Wheel of Fortune win with one letter

Cafe Society
41

Sorry I’m late. You’re incorrect.

The monitors are not touch screens; they’re just regular flat LCD monitors.

The monitors have a little touch strip on the side of their frames. Vanna touches the strip which is like clicking a mouse, telling the screen to advance to the next screen, which is the letter. Vanna doesn’t even know what the puzzle is, she just touches the little strip on whatever monitors light up.

And the producers never for a moment have considered anything that would remove Vanna from the show. They’re like a big family, for the most part: the production staff has pretty much all been doing the show for a couple of decades. Heck, I’m just a guy in Vegas, and I’ve been working on the show for over a decade when they come here. They’re very loyal, very professional; basically just great people to work with and for.

42

i enjoyed mr sajak’s stunned seconds of silence when she wanted to solve and when she did solve. the guy next to her was very funny.

on cnn they showed the segment and interviewed her, they also showed one guy who tried to solve the puzzle with all the letters and mispronounced it.

it reminded me of one many, many, years ago. the puzzle was all spelled out and the catagory was person. the puzzle was:

buttinsky

each person, all three, kept saying “butt- in- sky” not “butinski”. mr sajak was nearly speechless on that one. when he pronounced it correctly after time ran out they all did “headslap” “d’oh” type things.

vanna does have a very nice selection of wool that she endorses. i understand that she crochets a lot during show down times.

43

She crochets constantly. There’s a chair and fridge behind the wall of monitors for her, and she always has a blanket or scarf or sweater or something she’s working on. She’s very good, too. Many, if not most, of the production staff from CA have something she made for them.

The other thing she does in down time is she signs photos for fans. Hundreds of them in a day sometimes, all with hand-written notes; never just a signature. She knows she has the greatest job in the history of jobs, and is very, very appreciative of the goodwill that people have for her. She really goes the extra mile to make sure that people keep thinking well of her and liking her.

TBH, both of them are very warm, gracious people who know how lucky they are.

44

I believe I’ve seen her start walking towards a monitor even before seeing it light up. Is that possible? I guess it wouldn’t mean she knows what the puzzle is, just that she’s correctly guessed where the letter goes.

45

I’ve been to a taping in L.A. My guess is that it’s to keep the audience awake. Booorring! What appears to be seamless on TV is long and dragged out in reality. When Pat says, “and here’s our next puzzle…” they cut and then stop everything to set up the next puzzle. Also, there are “applause” signs everywhere and lots of encouragement for the audience.

What surprised me the most was that as soon as a contestant guesses a letter, Pat is looking toward the staff in the front row to tell him if that letter appears & how many. You don’t see that part on TV either. The illusion is shattered.

46

Oh Lordy yes, they’d never remove Vanna. That’s crazy talk. I was just wondering if her actions really caused the letters to change, or if they had someone timing their button presses to her motions. ISTM I’ve seen the letters change before her hand even reaches the screen, but I guess I’m mistaken.

47

I believe I’ve seen her reach for the screen, but not touch it well enough to turn the letter, and have to touch it again, so our recollections differ.

48

My impression is that it’s both. I seem to recall times where there were like 9 Es in a puzzle where Vanna turned some of them, but some of them turned by themselves. I believe that Vanna can make the letters change, but so can someone else, remotely, like they do at the end of a puzzle when it’s solved.

49

I am very pleasantly surprised to hear this! I had no idea Vanna White was still with the show. I thought she would have been put out to pasture 20 years ago.

And should I be amazed that not only do we have people here who have been ON game shows and can tell us of their experiences, but here on the Dope we have someone who has WORKED on this PARTICULAR game show? Wow! :slight_smile:

50

I’ve seen that too, but it can happen in either situation - either the touch screen didn’t work, or intern was a little slow and Vanna, seasoned pro that she is, touched it again to make it look good. But the case where it changes before she touches is can only happen if someone else is changing the screens.

51

There is no intern. No one else changes the screens. It’s all software, and Vanna triggers it with the little touch strip.

Someone said they had seen Vanna walk towards a letter before the screen binged, and you may have. On rare occassions, usually before taping starts, Vanna will poke her head in the safe room (there’s a even a guard at the door) and ask what the next puzzle is. She doesn’t do it often tho.

Pat knows what all the puzzles are for a given show; he has them written on the cards in his hands. They do sometimes switch the order of the puzzles, tho, to better try and fit into the time left for the show being taped. In other words, if they know they only have 2 minutes of air time to fill, they might switch the puzzle from “MICHAEL CLAYMATION OF ULYSSES S. GRANT” to “CEREAL BOX TOPS”, since the latter is more easily solved.

52

If Final Jeopardy is “US Presidents” and you guess Woodrow Wilson, you’re gonna be right a good 40% of the time. True story, swear to god.

53

I’ve seen a mathematical explanation of why the wheel on Wheel of Fortune must be rigged. Has this topic been discussed here?

http://vimeo.com/4427150

54

That video is over 19 minutes long. I guarantee you that 99 out of 100 people who click that are gonna come right back here and look/ask for a summary.

55

Well, he spends the first 10 minutes estimating percentages whilst apparently being unaware of the existence of division, fractions, decimals, etc.

Then he says “anything that’s on wikipedia is true” which is where he goes profoundly wrong, because the wikipedia link says there’s only one bankrupt on the wheel, while watching the video that he then watches clearly shows that every round has a minimum of 2 bankrupt spaces.

He also seems to not understand that probability is the law of large numbers, not the law of ‘watching a single episode of a game show’.

Also, he’s assuming that spins of the wheel are actually random, and I mean that not in the sense that the wheel is weighted, but that the contestants themselves aren’t aiming for the big prizes which tend to be clustered around the bankrupts.

There’s also a question of whether bankrupts tend to cluster because of how hard contestants spin the wheel – if many women get the wheel around just short of a single revolution, and that’s always been my impression, then one bankrupt might often lead to a second one, as the next contestant’s pointer is just a little behind the first person’s.

Basically, for a math teacher, he’s sorely lacking in math skills, doesn’t understand how probability works, and has a rather naive view of the reliability of wikipedia, especially in the face of obvious evidence of it being incorrect.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I am up very late watching really stupid videos because I’m unable to sleep. The fact that I was drinking Diet Pepsi while watching the really stupid video is unlikely to have improved the situation any.