The man who outsmarted a gameshow
Contestants ‘beat’ gameshows all the time.
But they don’t actually beat the gameshow, do they? Rather, they just perform really well through a combination of skill and luck.
Mike Larsen genuinely, truly beat the gameshow. He cracked the code like a gambler counting cards and he took the gameshow to the cleaners.
It’s an amazing story. Here’s how it happened.
Who is this superhuman guy that would go on to beat the game?
The year is 1984 and Mike Larson is unemployed. He’d previously worked as an air-conditioning mechanic and then also an ice-cream truck driver, but those jobs had dried up.
Michael was money-obsessed, a keen learner, and would dedicate himself to mastering various pursuits. One day, he gathered up several old television sets in his loungeroom and stacked them on top of one another. He then switched them all on to different channels and began scanning different programs simultaneously, searching for opportunities to make money.
Finally, on one fortuitous day, Michael noticed a new gameshow and started watching it intently. The gameshow was called ‘Press Your Luck’.
How does Press Your Luck work?
‘Press Your Luck’ is a gameshow where contestants answer trivia questions to earn ‘spins’ on a giant gameboard.
The gameboard consists of 18 squares, each containing a screen that cycle through random prizes and different cash amounts.
When a contestant’s spin began, a light would flick around the board, highlighting random squares in quick succession. Contestants would hit their buzzer to stop the light, and whichever square the light landed on, that prize would then be added to the contestant’s kitty.
Some squares would also contain extra ‘spins’, meaning contestants could keep spinning over and over if they were lucky enough to keep landing on those squares.
The doozy of the game was called a ‘whammy’. A whammy was a little red cartoon devil that would move around different squares on the board. If the contestant stopped the light on the whammy, their kitty would reset to $0 and they would have to start again.
Cracking the code
Michael was intrigued by the show. He watched it every night, scanning the way the contestant’s light would move around the board during a spin.
One day he jumped up and exclaimed to his wife, “I got it! I got it!”
Michael had discovered a system. The board was not random at all and the lights would move around the board in sequence. In fact, there were only 5 different light sequences that would play.
So how did Michael learn them?
1. First, he numbered each of the squares 1–18.
2. He then identified the ideal squares on the gameboard that he wanted to land on. These squares were 4 and 8. These two squares always had free spins and never a whammy. Perfect!
3. He then memorised the number pattern for each of the 5 sequences, e.g. 2, 12, 1, 9, 4.
Now, to win big, all he would have to do was to recognise which sequence was playing and hit the buzzer at precisely the right moment.
Michael bought a plane ticket to Hollywood and auditioned for the show. Although he was a bit of a strange character, the ice-cream truck background story was an interesting story arc and he was accepted to become a contestant on the show.
Show time!
Michael had bought a nice new shirt to wear on the show and appeared relatively affable in the introduction scenes. In the trivia rounds Michael wasn’t particularly strong, but he did well enough to get himself a handful of spins on the prize gameboard.
It was now time for his first spin. Michael watched his light move around the board and slammed the buzzer down hard.
WHAMMY!
Michael hadn’t got the hang of the timing yet and had pressed the buzzer just a fraction too late. He had missed the square he was aiming for and had landed on the next sequential square instead.
Michael collected himself and played on with his remaining spins.
For the rest of the first round Michael played like a perfect contestant: yelling and screaming and clapping his hands like a kid catching candy. At the end of the first round, Michael finished with the lowest score of the three contestants. This was all strategic though, because as Michael knew, the player with the least amount of money would get the first opportunity to spin in the second and final round.
Round two — Michael gets serious
As Michael’s second round of spins began, he dropped the act and turned into a new laser-focused machine, eyes razor-sharp to the board. His pupils darted around, following the lights and stalking the sequences, ready to press at exactly the right moment.
Slam! He hit the buzzer and won a cash prize and free spin.
Bam! Another cash amount and another spin!
Michael kept aiming for, and hitting, the same two squares on the board. The two squares were 4 and 8, those two safe squares with the high cash amounts and free spins. As long as he kept hitting these squares, he was able to keep spinning, over and over and over again.
The contestants’ scoreboards only allowed for a maximum of 6 digits — a $ sign and 5 numbers. When Michael passed the $100,000 mark, the producers had to remove the $ in order to display his full prize total!
Michael landed 45 spins in a row and the episode went for so long that they had to split it up over two nights. In the end, he finished with $110,237 ($382,000 AUD in today’s money), which was three times more than anyone else had ever won on the show.
The Aftermath: Heads are going to roll for this one
CBS investigated Michael’s actions on the show to determine if he had acted in any way that could be deemed cheating. The network was unable to find evidence that Michael had broken any rules and so he was paid out his full winnings.
To protect themselves in the future and stop this jackpot happening again, CBS took two important steps:
- They increased the number of sequences in the gameboard from 5 to 32. It would really take a true genius to be able to memorise 32 sequences.
- After airing the episode once, CBS stopped the episode from showing in any reruns. To prevent any kind of copycat behaviour, the episode was locked away and didn’t see the light of day until almost two decades later.
Every story needs a moral, or does it?
All because most people follow the same set of rules and norms, it does not necessarily mean that this is the only way to achieve an outcome. The moral of this story is to think critically of the situations around us and that it can be healthy, even necessary, to question accepted principles. Step back, look at the way things operate and ask, “Why have we been doing things this way for so long?” Sometimes we may even need to ask an outsider or get out of the building to see the situation in a different light. Don’t be afraid to take a problem back to its core and approach it from a completely different angle.
