The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: Sodboy13 on January 17, 2024, 10:11:44 AM
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I was watching a TPIR from the '84-'85 season on the Barker channel last night. I know it's pretty common knowledge about how Price can use wiggle room in its various games to affect the odds of winning, and boy does it seem like this particular episode is going above and beyond to keep things lean. It appears to be from November or December, as a portion of a promo for the Christmas Home Viewer Showcase was shown.
Game 1: Super Ball! (which always ropes me in) for two prizes and a cruise totaling less than $7,000. The price ranges on the first three ball prizes seem... tighter. Contestant blows all three, but does get the Super Ball and at least rolls in $300.
Game 2: Range Game, for a low-end Chevy. Accordingly, the price gets put on the low end of the range, about $6,245, for a loss.
Game 3: Barker's Bargain Bar. One of the bargain prices is $420, truly ahead of its time. Actual prices are $820 and $970 for a loss.
Game 4: Poker Game, where Bob always advises contestants to pick prices with "a lot of nines." The four prizes on offer are $505, $465, $620, and $640. Contestant draws the three 5s and holds them for the win.
Game 5: Clock Game for a sailboard ($749) and a range ($860) in a well-played win.
Game 6: Oh we're doing Grand Game! Target price is $1.35. Products are $.49, $.79, $1.03, $1.29, $1.39, and $1.85. Which actually seems pretty winnable, given the two lowest and one highest prices. And it does get taken, for the full $10K.
Showcases: Ah shoot, it was almost midnight and I fell asleep.
The show was still a fun watch, basically no one who wasn't looking for it would notice, and I am not posting this as a criticism of it; I am just noting it because of the way I could see the pennies getting pinched. And it makes me wonder if any of you know the subtler ways other shows could tug on the purse strings as necessary. Feel free to share your examples.
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You saw Dec. 11, 1984. :) https://tpirepguide.com/?p=17754
Linda won a surprisingly generous for 1984 Showcase, over $19K, after her opponent overbid. Maybe they were holding back over the rest of the show anticipating they'd be giving away a bundle at the end.
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The joke I have is when the TPIR is over budget, there is a whole week of Lucky $even and That's Too Much.
Among our community, we know when a series is over budget when we see more difficult bonus rounds (a friend of mine was on Wheel, won the main game, and had a DIFFICULT bonus puzzle and all the episodes that week had DIFFICULT bonus puzzles).
I think my favorite attempt at a budget saver happened on an episode of The $20,000 Pyramid with a winner's circle that was clearly designed to not be won. The third box was Lina Wertmüller Movies and the pair almost pulled off a win. Dick even said you deserve to win after facing a board like that.
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In the 90s, you knew Wheel was in budget-saver mode when the three-letter bonus puzzles came out.
Did Jeopardy have any budget-saving tricks? Wordier clues leading to less clues revealed? I imagine they don't have a terrible amount of fluxuation in their prize money from week to week, save for when James Holzhauer was on. Even Ken's daily average was only marginally above the mean.
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The current version of Feud does this a lot, where it seems like there’s only one logical answer in Fast Money, and the second place answer is usually a distant second. As a result, you get a lotta high totals for the first player while the partner rarely gets to 200. On the rare occasion I watch, it seems like any family with at least four wins usually only has one FM victory.
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You saw Dec. 11, 1984. :) https://tpirepguide.com/?p=17754
Linda won a surprisingly generous for 1984 Showcase, over $19K, after her opponent overbid. Maybe they were holding back over the rest of the show anticipating they'd be giving away a bundle at the end.
Well there ya go! That's $30K between the last pricing game and the Showcase, so I guess that works out to be a bigger/more average payout that they decided to make more likely toward the end of that show.
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Did Jeopardy have any budget-saving tricks? Wordier clues leading to less clues revealed? I imagine they don't have a terrible amount of fluxuation in their prize money from week to week, save for when James Holzhauer was on.
I suppose you could insert some ToC/Maters level clues on Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy. Didn't Wheel go through an epic bonus round losing streak while James was on? IIRC, it was something like 25 shows in a row.
The current version of Feud does this a lot, where it seems like there’s only one logical answer in Fast Money, and the second place answer is usually a distant second. As a result, you get a lotta high totals for the first player while the partner rarely gets to 200. On the rare occasion I watch, it seems like any family with at least four wins usually only has one FM victory.
The fact that five time winners, presumably the best families they have, rarely go home with $40,000 in cash, is a crime. If you're going to do that, I'd rather you just bump it back to $10k and make them more winnable.
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The bonus round on Double Dare was pretty easy to manipulate for this purpose--any time they put the dreaded "find the flag buried in a giant pool of glop" obstacle in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th slot, you knew they were in budget mode.
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The bonus round on Double Dare was pretty easy to manipulate for this purpose--any time they put the dreaded "find the flag buried in a giant pool of glop" obstacle in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th slot, you knew they were in budget mode.
This brings up a question I’ve had…was there anything stopping the contestants from flipping the dog bowl upside down and searching that way?
As for the OP, I felt there were times on Legends where the temple guards were strategically placed to force a loss.
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This brings up a question I’ve had…was there anything stopping the contestants from flipping the dog bowl upside down and searching that way?
Probably not. One time when they had set up a prop to look like cannoli, the contestant tore into the side of the foam/fabric, instead of reaching into the roll.
I just imagine, in the case of the dog bowl specifically, it would be hard to turn over because of how it was designed. They could throw the contents of the bowl every which way, too, but then you could end up throwing the flag across the stage and have to chase after it.
-Jason
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Oh, we're talking about how when you know a game show is tightening the pursestrings that week? I can think of two more examples outside of the broad adjective or pop culture category used on Pyramid during the Winner's Circle:
* Where In The World Is Carmen Sandeigo: Whenever they bring out the Africa map for the bonus round.
* The Price Is Right: Every time they play Stack The Deck (Honestly, I feel whoever created that game gave it that name just to rub it in).
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Concentration (Narz): For the Double Play bonus, players had to solve two rebuses in 10 seconds to win the car. Most times, the second puzzle was rather more complicated than the first, but sometimes they were both gettable.
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In regards to Legends, Double Dare, Carmen, and other kids shows, I always felt their prize budgets were so low that nearly 9 in 10 bonus rounds were forced losses, rather than being the exception to the norm. Fun House felt like the exception. Even if a team didn't find the Power Prize, the course was nearly same week-to-week and fast teams could still gather a huge haul.
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Concentration (Narz): For the Double Play bonus, players had to solve two rebuses in 10 seconds to win the car. Most times, the second puzzle was rather more complicated than the first, but sometimes they were both gettable.
In terms of staying on-budget, if someone won the car in the first half of the show, then for the second Double Play round, both of the rebus puzzles would be of the more difficult "full sentence" variety, so here's your $100, goodbye now.
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* The Price Is Right: Every time they play Stack The Deck (Honestly, I feel whoever created that game gave it that name just to rub it in).
Agreed. TPIR always had a few "forget about it" games. WOF had its share of super hard bonus puzzles and Pyramid had some tough categories in the WC, though the current version seems to want to give away the money.
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* The Price Is Right: Every time they play Stack The Deck (Honestly, I feel whoever created that game gave it that name just to rub it in).
It is definitely a budget-saver game, and they exploit that fact, though it seems to have a disproportionately high number of contestants who play it badly as well. The GP pricing can be tricky, but if you're fortunate to land one or two of them and you're picking either of the first two digits for your freebies, then you're asking to lose.
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The Price Is Right: Every time they play Stack The Deck (Honestly, I feel whoever created that game gave it that name just to rub it in).
I love this game but, yes, it’s brutal. It’s hard even if you get all three grocery prices right, and that’s rare. They at least need to lose a digit from the assortment.
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Toward the end of most TPIR seasons in the early-mid '90s, I really started to notice whether they were over budget because the cars on offer were stripped down and ganes played for luxury cars such as Golden Road and 3 Strikes + went AWOL. And although it wasn't usually played for luxury cars, Dice Game also went on hiatus because, while they could still tighten the game and use more middle digits in the cars' prices, the contestants could still get lucky and roll the exact number, a 1 or a 6.
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Dice Game also went on hiatus because, while they could still tighten the game and use more middle digits in the cars' prices, the contestants could still get lucky and roll the exact number, a 1 or a 6.
You tighten Dice Game by using more outside numbers, not middle numbers. If the digit is 3 or 4, you win it by rolling a 1, 6 or exact, and you also win on a 2 or a 5 if you're not foolhardy. If the digit is a 6, you win on a 1, 2 or 6, have to get lucky with a 3 or 4, and are hosed if you roll a 5.
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Dice Game also went on hiatus because, while they could still tighten the game and use more middle digits in the cars' prices, the contestants could still get lucky and roll the exact number, a 1 or a 6.
You tighten Dice Game by using more outside numbers, not middle numbers. If the digit is 3 or 4, you win it by rolling a 1, 6 or exact, and you also win on a 2 or a 5 if you're not foolhardy. If the digit is a 6, you win on a 1, 2 or 6, have to get lucky with a 3 or 4, and are hosed if you roll a 5.
Appreciate the clarification. You would also use more outside numbers in L7 to make it less winnable.
In any event, you'd still want to play Dice Game less often to save the budget due to the other aforementioned scenarios.
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Never ever forget how Mr. Stewart squeezed every last penny out of CBS with the post-cancellation episodes of Pass the Buck.
Top line: one human body part
The one you needed for 5000 fast bucks: the thyroid gland
I defy anyone—even a ned student—to name that in 15 hours, let alone 15 seconds
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Watching the Narz Concentrations in sequence you can tell that they never wanted to give away more than two cars at most per week because so often the "Double Play" puzzles were impossible to get two of if you had only two or three seconds left after your first one and they would give you a long phrase for the second puzzle, "Gregory Peck was the star of Moby Dick" etc. But whenever both puzzles tended to be shorter, you could tell they were going for an easy lay-up for the contestant (who wouldn't always necessarily get it).
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Doing a mini-bump on this thread thanks to the Supermarket Sweep episode I just watched on Samsung TV Plus.
In the bonus round, the final item, a laundry basket, was placed on the shelf leaning on its side, instead of stacked parallel to the floor. This meant that the correct-item indicator mark was placed on the bottom of the basket, recessed and hidden in the shadows--in other words, virtually impossible to see unless you combed through every nook and cranny of the aisle.
Needless to say, there was no way in hell anyone was gonna win the $5K that day...
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Here's a fun little one I've seen from the same 84-85 season: On a couple of plays of Hole in One, one of the products is a pack of Trident gum. Now, it's a bigger pack of gum, but the pieces were stacked in two or three rows, so it looks about the same size as a normal pack. Both contestants were clearly and confidently like, pack of gum, that's a quarter(ish), that goes first. And so they both had to putt from the back line.
Coincidentally, the $14,000+ Toyota van (with built-in icemaker!) won in the showcase of the episode I started this thread with was in one of those Hole in One playings a few weeks prior.
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The bonus round on Double Dare was pretty easy to manipulate for this purpose--any time they put the dreaded "find the flag buried in a giant pool of glop" obstacle in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th slot, you knew they were in budget mode.
There were some 1990 Family Double Dare episodes where Inside Out, Toe Jam, and Pick It were in the same obstacle course that day.
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There were some 1990 Family Double Dare episodes where Inside Out, Toe Jam, and Pick It were in the same obstacle course that day.
Having had this discussion with Jason A. I split things two ways--if you need three "find the MacGuffin" obstacles maybe your grand prize is too big, but I also understand that it becomes rote if teams win the obstacle course more than half the time. That doesn't excuse Sweep hiding the third item like that for a $5,000 win.
Part of the problem with offering a Mustang LX, Thunderbird or minivan as a grand prize is there's no way to back down from that without looking like the show was admitting a mistake (and even at age ten I noticed that a trip that stayed on the North American continent was less awesome than a car.)
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To Travis' point, I remember when VH1 made "Name That Video", offered a car as the grand prize, and then kept stacking videos of barely-hit songs from obscure bands like Wall of Voodoo and The Waitresses in order to make sure the car was practically never won.
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To Travis' point, I remember when VH1 made "Name That Video", offered a car as the grand prize, and then kept stacking videos of barely-hit songs from obscure bands like Wall of Voodoo and The Waitresses in order to make sure the car was practically never won.
And My Generation gave away a long weekend at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel/Cafe for a comparatively walk-in-the-park seven of ten.
I think this illustrates my consternation with the "Things That Are Incapacitated" situation. Because mom was a teacher she had custody of my sister and me during summers. I had Match Game '90 on and we get to the Super Match. For $some amount, the contestant is given the lay-up of BART ___. Mom said "That's easy!" (no fan of The Simpsons, even she knew it was the hotness). The contestant did not and won her Audience money.
Instead of having BART ___ and ___ JONES, find some phrases that are fifty-fifty propositions and let the law of averages let everything come out in the wash. Yes, it's more work but it feels to me like a fairer exercise where somebody is told "No ten grand for you, Bunky," because he happened to be on a particular time in the budget window.
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The bonus round on Double Dare was pretty easy to manipulate for this purpose--any time they put the dreaded "find the flag buried in a giant pool of glop" obstacle in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th slot, you knew they were in budget mode.
There were some 1990 Family Double Dare episodes where Inside Out, Toe Jam, and Pick It were in the same obstacle course that day.
One of the DD interviews or oral histories said that the obstacle course was the same lineup for any given taping day- they'd just start in different places. So whenever I'd see Ant Farm in the opening set and the Sundae Slide at the end, my first thought was "I feel bad for the winners that have to run this course backwards".
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Sticking with kid's game shows, I always felt that Legends of the Hidden Temple was mostly budget saver episodes except about every 8th or 9th episode where the temple run was way shorter than most and nearly guaranteed a win. No Shrine of the Silver Monkey located in the primary path, no dead ends, temple guards located mostly in the corner rooms, more unlocked doors for a straight shot to the room with the treasure.
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* The Price Is Right: Every time they play Stack The Deck (Honestly, I feel whoever created that game gave it that name just to rub it in).
It is definitely a budget-saver game, and they exploit that fact, though it seems to have a disproportionately high number of contestants who play it badly as well. The GP pricing can be tricky, but if you're fortunate to land one or two of them and you're picking either of the first two digits for your freebies, then you're asking to lose.
I also think "That's Too Much" is trotted out when they need to trim the budget.