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Budgeting Question on Luck-Based Shows
JasonA1:
--- Quote from: Jeremy Nelson on September 29, 2025, 05:22:22 PM ---I guess my follow-up to anyone who has an eye to this- have game shows ever hired mathematicians to calculate average expected wins in the same way a hopeful casino game developer would publish the math on house edge?
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All the time. And this is the correct answer with regards to any game with luck. You have enough data to tell you what you should expect over X amount of games in the production cycle. The classic endgames in this space -- the Big Numbers, the Money Cards -- have payouts that are manageable over the long term. All the tweaks to the Money Cards speak to making the averages more comfortable.
-Jason
TLEberle:
To answer Jeremy—David Hammett was hired on to the Greed crew to figure out how best to have reasonable odds for the top shelf questions. Interesting to me is the fact that the ten percent buyout was never really close to the straight pot odds of any question and was rarely tempted unless it was obvious a mistake was made.
More interesting is hearing from Aaron Solomon about Snoop Joker and how the magic box in Beat the Devil was a useful way to not pay out $50,000 as often as the odds might, but that Mr. Dogg was perceptive in knowing how much additional money would make the winner sweat the decision.
Matt Ottinger:
--- Quote from: Jeremy Nelson on September 29, 2025, 05:22:22 PM ---I guess my follow-up to anyone who has an eye to this- have game shows ever hired mathematicians to calculate average expected wins in the same way a hopeful casino game developer would publish the math on house edge?
--- End quote ---
A dear friend of mine -- someone a lot of you know and someone who still stops by this forum now and then -- was a high school math teacher in LA who had a side gig doing exactly that. Obviously there are a lot of intangibles that can't be perfectly accounted for (the difficulty of game material, the risk aversion level of contestants) but because he understood both the math AND the game elements, he could be eerily accurate about expected payouts. Until he got tired of doing it he was highly in demand.
EDIT: Yeah, David. It was David.
rebelwrest:
There was a week of Eubanks Card Sharks (1986?) that gave away over $90K. Around that time, the rules about the three spare cards were changed from you can change a card at any time (including one position twice) to only one card per line. Was this an example of cause and effect? It's possible that the $90K week happened after the rule change or CBS was giving away too much money during the original rules. It's also possible I pulled that week of CS out of my butt.
Ian Wallis:
--- Quote from: rebelwrest on September 29, 2025, 09:59:12 PM ---There was a week of Eubanks Card Sharks (1986?) that gave away over $90K. Around that time, the rules about the three spare cards were changed from you can change a card at any time (including one position twice) to only one card per line. Was this an example of cause and effect? It's possible that the $90K week happened after the rule change or CBS was giving away too much money during the original rules. It's also possible I pulled that week of CS out of my butt.
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When the 1986 version started, there were many big winners ($10,000 or more) during the first month. Even me as a viewer thought it was too easy to win big dough. When they changed it, it made more sense and the big wins became fewer and further between.
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