In 1984 an Ohio man put together an astounding run on the television game show Press Your Luck. He did so by memorizing the sequences by which the various prize squares lit up on the game board, allowing him to time his button presses to coincide with the lights' stopping on the most advantageous squares. By hitting 35 such squares in a row, he was able to accumulate the largest win in the history of that show, and he did it all in under an hour. He deduced there was some commonality to these repetitions, and after an additional six weeks of study he realized that the board utilized only six patterns, each consisting of a fixed sequence of eighteen numbers. After that, it was but a matter of memorizing those six patterns, then getting on the show.
― chaki, Monday, 17 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)
Phil, you haf LOST IT. Talk about bum sex instead!
Is "Play Your Cards Right With Bruce Forsyth" still on, I wonder?
If I were to go on any game show it would be KNIGHTMARE.
― Sarah, Monday, 17 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)
Chaki's story reminded me of this all-true urban legend:
"The year was 1873 when Englishman Joseph Jaggers
(1830-1892) made his fantastic run on the Beaux-Arts Monte
Carlo Casino. An engineer and mechanic in the cotton industry
in Yorkshire, his nuts-and-bolts background led him to ponder
the mechanics of roulette wheels. Were they perfectly balanced?
Were the numbers the shiny little ball landed on truly random, or
were some numbers more likely to come up than others?
Those questions in mind, Jaggers hired six clerks to record
every number that came up on the roulette wheels in the 12
hours a day the casino was open. He then spent the next six
days poring over the numbers, searching for patterns that
randomness alone wouldn't account for.
He found what he was looking for. Though five of the casino's six
wheels produced predictably random results, nine numbers in
particular kept showing up on the sixth at a rate far exceeding
what natural probability would have indicated. Clearly, the wheel
was biased.
The first day's foray against the casino netted him roughly
$70,000. By the fourth day his winnings pushed $300,000.
The casino fought back. In the dead of night each of the wheels
was re-housed into a different table. The next morning though
Jaggers went to his usual table, he was up against an unbiased
wheel.
He lost (some say heavily). It was then it dawned on him that a
certain miniscule scratch he'd previously noted on his
Jaggers-friendly wheel was no longer in evidence. Finally,
suspecting a switch, he made a quick survey of the other roulette
tables, and the discovery of a certain scratch led him to be
reunited with his faithful lady. From there he went on to push his
total winnings to $450,000, an astronomical sum for 1873.
In the end the casino prevailed. They had their wheel
manufacturer in Paris design a set of movable frets, the metal
barriers that separate numbers on the wheel. Each night after
closing, the frets would be moved to new locations around the
wheel. Playing into the teeth of this, Jaggers went on a two-day
losing streak. He finally bowed to the inevitable, escaping with
his $325,000 remaining profit. He left Monte Carlo, never to
return.
The song "The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo" was
written the year he died. "
This came from
http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/fracture/monte.htm, btw.
― Andrew L, Monday, 17 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)
The
only game show taping I ever attended as a kid was "Press
Your Luck". My mom's boss was a contestant on the show, which is why
we went. It was fab!
Not that it's worth paying for cable TV to see all these reruns on
the Game Show network or anything, but I'd love to see some of those
Whammy animation transparencies again. The moonwalking Whammy is the
one I always remember. Very Sergio Arroganes style drawings...
― Brian MacDonald, Monday, 17 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)