It’s not gambling. It’s not subject to the same IRS regs. AFAIK.
If you have contrary cites I’m all eyes / ears.
Jeopardy, filmed next door to Wheel, filmed five days on Monday and the next five days on Tuesday. People in the contestant pool got to sit in the audience - isolated from everyone else, to watch. I believe they had one batch of audience pre-lunch and another after lunch.
They definitely edit. They edited some of my chat with Alex, and I think some of the Wheel chats are cut abruptly so they got edited too. I think the contestants seem to decide to spin very quickly - I’d guess they edit think time out.
Other editing - after every show, they rerecorded Alex when he mispronounced something. And one of the shows I watched they called something wrong when it was right. (Or vice verse.) They refilmed the score display with the correct values. It was invisible to me when I watched the show even though I knew it was there.
We also know that when they spin for the final round they eliminate spins that wind up in the bankrupt wedge. When they had interesting contestants back, they showed one of them spinning bankrupt three times in a row or something.
I’d not be surprised if they sped up the footage of the wheel spinning to save time also..
A lot of the reality-competition type shows also shoot multiple episodes per day. When you watch something like, say, “Nailed It” or “Sugar Rush” on Netflix, or other shows in that vein, there’s usually seven or eight or maybe ten episodes in a season (or a series in the UK), but the truth is that all those episodes are shot inside a week.
Obviously there’s a ceiling for the number of episodes of a cooking competition type show that can be shot in a single day. There’s the simple logistics of cleaning the studio kitchens and resetting all the ingredients, not to mention the fact that the judges can’t eat five servings of cake over ten hours. If I remember right, the usual model is to film two episodes per day, one before lunch, and the other in the afternoon.
When you know this, it changes how you watch the show.
For example, there’s often a “big reveal” where the contestants who were eliminated in the first episode “come back” to act as assistants to the finalists in the last episode. This is a lot less surprising when you recognize that the first-episode losers went back to their hotel on Monday afternoon and just hung out until getting called back on Wednesday or Thursday.
It also explains some of the loopiness you sometimes see in the contestants toward the end, because they rest only between every other episode, and then only briefly in the evening before crashing into bed and coming back the next morning. The schedule requires them to be frantically high-energy all day for several days in a row. You realize a show like this is only partially a cooking competition, and really more of a pure endurance test.
I bet playback speed can be tweaked to a certain % before it becomes readily apparent.
When do casinos withhold taxes? Everything I have found says that taxes are withheld on winnings of $5,000 or more from sweepstakes, wagering pools, lotteries and poker tournaments. My husband and I have never had taxes withheld from slot winnings or winning at table games, even for winnings of over $5K.
I have no experience with this but thought the practice was to withhold twenty percent for the federal taxes.
IANA expert, but I wonder if there’s a practical distinction between a single identifiable win, like a big slot jackpot, or a winning long-odds horse race ticket, versus simply a successful session of, say, blackjack. The mere fact you cash out your chips for e.g. $6K says nothing about how much if any of that was winnings. You might have bought $1K, or $10K, of chips earlier that day.
I happen to have a pal here who’s visiting Vegas at this very moment. And who plays big enough that withholding ought to be an issue for him pretty much every time. I’ve just asked him, but it’ll be a few hours before we get an answer.
In the US, any slot payout over IIRC $1199 automatically generates withholding and a 1099. Same same for video poker. You are required to declare winnings at the tables, but there is little the Feds can do to track those.
You can also, by request, up the amount of withholding if it will make tax time easier. I’ve done that occasionally with video poker jackpots.
$1200 is the point where a W2 must be issued for slots - but I won an $18k slot jackpot, got a W2 and had no taxes withheld. I wish they had been- it would have been easier.
There is a distinction - for slots, racing and table games you get the W2 G for a single , identifiable win. Doesn’t matter if you are up $3000 after playing slots all day as long as there wasn’t a single win over $1200
Not just game shows. I read something once about “Fresh Air” that said that they sometimes sped up the tape to make the edited conversation fit.
In the old days of the original People’s Court, very occasionally there would be extra time and they would show Wapner taking questions from the audience. They did this after every taping and would show a bit of it when if need be.
Norman Blumenthal, the producer of “Concentration,” tells this story in his book The TV Game Shows. The brick wall was intended to be one of three gag prizes on the game board but the contestant insisted on being awarded the prize. Policy was changed so gag prizes awarded the winner $100.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
Uses the old format of playing until time runs out. The contestant can answer quickly or take several minutes if they’re using life lines.
The game continues with the next question the next day.
They never end the show with a contestant that’s needs to answer a question. There must be a little editing to make sure that doesn’t happen.
They do that on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
On (at least older) game shows the announcer would always blurb at the end “contestants must meet eligibility requirements”, which I assume is taxes.
When I was in LA I had a friend that worked selecting and placing prizes for game shows, but I never asked details. Considering the timing, I wonder if at least one of her shows was Classic Concentration, because they always had a whole board full of things of various prices to give away.
I think eligibility requirements also include things like not being a close relative of someone who works on the game show.