no whammies, no whammies....big bucks

such a wierd story. the end is maybe the wierdest.



When CBS first aired Press Your Luck in 1983, it quickly caught the attention of Michael Larsen, an unemployed Mister Softee ice cream truck driver from Ohio. It was winter time, and although Larsen wasn't selling many popsicles, he enjoyed watching contestants of average intelligence from around the country answer insipid trivia questions and gamble their winnings at the Big Board.



And so he spent his last $100.00 on a discount airline ticket and flew to Los Angeles, hoping to be contestant. Press Your Luck executive producer Bill Carruthers remembers Larsen's audition for the show: "He really impressed us. He had charisma, he played the game very well. Here was this out of work ice cream guy who told us he loved the show so much he flew out on his own to try to get on." Bob Edwards, the contestant coordinator, had a few doubts: "There was something about the guy that worried me.

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Back in his home state of Ohio, Larsen didn't have just one television, he had several. Each television was hooked up to a private networking farm of VCRs in his living room. In November of 1983, he recorded every episode of Press Your Luck over the course of several weeks. He studied these videotapes, slowed them down, and froze the images to examine randomized tile sequences frame by frame. If you haven't already guessed, Michael Larsen discovered that the Big Board on Press Your Luck was not a randomized display, but an iterative, sequential pattern which gave itself away once you knew what to look for.