During the regular portion of the Family Feud, one person from each family tries to get the best answer. I call this phase 1 or the lightning round. The family that wins phase 1 now has a choice whether to play phase 2 or pass phase 2 to the other family. Are there any statistics as to what percentage “pass”, because the winning family almost always shout “play” to the team leader?
But more to the point, on several occasions the family is screaming “PLAY” only to get three successive wrong answers. This is most common when the lightning round (phase 1) has revealed the top two answers. Are there statistics on whether it is better to “play” or “pass” when you have the option to choose?
One point to remember is that contestants aren’t chosen for how good they are at the game, like they are for some shows like Jeopardy. They’re chosen for how telegenic they are, which usually means enthusiasm, which means wanting to play first. So you wouldn’t expect them to pass, even if that was the proper move.
Yeah, the shows producers definitely rank exuberance over intelligence or strategy among criteria to get on the show. I don’t know what the precise statistics are, but I watch pretty regularly and I would estimate that contestants pass only about five percent of the time. I would guess that there are few times that it pays to pass. Perhaps if you think the other family is full of dunces who will leave several possible answers on the board.
My wife has the Game Show Network on most evenings as something of a default background noise/distraction. Kind of like a screen saver for the TV. Family Feud is usually the show that’s on at that time (hosted by Steve Harvey).
I don’t usually pay attention but I do on occasion. I think I’ve seen them shout “play” hundreds of times and only seen “pass” twice (it was notable when it happened, each time Steve had to confirm to be sure it wasn’t a mistake). I’d guess it’s closer to 1% than 5%.
Seems like you have about a 50/50 chance of winning if you pass or play. But playing gets you more time on TV, chatting with the host and such. I suspect folks go on Family Feud more to be on TV than to win (though of course they want to win too) so given an even chance of winning if you pass or play, you pick what gives you more screen time.
I’m sure there’s a good strategy about when to pass or play but most families just always play.
Intelligence, or at least not being an idiot. I’ve seen contestants who you can tell right away will be the weak link in a family. Being “too” smart doesn’t seem to hurt either; I saw one family that had a literal neurosurgeon, a researcher, and a college student on an academic scholarship to a prestigious school. They did well.
Experience. Being smart isn’t everything. A couple nights ago one family member was a preacher who came off as very intelligent. But he had very little knowledge of pop culture, seemed to have limited experience in personal relationships, etc. He did poorly. Many questions are like, “Name a place your significant other will go to if they’re mad at you.” A sheltered genius would have no clue how to answer.
Of course the usual things help; not getting shy/flustered in front of a crowd, handling stress with calm, having a reasonable grasp of the English language, etc. But those help on every game show ever.
It honestly seems to me that passing would usually be the better choice, since it’s unlikely that the other side will get all of them with fewer than 3 misses. And then you only have to get one right to win.
But that’s just intuition. I think a valid test would be to look at how often the family who plays first actually wins. You could then further divide that maybe by how high up their first choice is, and possibly whether they were the only one to get a right answer for the buzz in round. Maybe even throw in whether they buzzed in first or not. So getting all that data might be useful.
That said, while I kinda like playing along for fun sometimes, I’m not a big enough fan of the show to catalog those statistics. I do wonder if there are any fans out there who already have, though.
Thing is BigT: if the question is so tough that a reasonable group can fail 3 times after maybe getting only the top 1 or 2 correct, the family with a chance to “steal” has now exactly one chance to get it right. Now you see the producers plan – evenly matched families – smart enough, photogenic enough, unified enough (without a head of the family that overrules everyone) – so that they’re evenly matched. Then generate excitement, essentially purely by luck and speed of ringing in. Passing seems like almost never a good idea – unless you’ve noticed the family has some flaws like Atamasama: mentioned.
If you play, you win the round two ways. You get all of the answers on the board, that’s a win. Or you get all of the easy answers until all that’s left is something less intuitive or just plain stupid (I swear, some of these survey responses seem almost random and no sane person would guess them).
If you pass you have to hope that the other family can’t get all the answers and that you can guess at least one they can’t.
Another complicating factor is that when you play each family member asked gets one chance to guess or get a strike. If they are playing like they should and coming up with a ready answer, there’s a chance that the answer they had ready will be picked by someone else. Then they have to think of something else, on the spot. No collaboration or other kind of help between family members is allowed if you play (except shouting “good answer” after their pick which ties into the whole “stay enthusiastic” mandate).
If you pass then you watch the other team and you can spend time figuring out what must be up there. Then if you get a chance to steal the lead player hears all the suggestions of four other family members before deciding. You only have one chance but you don’t have to work alone. So it’s not as difficult to get a good answer as it would be just picking on your own.
I think it’s hard to say which is easier. There are so many factors you have to consider when weighing which method is more likely to win you a round. My casual eyeball test suggests it’s about 50/50 as I said before so again, I think most people pick what gets them more face time on TV and play when given the chance.
Maybe not, but at least two people in the survey came up with that answer. If at least two people answer the same (or similar) way, it counts as a possible answer.
Once, a few years ago, I was stuck in Reno helping my father-in-law after surgery. With nothing else to do and nearly two hundred Family Feud episodes saved on his DVR, I decided to run statistics on this very question.
To my surprise, it is ALWAYS better to play and not pass, and it wasn’t even close. Attempted steals fail at a very high rate, and combined with clearing the board the percentage the playing team wins the points was somewhere above 70%. That’s not including the obvious incentive of getting screen time and fun interaction with the host.
The only occasion where passing makes any sense is a question with “soft” answers and 7 or 8 answers on the board. (“Soft” meaning ‘reasons a woman would ditch a date’ rather than “hard” answers like ‘organs you could live without’.)
IIRC, the Ray Combs era didn’t even bother with allowing teams to pass.
I’m not sure I understand the distinction between soft and hard. Is it open ended vs. limited choices?
And the reason it makes sense to play makes a lot of sense once I see it explained. I forgot there was only one chance to steal, too. Of course one chance after all the easier of answers have been gotten is worse than 3 failures before that.
The distinction I’m seeing there is that the “hard” ones have unambiguously distinct answers. If you ask “Name something that creeps you out about old people”, and someone answers “That funny old-person smell”, they might get a <DING> and the board reveals “Their Odor”. It’s a different answer, but close enough to count.
On the other hand, for “Name a car company that makes really nice cars”, if one of the answers is Porsche, then nothing other than Porsche will match that answer.
“Name a body part…” isn’t quite as hard, because it’s still possible that someone will say “noggin” instead of “head”, or something, or any of a variety of euphemisms for genitals. But there will be a lot less of that than for most categories.
Heh. This is not to the point, but I just want to brag: when they say, ‘We asked 100’ people/women/married people/whatever category, I’m quite often one of them.* [Casually buffs nails on shirt.]
I don’t know how they picked my address to begin with, but about once a month I get an email inviting me to fill out a survey that turns out to be several screens full of what can’t be anything other than potential Family Feud questions. (For example, one time the question was, Which super hero would you compare Steve Harvey to?)
But that time the question was “Name a department in a grocery store” and one of the answers was, Tires? That wasn’t me. Truly.
I always call that the “two crazy hippies”. I think the first time I noticed an oddball answer was a question that was like, “name something beautiful to own” and the answer was “sunsets”. Another was something like “who was your first love” and the answer was “nature”. Both were answers that were practically non sequiturs and both happened on the same show, and both had two people with that answer. So I joked to my wife that the same two hippies got surveyed. Now each time an answer is crazy I say it’s those two hippies again.