As I was watching the show (for the first and ONLY time), it occurred to me that the numbers in the cases could be changed while in the case (by producers to keep up the suspense and play the audience for chumps), technologically, its possible. The question is, is it legal?
Google quiz show scandals faor about a million hits on what happened in the 1950s with networks that cheated.
Here is a good link.
How is it technically possible? I don’t think those cases leave the stage once the picking begins. You mean with trick cases? With multiple numbers in each one or something? That would be very risky. And anyway, he’s given cases away to contestants as souvenirs.
THe game is legit. There’s no real reason to cheat - if they give away an average of 100K per contestant, that’s a trivial amount compared to the average TV production budget.
There are easier ways to cheat at Deal or No Deal. Maybe the banker really does know what’s in the briefcase the contestant picked? But I don’t think they need to.
Based on having seen the show once, it looks like the offer is based on a formula (looks pretty close to a straight average of the remaining cases). The one time I saw it, after the contestant took the deal, they ran through the rest of her picks and the remaining deals rather quickly; certainly not enough for a human to come up with a precise offer. I imagine the “banker” is just the producer, or director, or possibly just another random person; he’s just there to add drama and suspense.
Would that really help? If the banker varied the offers based on what was in the cases, anyone who analyzed that would have more information to work with. In general, that should cause the expected loss of the studio to go up.
It just seemed to me on watching the show that the drama/suspense was played up too perfectly. I mean, if the 1 million comes up first, or they happen to pick all the high numbers early, you’d end up with a pretty boring last half.
I don’t watch the show except if I happen to be flipping past it, but I’ve seen at least one round in which all of the high numbers were gone but one, and Mandel was selling the DoND on the basis of the good chance that taking additional cases would be likely to eliminate more low numbers and raise the deal amount.
IMDB.com says The Banker is played by Peter Abbay. Probably just the silhouette, though.
I have seen the Australian version a few times and have regularly caught a few minutes before the news. Occurrences like this are not rare. Once I saw a contestant eliminate the 3 highest amounts in 4 picks.
A couple of nights ago a contestant picked the million on her first pick. After her first six, most of the big amounts were gone, and she wound up struggling for another half an hour. The best deal offered during the whole show was something like $54,000, and in the end she settled for $24000.
It does happen. You don’t see a total wipeout often because the odds against it are not very good. In fact, the odds of picking the six largest amounts in your first six picks are not much better than the odds of winning a small lottery. So there’s almost always a big amount or two left to entice players to keep going and to keep the audience interested.
For all its simplicity, it’s actually a fairly cleverly designed game and production. The addition of a mysterious ‘banker’ and the choice of Howie Mandel as host were inspired, and they are very careful to pick entertaining contestents (I understand they actually have to audition to get on the show).
Although i have seen a round play out just that way. A contestant knocked out most of the really high values early on (perhaps before the third offer) and turned down the highest deal she was likely to get. Once the last of the over-$100,000 slots was removed, she and Howie sped through the remainder of the round which consisted of laughably small offers from the banker.