Has there ever been and instance of both people winning both showcases? It is technically possible if both people come exactly within $250.00 of the winning bid. I’ve seen one person win both a few times, but never both people winning both.
According to Wikipedia:
Unfortunately, they don’t give the date of the one occurrence of a tie.
I looked at the trivia here and found no reference to such an event. An interesting question, though.
According to Wiki, both players winning both Showcases has never happened, and both players winning their own Showcase has only happened once (meaning that they were exactly the same amount away from the correct price of their Showcase). As you say, it could happen, but that would require both players to be exactly the same amount away from the actual value AND within $250 of their own. Thet odds against that are astronomical.
And that’s exactly why I normally let Q.E.D. answer these things without my help. 
Interesting, that would be wild to see both win both showcases
Airman:
Is this an issue where odds can be said to come into play? All you really need are two players who are VERY well-prepared with knowing prices. You can say that the odds against seeing two baseball teams get 35 strikeouts in a game are astronomical as well, but if the pitchers are Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens, it’s not exactly a matter of chance that it happens.
You make a good point but odds do come into play. What are the odds that Johnson and Clemens end up pitching head to head in the first place?
Well, what are the chances that two contestants would tie? It’s happened once in the history of the show.
What are the chances that one will get within $250 of their showcase? I don’t have the exact numbers, but it’s pretty rare.
What are the chances that both will happen in the same game? Take the rarest occurrence in the game’s history and add to it a highly unlikely variable and the chances diminish even more.
Even if you fix it so there are nothing but pricing experts on the show, the products are so dissimilar that it’s impossible to really get a grip on them all. How many people know the approximate value of an Italian vacation, a dining room suite, a brand new Pontiac Vibe, Dinty Moore beef stew, and 2000 Flushes? The big-ticket items are so uncommon that the average person has no idea. Put them in front of a screaming audience and they’re lucky that they can even get close. And that also assumes that the two people best equipped for this synergy win at the Big Wheel. Oh, and before all that you have to get out of the audience.
In other words, it’s luck, and therefore you can compute some sort of odds, just like any other game of chance.
For a few weeks, while prepping to go to a taping (never did), I recorded every episode on DVR. Watch it enough and you get to know the prices. My wife was amazed when I got the price of a Wrangler exactly right, until I told her one was given away two days before.
The hard ones are prizes they always include in the Showcases, but rarely on their own, like pianos and arcade machines.
Didn’t it used to be within $100 to win both? Or is my memory failing?
Used to be. They adjusted it for inflation.
Many years ago, I was in college so close to twenty years ago, I saw an episode where some guy and his wife kept a list of every item and its price over several weeks worth of shows. He managed to get picked and she would consult the list and call out the price whenever he had to know the price of an item. He got the exact price on the first part and nailed the next part too but didn’t have the luck to get to the showcase.
Pity, all that wasted effort. He should’ve studied whammy patterns instead.
Are you sure inflation is the reason for the change? Seems to me the only reason to change the target range for a Double Showcase win from $100 to $250 is to increase the chances of it happening. They want to give away prizes on the show. That’s what creates the sense of excitement and draws in viewers.
Yes, excitement is important. Over the last 25 years or so, though, inflation has driven the showcase prices from ~($9000-$16000) to ~($20000-$35000). As such, it gets harder to hit the target with accuracy, so they increased the size of the super-duper bullseye.
I admit I assumed the reason. I can’t find a given reason for the change, but I did e-mail the question to the show’s Q&A address. A little research shows they changed it at the beginning of the 30th season. $100 in 1972, when the show started, would equal about $430 in 2002 when the switch was made.
We’ll (hopefully) find out soon.