bill's serial number with a random number read out on a local radio game show that promised a $30,000 jackpot. Larson withdrew his remaining gameshow winnings in one dollar bills in hopes of winning the contest. He would examine each dollar carefully and upon discovering that he did not have the winning number, would place all the money back in his account, only to withdraw it again the next day and repeat the process all over again. Larson's wife at the time stated that this obsession consumed him...

Approximately USD $40,000-50,000 in the remaining cash was stolen from Larson and his common-law wife Teresa Dinwitty while the two attended a Christmas party shortly after giving up on the radio contest, according to a Game Show Network special. Larson and Dinwitty split up soon after...

Larson fell victim to head and neck cancer in 1999 and died while on the run from the US Securities and Exchange Commission."

Later, they changed the way the Big Board worked so that no one would be able to exploit the pattern like this guy did. But I have to wonder why the original pattern had those two "always safe" squares in spots 4 & 8. Did no one notice that the pattern had safe spots? Did a technician somewhere screw up the implementation of the pattern so that the safe spots appeared?

Also, can you imagine that "I told you so" of the producer who didn't want Larson on the program to begin with?