Games on The Price is Right that no one ever wins, and games everyone wins

Cafe Society
1

Let’s face it…some contestants on The Price is Right get the shaft when it comes to games and prizes. It sucks to have the guy before you win a car on what is essentially a game with 50/50 odds, and then you have to play one of those “supermarket” games where you need to know the prices of mundane items from the grocery store, and lose because the cold medicine is ten cents more expensive than the shampoo.

I saw one of my most hated games today (because I have never seen anyone win it…obviously someone sometime has,) Lucky Seven. In this game, you are given the first number in the price of a car, and you have to guess the other six numbers. For every digit that you are off, you pay Drew $1 (from a total of $7 that he gives you.) You also need $1 left over to “buy” the car with, so in six numbers to guess, you cannot be off by more than $6 total. Complete BS game, and it’s thrown in there as a “win” for the producers, because they know they will rarely have to give away a prize because of it.

On the flip side, there are several games that are almost impossible to lose, like Plinko. Technically, the only way to lose Plinko is to only get your chip(s) in the $0 slot. Everyone gets at least two or three extra Plinko chips, and they always get at least one $1000, if not a $10,000.

2

I don’t remember the name of it, but the game where you stand on a grid, then step to the adjacent square which has the next number of a price on it. Hate that game. Also the game where you try to correctly arrange the numbers in the price of three prizes.

Plinko is always a winner. I like the mountain man game… One time I saw a guy get all three (or four) prices exactly right.

Haven’t been home to watch it in years, so I’ll have to go off and think of some more. I think I may have seen one episode where Drew was the host.

3

In the example you gave, you’re talking about a 7-digit car. They don’t give those away on TPIR. :stuck_out_tongue: You’re given the first number, and you have to correctly guess the next four numbers.

The one that irks me is the “Golden Road.” Granted, the top prize on those is generally something in the neighborhood of $80,000, so they’re not eager to give those away, but seriously, the odds of winning must be something like 1 in 1,000.

4

Seems to me the Dice Game is a pretty easy winner. You roll the die and if the number you roll isn’t an actual digit in the price of the car, then you guess whether it’s higher or lower than the number you rolled. Then after you have guessed all the numbers they even give you a chance to change your guesses if you don’t have all the numbers right. I see alot of winners on that game.

One game that is really hard is the one where there are 3 prizes…one with a 2-digit price, one with a 3-digit price and a car or boat that has a 5 digit price. They give you all the digits in the prices plus an extra digit and you have to write in the actual price, once you guess right you move up to the higher prize…I can’t remember the name of the game (Ten Chances??)but it is really tough to get that 5-digit price correct.

5

In case you missed this one when it aired (because who misses episodes of The Price is Right?), check out this kid’s unbelievable run: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMuiYNa3Xo

Includes the Lucky Seven game.

6

I agree. However, watch this guy win it. He’s nearly the luckiest contestant ever.

Lucky Price is Right Winner

7

I watched a few of the showcase clips on youtube. Sometimes Drew (and Bob) read the top winner’s actual price first, sometimes the wingman; but always the loser first.

Is that a giveaway?

8

There are some almost immutable laws to The Price is Right, where, if contestants followed them, they would win a lot more than they should (easier said then done when you have cameras in your face).

  • SafeCracker, it’s three digits, the last digit is almost always 0. If 0 is a digit, it will be the last digit. This makes the game a 50/50 shot if you know nothing about the price.

  • 10 Chances is harder, but the same rule applies. If there is a 0, then that will also be the last digit, reducing messy combos.

  • You have to work hard to lose at Cliffhanger. The first product is almost always in the mid 20s, the second mid 30s, the last mid 40s.

  • On any game where there are four items and you have to guess right/wrong price, or something similar, like Bonus Game, Plinko, One Right Price, etc, very often, but not always, it will be two of one option and two of the other option.

9

I have not seen the show in years but my favorite was the “range game” only because of the funky sound effect as the scale went up the chart. Do they still play that one?

10

I’m having trouble parsing this sentence, but the one Mahaloth and A. I. Wintermute both linked to have Drew reading the winner’s showcase price first; the second person went over with her bid.

11

One of the benefits of occasional wfh is that I have this on as background noise, and yes, they do, same sound effects and all.

12

Dice Game CAN be easy, if you are lucky in the rolls. Get all 1s and 6s and you are on easy street, get 3s and 4s and you are screwed. A contestant last week rolled a 2, went higher, another 2, which was the right number, a 1, and then a 6, so those last two were automatically easy. He still lost because the one 2 that was not correct was actually lower.

13

(First of all, five guesses as already noted.)
This isn’t as tricky as you think. They give you the first number, which will either be a 1 or a 2 most likely. Hopefully you will get a one and be able to guess 8 or 9 for your next number (unless it’s a well-known car in the $15,000-$16,000 range, like Ford Focus or Ranger.) After that your last three guesses should all be 5.

The one that’s so easy I want to kill someone is where they have 3 oversized “baby” blocks that say “1” “2” “3” and 3 prizes and you have to put them in front of 3 prizes in order of least to most expensive. That’s it! That’s not even fun!

The one I DETEST is “Clock Game,” where you have 30 seconds to frantically guess the price of one crappy prize while Drew goes “higher/lower” and then if there’s time left in the 30 seconds you get to try for the second better prize.

FAVORITE! is any of the ones where you have to add up the groceries to get within a certain amount (or above/below a certain level.) If you watch the show regularly/are the shopper of the household you NAIL that game, hahaha.

14

Oh I’m so glad to see that again! That guy made my day when I saw it!

Another pet peeve: When Drew asks people if they want to say “Hi” to anyone and they give a “Shout out to THE LORD” or something. Wha? Or they say “Hey” to people who are already there with them in the crowd (pointing them out is a bonus.) That is not the purpose of saying “HI” to someone ON TELEVISION! :dubious:

15

I LOVE the clock game! It’s so easy to win, and the only people who lose are usually old people who can’t think “fast enough,” or people who get confused for some reason. The other week I saw someone try to play this game, and they kept guessing the same fucking numbers. Let’s say the prize was $1586, she would say $1580, Drew would say higher, she would say $1600, Drew would say lower, she then would say $1590, Drew says lower again, so she goes to like $1550…?! She then went back to $1580, and basically then kept flip flopping between $1580 and $1590. You could see Drew getting frustrated and being like “no, HIGHER THAN THAT.”

The trick is that once you have it within a $10 or $20 range, you don’t wait for Drew, you just frantically start going up like “$1001, $1002, $1003, $1004…”

In the same vein as “clock game” is “Bonkers,” which is like the clock game merged with the dice game. You have a prize that has 4 digits, and the numbers on the board are all wrong, and you have to put a marker over or under each number, depending on whether you think the real digit is higher or lower. If you’re wrong, you keep going until you get it right or time runs out. Now, this game coiuld be easy, if anyone actually did it logically! Which is to say, make all of them higher, when you get it wrong move the first one lower, if that’s wrong, move the next one, and so on down the line only changing one number. But people change all the damn numbers, or at least 2 at a time, and they get messed up and forgot which combinations that have already tried.

And yes, I was mistaken on the “Lucky 7” game. Still, it’s hard. Even with 4 numbers, and you guess the first one as say, a 7, and it’s a 6 or 8 (or a 7), you now have $5 or $6 you can lose, so with three numbers you can only be off by 5 or 6 total. You guess 5 for each one, and if the next one is an 8, and the one after that a 2, you lose, or have to be spot on for the last one.

And I forgot about Golden Road…that one is a bitch, but they don’t haul it out that often.

ETA: I just watched that clip. I love when he guesses 9, and Drew is like “Nine…” clearly expecting him to be off by a lot and lose. Which reminds me of another thing that cheeses me off about Lucky &, is that they always throw a 9 or 1 in there…(and in Taylor’s case, both!) to fuck with you.

16

The clock game is easy. Pick a number that is obviously higher and continue to cut it in half with each guess instead of randomly guessing. If you guess $100 and he says lower, guess $500. If he says higher guess $750, if he says lower say $250. Keep doing that until you get within the right range.

It doesn’t take long at all and it gets you where you need to be in short order.

17

That was awesome.

18

The top slot on Plinko is $5,000. So 5 chips times $5,000 equals…

[Rod Roddy]$25,000![/Rod Roddy]

If anything though, I’d say Plinko is a win for the producers. Players rarely win all five chips and even then, I’ve never seen someone hit the $5,000 slot five times. I think the best Plinko performance I ever saw was $12,000, which is much less than even the cheapest cars they give away.

And it’s a fan favorite, so it’s a double win.

19

There was a game show several years ago where the bonus round was played like that. There was a board of 12 TV monitors (4 columns of 3) and a button next to the host. The question would be something like “which of these are words about animals”, and 12 monitors would show things like “bovine”, “canine”, etc. 6 would be real words and 6 would be fakes. You had to run across the stage and select 6 by pressing on them (a light would go on around the monitor), run back and hit the button. A number would tell you how many were right, and you’d run back and try again until your 60 seconds were up.

Then someone did this.

Come to think of it, this was another Peter Tomarken show. Did he only host game shows that could be hacked?

20

They changed the value to $10,000 recently (maybe when Drew took over?) They also changed the bonus you get for guessing the amount of the prize on contestant’s row from $100 to $500, and the money you can get from the wheel went up. It’s still $1000 for the first dollar, but now it’s $10,000 for getting it in the green on the bonus spin (was 5k,) and 25k for getting another dollar (it was 10k.)

They also upped the amount range you can be in to win both showcases. It used to be if you guess within $100 without being over, you get both, and now I think it’s within $500.

ETA: Also Rod Roddy died several years ago. :frowning: