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The Man Who “Whammied” Press Your Luck

$110,237 in cash and prizes. That’s how much Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream−truck driver from Ohio, won in just one game of the TV game show Press Your Luck in 1984. At the time, his winning total set the all-time record for daytime game show winnings in a single episode, a record that stood until 2006. Even more interesting is the fact that he won more than three times the total of any Press Your Luck contestant before him and managed to survive 45 spins in a row at the show’s game board, a streak no contestant ever came close to matching. Was Michael Larson one of the luckiest people in game show history? Or was there a trick up his sleeve? First, a little history on the show: Press Your Luck was a popular game show that aired on CBS from 1983 to 1986. Three contestants answered questions to earn “spins” at the show’s game board, where they could win thousands of dollars in cash and prizes. Every spin at the game board, however, was a risk, since hitting a “Whammy,” the show’s trademark red gremlin, meant the contestant lost all of his or her winnings to that point. The player who managed to earn the most in cash and prizes while avoiding the Whammy won the game and kept all the winnings. To understand Larson’s feat, we first must understand the mechanics of the game board. Specifically, the board consisted of 18 spaces, and within each space there were three possible outcomes. Most outcomes it was. Is it reasonable to attribute this winning streak to pure luck, or was there some other factor involved? In statistics, the technique created to answer questions of this sort is called hypothesis testing. The first step in a hypothesis test is to formulate the so-called null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the assumption that the outcome we witness is the result of natural variation only and that nonrandom factors are not influencing the experiment. On the Press Your Luck game board, exactly 9 out of the 54 total outcomes were Whammies. If we take the null hypothesis to be that every space on the board is chosen with equal probability, then the probability of getting a Whammy on any given spin is 9/54 or 1/6. Relying on luck alone, Michael Larson had a 5/6 chance of surviving each successive spin of the board. The question then becomes whether the information we have from Larson’s streak is enough to reject the null hypothesis in favor of the “alternative hypothesis,” which in this case would be that Larson had cleverly devised a way to significantly lower his chances of hitting a Whammy. The central step in a hypothesis test is to compute the p-value of the experiment. The p-value is the probability, assuming the null hypothesis is true, of encountering a result at least as extreme as the one we witnessed. Using the To believe that Larson was simply lucky we have to accept that he beat odds roughly equal to 3 out of 10,000.