How To Cheat at Millionaire

I thought I heard the question as “women’s names”. If it is as you say, then my objection is indeed invalid.

#6, I think you are right. There was no distinction made.

They ran a special on it down here called, “Who wants to steal a million?”
The coughing was a sceond tactic, the first was to get his brother who was int he backstage audience, to call one of four phones situated about his body, causing them to vibrate. By where they were positioned he could figure out what the answer was. The brother wasn’t allowed to use phones in the studio, so he went outside, and well t became a bit suspicious halfway through the show, so he had to stay inside.

What I don’t understand is why the brother didn’t just go on millionaire?
Then on the next episode they started the coughing, and it was so obvious too… and this guy obviously didn’t know a thing. He didn’t get his million dollars.

Unless it’s the Japanese version, and it’s sufficiently funny, I guess. (see my previous post…)

Walloon is correct; the question was about surnames.

I’ll bite. How?

Or, even, this: Player A serves, falls down and breaks eir neck and must retire. Player B, having not returned serve because e was so stunned to see a broken neck, has 0 strokes but wins the match because A retires.

There’s no doubt that some contestants have tried to win this way. I don’t recall any that have, but I know for a fact several have had their friends use the computer to get the answer for them. A better way, I would think, would be to simply have several people at the friend’s house AND a couple of PC’s googling and maybe even a bookworm or two. A good debate team or trivia team would also be hard to beat.
I’m not a big Millionaire fan but I’ve seen it several times (when it was new) and usually do pretty good. I’ve got three or four books beside my recliner that I can check for just about any question you throw at me. I rarely need to check but so far the answer has been there with only a couple of exceptions pertaining to pop culture, my weak area. I don’t do a lot of TV and/or pop music.

Maybe Cecil could answer this question. It’s obvious we’d get the wrong answer from Marilyn vos Savant. Anyway:

Even if the 50/50 is random, it must eliminate at least one of the two weaker choices. It may eliminate them both, of course. Would that be a 33% chance of eliminating the two weakest choices?

I haven’t seen the Meredith Viera version much, but I catch the re-runs with Regis pretty often. What I don’t understand is all the times that the phone-a-friend clearly has a group of people with him, but they don’t use a speaker phone.

What inevitably ends up happening is the contestant reads the question, then the phone-a-friend repeats it for the other folks at his end. Then the contestant reads the four answers, and the phone a friend repeats them. By this point the thirty seconds are pretty much up and they usually get cut off before even offering an answer.

Eric

Yes.

If we take the correct answer out of the equasion, we are left with three answers, two of which will be eliminated. If we assume that two are weak answers, and one is a strong answer, then the only combinations that can be eliminated are:

[ul]
[li]WA1 and SA[/li][li]WA2 and SA[/li][li]WA1 and WA2[/li][/ul]
So yes, in this case there is only a one in three chance of both weak answers being eliminated, and a two in three chance of the 50/50 taking out the strong answer.

Where this all falls apart, however, is the 50/50 is not random. Also, there is no guarantee that of the three incorrect answers, two will be weak and one will be stong. Further, what can be considered “weak” or “strong” is entirely subjective depending, on the knowledge of the contestant.