Ben Blatt
breaks down how to beat the games on
The Price is Right:
NOW and THEN is hardly the only contest where game theory can greatly
increase your chances. Many others can be cracked with a bit of
knowledge of the show's (nonrandom) habits. Consider the pricing game
called
Squeeze Play.
Current host Drew Carey shows the contestant either a five- or
six-digit number and asks the player to remove one digit from the
number—first and last digit excluded—to reveal the price of a prize.
Over the last eight years, this game has been played 215 times with a
five-digit number, meaning the contestant can either remove the second,
third, or fourth digit. If every contestant had gone into the game
opting to pick the third digit, regardless of the prize or the numbers
displayed, the combined contestant winning percentage would have been
49.8 percent. Instead, players got wrapped up in guessing the exact
price—and had a combined winning percentage of just 35.8 percent.
The reason that it's better to always pick digit No. 3 in Squeeze
Play is that the show’s producers are clearly not placing the numbers
randomly. The wrong digit was placed in the third slot 49 percent of the
time as compared with 22 percent and 28 percent for the second and
fourth, respectively. The discrepancy between the winning digit's
location and what we would expect if that digit were placed randomly is
statistically significant—meaning the placement is not,
actually, random. Whether the show's producers are intentionally
favoring the middle location, or are doing so simply because they’ve
failed to simulate randomness, is unclear. What is clear is that
guessing the middle digit is the safest bet in Squeeze Play.
This isn’t a knock on The Price is Right. The show makes no
promises of behaving like a casino, with perfectly random distribution
of numbers. And its nonrandom habits are great for the contestant—and
presumably for the show, which doesn’t want to feature an endless parade
of losers.
Apparently, my favorite game, Cliff Hangers, is one of the easiest to beat. But I so love hearing the yodeling.
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