You’ve probably never heard the name Michael Larson, but he pulled off a truly epic hack many years ago that deserves to be known, as once upon a time Larson was the Pudding Guy of the game show world.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the game show “Press Your Luck“. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the gameplay:

Before each spin, a contestant was asked if they wanted to “press [their] luck” or pass their remaining spins. If the contestant chose to “press [their] luck”, a selector light flashed among the 18 squares, while the contents of each individual square rotated. The contestant then stopped the lights from flashing by hitting a button in front of them. If the square landed upon contained a cash amount or prize, that value was added to their score. If it contained a Whammy, the contestant lost any cash or prizes accumulated up to that point. Some squares offered the contestant a choice of two or three different squares, moved the selector light forward or backward two squares, or awarded a cash value plus an additional spin.

This is what the board looked like:

Those little guys toward the upper left are the Whammys, by the way. (Obscure footnote: the Whammy animation was done by “Savage” Steve Holland, who later went on to direct the John Cusack film Better Off Dead, aka one of the greatest movies of all time.)

In 1984 an unemployed truck driver named Michael Larson appeared on the show. Larson did something he wasn’t supposed to do: he studied the game very closely and found a loophole. The patterns in which the squares appeared seemed to be random… but they were not. Larson was the first contestant to figure this out.

What happened? Larson won a lot of money: $110,237. Mind you, these are 1984 dollars, and that was in a single episode. This was a daytime game show record that lasted until 2006.

Those of you who have read about Citi closing the accounts of people who earned “too many” Thank You Points may not be surprised that Larson was accused of cheating. Again we go to Wikipedia:

While Larson was running up the score, the show’s producers contacted Michael Brockman, then head of CBS’ 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.”

The program’s producers and Brockman met to review the videotape. They noticed that Larson immediately celebrated after many of his spins, instead of waiting the fraction of a second that it would normally take for a player to see and respond to the space he had stopped on (effectively showing that he knew beforehand that he was going to get something good). It was also noticed that Larson had an unusual reaction to his early prize of a Kauai trip, which was out of his pattern – he initially looked puzzled, smiling and clapping after a pause.

CBS initially refused to pay Larson, considering him a cheater. However, Brockman and the producers could not find a clause in the game’s rules with which to disqualify him (largely because the board had been constructed with these patterns from the beginning of the series), and the network complied. Because he had surpassed the CBS winnings cap (at the time) of $25,000, he was not allowed to return for the next show. CBS later raised, and has since eliminated, the winnings cap.

The five light patterns on the Big Board were erased and replaced with five new ones for about a month. Then, to make sure no one was memorizing those, they were again replaced with five new patterns for another month. Finally, in August, new software was installed which gave the Board a total of 32 patterns, effectively ensuring that nobody would ever again duplicate Larson’s trick.

The Onion’s AV Club recently had a full-length feature on Larson that’s worth a read. There’s also a documentary about the whole affair called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal, and it’s available on YouTube.

Happy Friday! Things have been a bit slow lately, so hopefully next week will bring some good deals.