Press Your Luck was a mid-80s game show modeled along similar lines to Wheel of Fortune. But instead of a wheel, its flashing board was digital, supposedly random and unpredictable.
Sadly, no, writes Priceonomics' Zacahry Crockett. One contestant, Michael Larson (not the fellow on the right) figured out the nonrandom patterns the board followed and racked up huge gains as the network panicked. He had turned their game of chance into a game of skill, and he was skilled enough to take them to the cleaners.
… During Larson’s rally, Tomarken, the show’s host, grew increasingly nervous. His quips graduated from shock (“We’ve never seen this happen! You’re on a roll!”) to disbelief (“This is unreal”), to utter disgust (“You’ve got to be kidding me”) — and once Larson hit the $30,000 mark, he started pressuring the contestant to bow out.
“Michael, you really are PRESSING YOUR LUCK,” he warned at one point, wagging a finger in the air. “After this show, you’re going to get a special call from the president of CBS…”
Finally, 40 successful spins and $102,851 later, Larson passed his final 3 spins to Ed Long, fearing that he was beginning to lose focus. On his very first spin, Long hit a Whammy and lost all of his cash. When the spins were passed to Litras, she too hit a Whammy on her first try. In the hopes that Larson would screw up and lose his cash, she then passed the spins back to him, but Larson did not falter. Instead, he landed $4,750 and a trip to the Bahamas.
I think, in this day and age, the show's nonrandom patterns would be almost immediately spotted by the Internet. It's obvious that some of the squares are always rewards. Moreover, once you notice the sequence in which the squares are highlighted, it's hard to "unsee" these recurring blinking patterns.
But these observations are from a modern vantage point, aided by the knowledge that random numbers aren't, that code is often garbage, and that incompetent game design is all around us. In the early 1980s, all this was new. You tell people the computer's picking them at random… and they know it.
From the description of their investigation, it looks like they didn't quite figure out how he'd taken them, either: the fix was to increase the number of board patterns from 5 to 32 instead of effectively random.
