You can be bored, flipping through channels and the next thing you know you're yelling the price of beans at the TV because you want to see a contestant win a new car.Sign up for NBC LA newsletters.
To write the book, he analyzed hundreds of episodes from seasons 47 and 48 to identify the best winning strategies based on the math behind the show. Here are five basic strategies that can help you win.Even the most casual viewers will recognize the Showcase Showdown's colorful oversized wheel paneled with various denominations of $1 or less. Three contestants spin the wheel up to two times, aiming to be the closest to $1 without going over.
These rules are based on the probabilities of a given wheel spin, and will minimize your risk that a spin will go over $1, says Bergner.With the cash game Plinko, contestants can win tens of thousands of dollars by dropping chips down a large, peg-filled board into landing areas that are worth either $0, $100, $500, $1,000 or $10,000.
The odds of winning improve with the order of bidding, with the first bidder winning only 18% of the time, compared with the last bidder who wins 41% of the time. The last bidder has a significant advantage in that they control whether they get the highest bid.That's because those bidders'"first reaction is to think that they cannot win if they go over, rather than to think that they have little chance of winning if they do not risk going over," he says.
It's also important to remember that people tend to recall sales prices for merchandise, not the actual retail prices, Bergner says. Sales prices are usually much lower than the retail prices used on the show.As indicated above, if you're the last bidder on Contestants' Row, you're doing better already. You have a 41% chance of winning — roughly double that of each other contestant.
Curiously, bidding on the first showcase results in better outcomes — both win rate and average showcase earnings — regardless of whether the showcase was lower priced or higher priced.