346 views

Watch
- Search Videos
  
  Advanced search »
- Submit a New Video
Discuss
About
- Try clicking on the various channels to see videos posted to that channel - if you're into music you can click the Music channel to get more music sifts - go on and explore! Use the "hotness" when you have opened the channel link to get videos that have gotten a lot of votes, or use "newness" to have a look at the new sifts.
  When browsing sifts you like, have a look at the Related Posts list to see other related videos, click the tags under the video title to see more sifts tagged with the same tags or have a look at other sifts from the same user in the More Posts By list. If the sifted video is in a play list, have a look at the play list to see other interesting videos the Sift users have linked together.
  Enter the Sift Lounge to chat with online sifters about anything and everything, or read interesting posts in the Sift Talk forum.
  The Top New Videos list is always full of interesting, current videos. It is always recommended that you have a look through the Top New Videos, but also have a look at these:
  - Upcoming Unsifted Videos - active video submissions that neither are published to the front page nor archived to the submitter's personal queue
- Have you seen a really funny, surprising, scary, interesting, cute or in any other way extra good quality video?
  Post and share it here - VideoSift is the best video aggregator on the Web, where we share, discuss, promote, and interact with the best videos out there on the web. Post it here, and share it with the large community of video-interested users. And - you are guaranteed to find more very good videos here already!
  Mind you, we only share videos you discover that someone else has made; if you "self link," by posting a video you have made, have posted or have interests in, you risk the ban hammer - read the posting guidelines before posting. The sift is NOT for promoting your own videos - it is for sharing videos others have made.
  Submit a Video Now »
Login

Post has been Killed

Contestant games gameshow, wins stupidly large wad of money

submitted by RedSky

1 decade 3 years 7 months 1 week ago

Having nothing better to do than watch game shows all day and silently wonder what went wrong with his life, unemployed ice cream truck driver Michael Larson was in the perfect position to pull off one of the greatest stunts in the history of afternoon programming.

His target was a popular CBS game show called Press Your Luck.

Press Your Luck basically consisted on a roulette wheel with light-up cartoon characters corresponding to different prizes. You get so many turns and if you hit the wrong spot, you lose everything. Hit "free turn" and you get to go again. So sort of like Wheel of Fortune, only without the spelling and the wheel was electronic. That latter part would be their mistake.

One of their mistakes.

See, it's actually pretty hard for a computer to generate truly random patterns. Since Larson watched the show every damn day, eventually he noticed that the roulette only had six patterns of lights. So, he carefully taped each episode and, using the prodigious memory he had acquired reciting ice cream flavors, he memorized the six patterns and figured out exactly when to hit his button to make it land on whatever space he wanted, including "free spin." That's also important: The show had no rules limiting how long the game could go on. You could Free Spin forever. Larson had figured out a way to win basically infinite money.

Then he flew to LA and managed to get on the show. When his turn at the board came around, he won, and won, and won. He won $30,000, and by that point had been playing for longer than the half hour the show was allotted to air. They actually had to stop the episode and bring him back the next day to continue the round. When they did, he kept winning.

He wound up with over $100,000, a trip the Bahamas, and the undying hatred of a game show's producers.

They got off lucky; the only reason his run ended was because he eventually declined to spin again (the show let you hand off your turn to the next contestant) and fatigue was making him start to miss his mark. By then CBS figured out what he did and tried to have him disqualified, but nothing he did was illegal. He just beat their system. Their stupid, stupid system.

They changed the board patterns and banned the Larson episodes from airing as reruns. Meanwhile, Larson walked away with a nice pile of cash... only to lose it all in an investment scam. But, hey, a free trip to the Bahamas and the memory of punking a major network? Priceless.

Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_18753_the-6-most-creative-abuses-loopholes.html