In my opinion, buying vowels is overpowered; so buying vowels is only stupid if you already know the answer.
In the ‘buy vowels then hit bankrupt’ scenario, you aren’t winning anyway because you hit bankrupt. It isn’t as if buying vowels made you hit bankrupt. The goal of the game is to solve the puzzle. Buying vowels is an excellent way to do so. Focusing on an edge case is shortsighted.
Furthermore, buying vowels allows one to optimize cash since if you know the solution before calling consonants you can choose low numbered consonants when hitting a low value and save up the multiletter consonant for if you hit a big number then solve. If you guess consonants those five T’s could be wasted on 300 dollars.
Anyway, buying vowels is hardly stupid.
“I’ll put the rest ‘on account’. On account of, I don’t want that demmed ceramic dalmatian!”
The goal of the game is to have the highest score by the end of the regular rounds.
And the only way to score is to solve puzzles. Solving puzzles as soon as you can guarantees you money and prevents your opponents from doing so. Going for extra by continuing to spin is a risk often worth taking, but only to a point.
It’s been ages since I saw it, but I think that if there was a prize that you could afford, you had to buy it. It was only when your bank got below the cheapest prize, and then the choice was account or gift certificate.
However, it would certainly be possible not to buy the ceramic dalmation. If you solved the puzzle for $5,000, and there was a trip to Puerto Vallarta for $4,999, you’d have a buck left over. You can’t even buy a ceramic chihuahua for $1.
You are correct. And actually it doesn’t look as bad as I remember.
I once saw a guy who had the spin of the wheel down perfect. It was one of those that had a $10,000 space (the highest on the wheel), a third the width of a normal space wedged in between 2/3 bankrupt. And he hit that $10k third-of-a-space every single time he spun. And then missed the letter, every single time he spun.
Still not sure how he managed that. Sure, it’s something a human could practice, but to practice it, you’d need long-term access to the show’s wheel (or at least, a perfect replica of it), and how would you get that?
I might have missed the post but a secondary strategy is to prevent your opponent from solving the puzzle. The player’s goal for maximum expected value should be to get the Bonus Round
so a contestant might want to solve the puzzle when he/she has only banked a few hundred dollars to prevent an opponent who previously called letters for few thousand dollars in prior spins for that puzzle. The “hero” does not want to take the chance of landing on a “bankrupt” or “lose a turn” and give the “villain” a chance to solve the puzzle for $5000 and possibly the bonus trip.
At the end of the game, the leader might want to “stall” the game by buying vowels until the final spin.
Call it WoF Strategy 301.
On Who Wants To Be A Millionaire when people still have all 3 lifelines on a question they literally know nothing about and then they choose the “Remove 2” life-line. Yeah, now it’s just a 50/50 still between 2 answers you still know nothing about. Just Poll the Audience if you have absolutely no idea.
Dunno about this. If you have absolutely no idea, how likely is it the poor schmoes in the audience do?
Unless there’s a clear majority indicating they do, you may have to go for the 50/50 option in any case.
I saw a “Wheel of Fortune” show when the answer, “General Motors Corporation”, was completely exposed. And the contestant blurted out “General Motors Co-operation”. (No mistake, she said co-operation VERY clearly.) The audience started clapping and the host had to step in and declare a wrong answer.
Really, it’s almost always whoever wins the prize puzzle. The dollar value for that is usually high enough that it puts you ahead of the other players, so as soon as you know the answer to that, you should solve.
For this I think it depends on why I don’t have a clue. I am, for example, entirely uninterested in basketball. If it was something like "this player for the Celtics had the nickname ‘The Truth’ " I don’t know. I’m not going to be able to guess. But it’s very likely that there are a lot of people in the audience who watch a lot of basketball and are sure of the right answer. But if it’s just a weird obscure question, then no - they don’t know any more than I do and there’s no reason to waste an ask the audience for that.
I spend too much time strategizing about game shows.
Yeah, this would be me for pop music. I just don’t follow current music at all, so if I found myself on Millionaire, facing a question about the latest hit record, I would have no clue, but it would be very likely that a lot of people in the audience would. When they have an audience, at least–the recent Jimmy Kimmel-hosted iteration of Millionaire has replaced “Ask the Audience” with “Ask the Host,” because of Covid.
I don’t know if they do this deliberately, but it always seems to be the case: when you are debating between two of the four answers, and use the 50-50 lifeline, the two answers that remain will ALWAYS be the two that you were trying to decide between. 50-50 is the worst of all the lifelines. I swear to God, it never helps!
Not to hijack, but some of the questions on these shows DESERVE a dumb response.
When I used to hear a “Family Feud” question beginning “what do people say…the percentage of…”, I always wish the contestant would respond “Hello - even if you only accepted integer responses, that’s a question with 101 possible answers. From zero to one-hundred percent. Do you really believe I going to gain any points on this.”
Questions about “from a scale of 1 to 10” are slightly better.
So it’s like catching the golden snitch in Quidditch?
Well yeah, because it doesn’t just pick two answers at random. It leaves the correct one, and the most likely other answer. It only helps if you are truly clueless and have no idea at all.
The Russian version of of FF is called 100 to 1. One thing I really like about it is that instead of just saying “The number one answer was …” in the “Fast Money” round, the host tells the contestants (with great regret) “If you had said X, you would have gotten Y points.” The number is usually so high that everyone in the studio gasps and groans.
Quite often the early round questions in WWTBAM are fairly difficult for me - they’re about reality shows, sport, or TV soaps (UK soaps, not the same type as US ones). There are very good odds that the majority of the audience will get it right if those are the topics - they pretty much always do in the episodes I’ve watched.
I’d bone up on those topics if I got on the show, but often they’re about shows/sports games from several years ago, so there’s an awful lot to bone up on.
They claim that the other answer is chosen randomly, and they’d get censured if they were lying, so they probably aren’t.
I was watching an episode of the Russian version back in the '90s, and one contestant was a middle-aged woman who had a real attitude problem. She had gotten the first few answers correct when this question came up:
What classic Soviet film ends with a demonstration on Red Square?
The correct answer was The Circus, a movie everyone in Russia has seen at one time or other. (Hell, even I knew it was the right answer.) But this woman just shook her head and said “The Circus? Not bloody likely!”
The host was visibly astonished (like probably everyone in the audience). “Have you seen The Circus?!?” he asked. The woman replied “Yes, but that’s not it!”
She was adamant and chose one of the other answers, thereby losing her only chance ever to make a million. When she was told the correct response, she was really POed!