Totally agree. It is like a casino being pissed at someone for being smart enough to be a card counter. They aren't cheating. They are simply smarter than your game.
He gets very pissy when the callers aren't professional radio personalities who have been doing it since they were 18. Pay no attention to the dude who chose to take the call.
The phone calls would always slow down the conversation, regardless of how well the caller performed live. However, it's a product of it's age and taking callers was a huge part of radio, so it's hard to put all the blame on Opie. Even when he'd bitch about the calls he took lol.
@@nero48it goes in a set pattern of layouts that he noticed watching at home and memerized, so frame one the big money would be in the corner and again at 7th flash, so when he saw it in corner he'd count 6 frames and hit the plunger.
It wasn't "cheating" whatsoever, he just noticed there's never a whammy in that one spot and figured out when it would land there. It was a ridiculously massive design flaw They didn't have the technology yet to make it truly random but surely there could have been more sequences.
CBS had a winnings limit on their game shows ($25,000 at the time, though contestants could keep up to $50,000), which is why Larsen couldn't come back the next day. The network upped the winnings limit to $50,000 (though contestants could keep up to $75,000) in November, about three months after the show aired. Anything over the limit they had to donate to charity (usually). Larsen got to keep every dollar of his winnings and didn't have to donate a dime.
The robbery is the craziest part of the story. He was constantly looking for an easy buck, and there was a radio station where he lived that was offering a bunch of money if you had a dollar bill with a certain serial number on it. So he went to the bank and got almost all his winnings in one dollar bills. They were in his house in plastic bags, as he was sorting through looking at the numbers. One night while he was out, someone broke in and took the bags with the cash. Finding the patterns was an amazing feat back then, because he did it with the technology of the early 80s...vhs tapes.
I agree with your assessment totally, but to be honest, I don't really blame the guy for constantly looking for an easy dollar, because from what I understand about him, he used to drive an ice cream truck, that's not exactly the most lucrative job you can have
I don't know why making an 'easy buck' has become this terrible thing we should all look down on. It's not like this guy wasn't working hard in order to achieve it - the amount of time and energy he must have put into studying those panels, and the amount of time and energy it would've taken searching all those dollar bills...
@@lancehill1397 I agree with you. I don't get why the greater body of society vilifies seeking "an easy buck" and glorifies "hard work". Both are equally valid pursuits. To find a way to avoid digging a ditch is not a character defect, and the world does need ditch diggers. There is also an enormous spectrum of options between and beyond the two concepts.
Paul Michael Larson (May 10, 1949 - February 16, 1999) was a contestant on the American television game show Press Your Luck in 1984. Larson is notable for winning $110,237 (equivalent to $254,000 in 2016) in cash and prizes, at the time the largest one-day total ever won on a game show. He was able to win by memorizing the patterns used on the Press Your Luck game board. Originally from southwestern Ohio, Larson used his cash winnings for taxes and real estate investments. However, he also had problems with the law and was involved in illegal schemes. As a result, Larson lost all of his winnings within two years of the show's taping and moved to Florida, where he later died of throat cancer at the age of 49. Since his death in 1999, Larson's game has re-aired on TV at various times and inspired the 2003 Game Show Network documentary Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.
Well shit, I was hoping the best for this guy. It's kind of a bummer what happened post winning, but at least he won, beat the game, and is now a legend. Heros are remembered, but legends never die--Art LaFleur while he was hiding in the closet of Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez.
What the guys don't know is that the show (and most CBS game shows at the time, since this was a CBS game show) had a flat winnings cap of $25,000 at the time-- and exceeding that figure meant that a contestant was automatically retired. Midway through the run, CBS doubled the cap to $50,000-- and subsequent to that, the cap was raised to $75,000.
It's totally worth it to read up on this. Basically he sat at home studying the patterns, and finally noticed that there were only about 8 different sequences that the "random" spinner went through. During one of the sequences, it would stop on the upper right space which was always "money + another spin". All he had to do was sit and wait until he recognized that particular pattern sequence was up, then wait for the space just before the upper right to light up so when he hit the button, it would be the money+spin one. That's why he's taking so long to press the button, he's waiting for it to cycle through to the winning pattern. The only thing that stopped him from going on forever was fatigue. After a while, he actually slipped once and missed the upper right space. That made him panic and finally pass rather than risk slipping up again and getting a whammy which would mean he'd lose it all. The other contestant passed it back to him hoping he would do exactly that. That was the real panic as he tried to avoid slipping before passing it back and ending the game. It didn't take long for the people in the control room to realize what was going on, but they couldn't do anything about it. After the show, they redid the whole randomizer so that now it had something like 60+ unique patterns that no human could hope to keep track of. On top of that, the spaces themselves would always be random so you would have to know ALL the patterns instead of just one. And most hilarious of all is what ended up happening to the winnings, like others have pointed out: blowing it all on a crazy radio dollar bill contest and having all the cash stolen. I honestly wonder if that event is what inspired the Jeopardy subplot in White Men Can't Jump, because the exact same events played out.
Not having the tech know-how to randomize the pattern at the time, understandable. But not having a fail-safe ready, where they could force a loss on a person winning too much, surprisingly honest.
Jim is normally pretty sharp and quick-witted but he can't seem to grasp how this guy was able to learn the patterns and win repeatedly. The people who designed the game clearly came up with wayyyyyyyy too few algorithms and this guy, tbh, was likely one of many to recognize the relatively straight-forward set of algorithms. Kudos to this guy though bc he (1) took the time to memorize the algorithms + practice the timing of pressing the button + practice the overly enthusiastic personality that TV execs wanted in a contestant, (2) had big enough balls to actually go out to LA with the little money he had in order to audition for the show, (3) successfully convince the show's bookers that he had the "personality" of a good TV contestant... aka demonstrating that he could smile and clap like a manic seal..., and (4) apply his knowledge under pressure in order to win loads of money. I'm sure a lot of people recognized the limited # of patterns/algorithms but this guy turned it into action. As for Jimmy, he apparently would have been another unthinking "come on big money! no whammies!" type. He doesn't seem to grasp the notion of that there were a limited # of algorithms which the contestant used to identify patterns so that he could consistently win money+an extra round (despite Anthony's multiple attempts to dumb it down for him).
This Press Your Luck is one of the many cases which demonstrate that I give people entirely too much credit. I would never have imagined that they would not have made sure that such a thing wasn't possible at all before even deciding to put the show on TV, just as I never would have thought people would allow the worst among them into the most influential positions, but that's another matter.
Things they missed that I wished someone would've told them 1. It was only 6 patterns, not 16. 2. The square to the right of the upper left corner is the one that he waited to have light up. It's 4 or 5 spaces it jumps after to where he actually stops. It's because the two he does usually stops on never had a Whammy in them, and held the most money and a spin. 3. CBS had a hard limit on how much accumulated winnings you could amass on their game shows before you were "retired" (50K, I think it was). It was imposed on all contestants. You could keep what you won beyond the 50k if you're totals broke that limit on the day you did so, but that meant you were retired on that day. The reason for that: it was CBS's way of safeguarding themselves after the quiz show scandal (Twenty-One rigging). Wasn't something they changed for the Larson episodes.
The quiz show scandals... the nation was embroiled in the idea of rigged gameshows. Without that scandal all we had to be concerned about was mutually assured destruction. I hear tell the 50's were pretty sweet.
Blows my mind NBC probably makes a few million from advertising during this show and they were worried about a little. MTV gave Bam like 500k budget per episode to just do whatever he wanted...if he suggested something cheap they'd tell him to do more.
If you are a poor person and make a horrible financial decision like a payday loan or even student loan you cant payoff you are fucked forever...penalties...fees...it can ruin people for life...but this Corporation made a mistake with the game and a smart guy cracked it but they DON'T have to pay the consequences because they are rich and can change the rules...not allowing him to come back...limiting his money...they fucked up..they should have paid the ULTIMATE price and let the guy come back over and over until he drained CBS of Millions..then attorney up and negotiate a settlement....He was FUCKED over by the establishment....Make a crucial financial mistake? You pay the price unless you are a rich Corporation.....lesson here
That's 80's money too, so that was some serious cash at the time. I hope he bought the biggest largest land yacht luxury car on the market, fully loaded lol.
He was robbed because he was trying to win a radio contest where they were looking for a dollar bill with a specific serial number. He had taken out a huge amount of money from his winnings in singles and had them all over his place so he could go through them. Somebody caught wind of this and broke in and robbed him.
I love Matchgame. Gary Burghoff is a sweety. There's such an uncomfortable akwardness whenever he speaks. It's like he thinks everyone knows what a cunt he was on the set of M.A.S.H. Charles Nelson Riley and Richard Dawson were fuckin HILARIOUS on that show. They had Hot-Lips and Henry Blake all the time too. Jamie Farr was on alot I'm pretty sure. Half the set of MASH was on that show. They should have had Klinger in a pretty dress in the background, like the better original version of Vanna White.
This guy was a peculiar man. First it was this- which wasn't really dishonest or cheating at all. He just simply figured out how the game works. It's not like he broke into CBS and got any privileged information. He recorded the shit on a VHS and studied it lmao. But later in his life, he DID commit some shady Ponzi scheme shit and defrauded like 14000 people out of 1.8M dollars.
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jeez some of these callers are full of shit, just watch the documentary, its 5 patterns he memorized not 16 and he only hit a whammy on the first one, not towards the end like that one guy said, and he was following the light, there were 2 squares that never had a whammy so he knew when the lights hit those squares
It happens man. Human memory is terrible, and it's worse when you're calling your fucking radio heroes. I called in once like 10 years ago and completely panicked.
I highly advise against watching the documentary on here "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal". It was done by the Game Show Network after Michael Larson's death from cancer and they went out of their way to defame and slander him and portray him as a crook and a con artist. It's really disgusting that they did that to him. Like many people here have already said, he did nothing wrong. The PSL producers were just pissed off that he figured out the game board pattern and took them for a lot of money. So they were vindictive as hell in the documentary and basically claimed he was a terrible person, when that wasn't the case at all. What a bunch of bullshit!
Apparently Opie and Anthony did some sort of opposite sketch thing I was unaware of, because I have never heard something more opposite the truth than Jim Norton saying "I can't think quickly at all."
JonesDylan874 The Fragmentationer just on this video i don’t see it ever going on 2 whammys in a row, so stopping on a whammy (with the slight delay) was also a good strategy
maybe this was all planned for publicity and this guy was in on it getting paid like $1000 or something but at the last second he fucked then and said you owe me $100,000
Ross Robertson maybe $100,000 was his contract price for the publicity stunt. this incident probably led to a big bump in viewer numbers so I don't think it's beyond the reason a corporation would do that
It's legit. They kept the episode quiet and didn't air it for several years because it was 3 times as long as a regular episode due to all the spins and they didn't want people to know about it. They cut him a check and hid the footage for years until an executive had the idea to make it a special.
