Until I did it and everyone said, ‘Hey, that’s pretty neat’. I took six months out of my life and said I was going to do this, and everyone said it was silly. To get on the show, Larson watched recorded episodes, learning contestant mannerisms, facial expressions and even their most often-used phrases. Like a card counter trying to sneak into a casino undetected, he had to present himself as a genuine contestant, get on the game show and answer enough questions to take control of a board he knew like the back of his hand. While Larson’s discovery and memory skills presented a huge opportunity, he still had a few more significant hurdles to navigate to cash in. (Image below courtesy of Wikipedia and commons license). Going clockwise round the 18-square rectangle, the fourth and eighth squares always contained cash and never the wipeout “Whammy!” feature. He memorised the fixed board patterns by slowing the sequence down using his VCR’s freeze frame and used it to formulate an unbeatable strategy. Watching the show repeatedly, Larson was observant enough to figure out the game’s secret. It was winter, and I wasn’t exactly selling a lot of ice cream. If you’re too young to know what a videotape is, google it. He liked it so much that he videotaped every show in the Winter of 1983 over a few weeks. The producers thought that no one would notice, but Michael Larson did. So, faced with options for creating a random function to power their game board back in 1983, Press Your Luck decided to dodge the issue entirely and program into the game board five fixed alternating sequencers. Yes, there is a pseudo-random function in Excel, but that wasn’t launched until 1985. This creates a Catch-22 that very smart scientists and national security experts spend a lot of time and money trying to solve. You might think the solution to creating random outputs is to program a computer to do it for us, but a program needs instructions, which inevitably reflect the programmer’s human predictability. Humans are predictable and so bad at being random. Generating genuine randomness is surprisingly hard. It wasn’t, and Michael Larson’s hustle was figuring that out. The board consisted of 18 flashing squares in a rectangle that mixed varying cash and prizes along with Whammy squares – to be avoided – that reset contestants to $0.Ĭontestants had to hit a plunger to stop a seemingly random sequencing of the squares, hoping to land on a winning square and avoid the dreaded Whammy.įor anyone casually watching the show, the gameboard appeared randomised, moving so fast between squares that it was pure luck as to where the contestant landed on pushing their button. Its format wasn’t particularly imaginative, requiring contestants to answer general knowledge questions to earn spins on a giant digital gameboard. “ Press Your Luck” was a daytime game show on the US television network CBS that aired in 1983. Whammy! How Michael Larson Pressed His Luck The result is an hour of TV gold, which should earn Larson a position in the hustlers’ hall of fame. Like a poker player or a card counter, Larson studied his opponent and realised that ‘ Press Your Luck’ wasn’t as random as the name suggests. What’s so fascinating about the story of an ice cream driver from Ohio walking away with one of the biggest prizes in game show history is that there was no collusion, and he didn’t cheat. The Story of Michael Larson & Press Your Luck So it’s worth celebrating those stories where some ingenuous soul figured out a fair and square hustle, like the story of ice cream van driver Michael Larson and his appearance in 1984 on the US TV Show, Press Your Luck. The sad truth is that deception for profit is much easier than hard work or finding a genuine edge. In the modern digital economy, scams have become so commonplace that they barely make the news.
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