Did anyone else catch this documentary on GSN tonight? Was that a total character assassination of Michael Larson or what?? One contestant called him “creepy”, the show’s creator said, “He ripped 'em off for a hundred grand,” even his own brother seemed to disown him. I’m surprised they didn’t have the CBS executives dance on his grave!
I did like the scene-by-scene analysis of the game itself, which was shown in its entirety. Interesting how that pattern wasn’t too hard to get, once you knew it existed.
“Notice his hands? They’re poised over the button like a rattlesnake ready to strike.”
“Notice his eyes? It’s a sign of total concentration.”
“Notice his voice? It’s throat cancer. Oops…”
It’s on again tonight at 9pm (EST), so I’m going to catch it. I’m not not surprised that the network would attack this guy. He used their game against them and won huge money. I’d likely be pissed, too.
Well when his ex-wife, his brother, and apparantly the rest of the family disown him there was probably a good reason. Still, it was pretty unnecessary to end the show on such a neagative note.
I don’t know. They did have that toast to him at the end. I think the host of the show liked him, thought he was pretty awesome. I’m surprised no one at control noticed what he was doing. Didn’t they think it was odd that he kept getting the same two squares almost the entire time?
Although I didn’t see the documentary, I’m wondering why it took so long for this to become “news”. At the time, there was hardly a ripple in the media. Now, I’ve read about it in at least a couple of different places, including Snopes.com.
The thing is, all he did was take advantage of an existing flaw in the system. There was nothing illegal about it, and it really was rather ingenious. At the very least, the producers should have been grateful that he exposed a loophole in the game that anyone could have exploited if they had the same idea.
You know, this reminds me of the “rhythming” craze that plauged casino owners some time ago. It happened when a slot machine player suddenly started getting payouts over and over on every machine he played. He wasn’t doing anything illegal, and the only unusual thing anyone noticed when watching him was that he often varied the timings of the pulls (sometimes right after putting in the coin, sometimes three seconds after, etc.). Before long, the secret was out, and countless slot players were taking casinos to the cleaners.
So what did they do? Grumble? Slander? Scream? Whine? Beg?
No…they found out what these players were doing, then took measures to prevent it. See, what the original rhythmer had figured out was that a countdown timer, which started as soon as the last play ended, determined how long the reels spun (lotsa details; won’t go into it here). So once he’d worked out a winning payout via timing and good memory, all he had to do was keep getting it, over and over. (Most rhythmers only got good enough to get a single cherry, but even that was enough to break the machine, it just took a while.) The solution was a variator, which made the spin times for each real completely random. There hasn’t been a single complaing about rhythming since.
The producers of Press Your Luck saw a problem exposed and fixed it. There’s absolutely no call for discrediting someone for doing something COMPLETLEY WITHIN THE RULES, let alone attacking his character. This “Notice this, notice that” BS is nothing but a smokescreen.
Jesus friggin’ Christ. Have we really become such a nation of whiners that we can’t even give a guy his due for finding a way to win on a lousy game show? And I thought baseball had it bad…
Why’d they feel the need to point out ever little thing he does? Big deal. I’m with the others who feel that people are coming down on him for no reason other than he exploited a hole in the system and his fellow contestants didn’t think of it sooner.
The woman (Janice?) said in her interview that she was just putting on a show and that in reality she was angry at him. If that was putting on a show, she should have gone into acting!
Oh, and he was stupid with his winnings. Who in their right mind keeps over 110,000 dollar bills in their home? He was just asking for it to be stolen! And all his get-rich-quick schemes? I’d say either he watched too many “Honeymooners” reruns but didn’t really pay enough attention to them to realize that Ralph & Ed always ended up back where they started.
I admire him for finding the flaw and working it. I don’t admire him for the con he pulled afterwords. But I never dislike people just because they are eccentric – which he was.
I thought the analysis was interesting. Before they mentioned it, I had noticed that he was cheering before he even saw what he had won.
But the most interesting thing to me is how the network tried to find a way to wriggle out of it and couldn’t find one.
Well a lot of that extra stuff was just padding. I mean I can see how I could finish the program in 20 minutes rather then the 2 hours they tale. I wouldn’t say it was negative about him, just that they reviewed the program in a hacky cheesy kinda way.
And let me say that it gaves me the biggest laugh I’ve had all year when they referred to his death as having finally been caught by the big whammy.
P.S. Thanks for the heads-up. It has just started when I saw this thread.
Funniest/saddest moment was during the toast given at the end of the show by Press Your Luck host Peter Tomarken. When he directed the toast to Michael Larson “up there”, Larson’s own brother chimed in with “or down there”.
bean shadow, the production staff of the show said they did understand what was going on at the time, but there was nothing they could do about it. As the producer (or was it the creator?) said, there had been discussion even before Larson’s win about the limited number of patterns that the board ran through, and the possibility that those patterns could be discerned. They thought that had set up enough patterns to make it seem random, but they realized as Michael Larson was winning that Larson had beat the system.
The Gameshow network hawked this dud for weeks before playing it, and then it was a just a repetitive piece of crap that could have been explained in half or even a fourth of the time. Also, the audio cut out twice during the broadcast (possibly only in Montreal).
I also thought the “down there” line was just icky. There must have been a lot of bad blood between Larson and his brother.
The moment that just had me rolling, though, was when the other male contestant whammied out and you could see Larson reaching over and patting him on the shoulder!
That moment cracked me right up. Larson knew he was going to rule the day, so there’s a mind-blowing level of condescension in patting another contestant on the back. “There, there, Jimmy, your little kindergarden project is juuuuust fine.”
All told, though, I was annoyed by the repeated implication that Larson had cheated, or even that the matter was a “scandal”. Larson played perfectly within the rules of the game and it’s the producers’ fault if the game was that poorly designed. Actually, by making the more modern “Whammy” game completely random, there isn’t even any point sitting there like an idiot saying “no whammies” because you have absolutely no control over getting a whammy or not. You may as well just punch the button as soon as the board starts.