THE LAST TURKEY

I have just learnt of this great tale:

Paul Michael Larson (May 10, 1949 – February 16, 1999) was a contestant on the United States television game show Press Your Luck. Larson's claim to fame was his winning $110,237 in cash and prizes, which he was able to do by memorizing the patterns used on the Press Your Luck game board.

Through a careful study of the "random" movements of the 18-square "Big Board" on the CBS game show Press Your Luck, Larson was able to determine that there were only five patterns used to determine the movements of the spinner used to award money on the show. He was able to discover this by using a VCR to pause a recorded episode of the game, and proceed frame by frame to learn the patterns. Armed with this knowledge, he found that it would be theoretically possible to go on the game show, watch the patterns carefully, and hit squares containing money consistently.

Larson arrived in Hollywood from Lebanon, Ohio for a contestant tryout on Press Your Luck, having virtually no money to his name and using most of what he had to make the trip. In his tryout interview, he described himself as unemployed, but an ice cream truck driver during the summer season, who wanted to be a contestant on the show.

Early on in the second round, perhaps due to nerves or inexperience, Larson's pattern play was irregular. On four of his first eleven spins, Larson stopped the board at a point not called for by his patterns; but luckily, he avoided the Whammy all four times.

Then his play became deadly accurate. A player stopping the Press Your Luck board randomly would expect to hit a Whammy approximately once in each six spins. By contrast, in this second round alone, Larson took over forty spins without a Whammy. On thirty consecutive spins, his pattern play was perfect.

Finally, Larson reached $102,851, and he passed his remaining four spins. The main reason for this is because he was beginning to tire from such strenuous concentration. When the game was over, and Michael had won $110,237; of this $104,950 was cash.

While Larson was running up the score, the producers contacted Michael Brockman, head of CBS's daytime programming department. In a 1994 TV Guide interview commemorating the Larson Sweep, conducted at the time the movie Quiz Show was released, he recalled "Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy. He kept going around the board and hitting that box." Brockman contacted CBS lawyers to prove that he had cheated, but they failed.

When he threatened a lawsuit of his own, CBS finally gave in and awarded him his money. Because he had surpassed the CBS winnings cap (at the time) of $25,000, he was not allowed to return for the next show.

Part of his winnings went to taxes and parts of his winnings were invested in real estate, with the remainder left in the bank. The real estate deal turned out to be a fraudulent ponzi scheme and Larson lost his investment entirely. Larson then learned about a get-rich-quick scheme involving matching a one dollar bill's serial number with a random number read out on a local radio game show that promised a $30,000 jackpot. Larson withdrew his remaining gameshow winnings in one dollar bills in hopes of winning the contest. He would examine each dollar carefully and upon discovering that he did not have the winning number, would place all the money back in his account, only to withdraw it again the next day and repeat the process all over again. Larson's wife at the time stated that this obsession consumed him.

Approximately USD $40,000-50,000 in the remaining cash was stolen from Larson and his common-law wife Teresa Dinwitty while the two attended a Christmas party shortly after giving up on the radio contest, according to a Game Show Network special. Larson and Dinwitty split up soon after.

Larson fell victim to head and neck cancer in 1999 and died while on the run from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Above is the extraordinary Larson episode. It is split in to 5 parts on youtube, above is part 2 which when things just start to get going.

Michael Larson: I salute you.