by Chad Mosher
The American game show with the highest accessibility for anyone to have a chance to play is probably CBS's long-running The Price is Right. Anyone can head to Los Angeles, hang out in line, show a little pep in their step and wander over to Contestant's Row to win some flatware. And even though the biggest skill you can have on the program is to price and estimate well, it's also helpful to know some of the time-honored tricks the show uses.
"Whaaat? Tricks, you say?" Yes! Some viewers don't know that many of the games have some implied tricks that have been used for years. Even though the show is under "new management," so to speak, a lot of these behaviors are still present in many of the games. Here are just a few of the tricks that I've picked up from watching the show over the years and recently that can lead you to victory in these games!
- Contestant's Row and the Showcases generally have minimum limits. Lately, in Contestant's Row, most items have values above $500. The cheapest item I can remember seeing lately was makeup valued at just above $500. Unless you're trying to be strategic ("one dollar, Drew"), don't ever bid under $500 in Contestant's Row.
- With the Showcases, it's been a long time since a prize package under $15,000 has been seen. It's also rare (though not impossible) to have one under $20,000 these days. Except if your opponent just bid $80,000 on a new hot tub and you bid a dollar to ensure your victory, don't bid a number lower than $15,000 in your Showcase.
- In Cliff Hangers, the small prizes always go from lowest to highest, usually increasing in increments of about ten dollars. If you guess $20 on the first item, $30 on the second and $40 on the third, you're likely going to win the main prize with a lot of hiking room to spare.
- Though the show tried experimenting with higher values last year, the two prizes in Clock Game are always valued under a thousand dollars. That's why they add a bonus prize and an extra thousand dollars - to bump up the package value!
- One of the most famously-ignored rules is the one in Ten Chances. You have three prizes to price and you're given the numbers in the price plus an extra (except for the final prize where you just get the five numbers). You might notice that each of the scrambled prices has a 0 - that's because each prize ends with a 0! It's sad to see contestants struggle with this on TV because the game is so much easier when you can automatically fill in one number. Similarly, the price in Safe Crackers will end in a 0 if one is present.
- This may seem like a natural, but from seeing it happen in recent playing, it sadly is not. In time and speed based games, like Race Game and Bonkers, you might want to give the audience a chance to participate by standing there listening to them. That's a silly strategy, however, because you're wasting time paying attention to a group of people who is probably 90% as clueless as you are! Always trust your first instinct and hey, if that's wrong, you've saved a lot of time to try to figure it out again and again.
- Depending on if it's being played for a four- or five-digit prize, Push Over has five or six possible solutions... but you can knock one off immediately if you realize the first price in line is never the right solution. In the same vein, the price of the prize in Range Game is never right at the beginning. There's a six hundred dollar range, so you've got to let the rangefinder go up at least a little bit (about $100) before you get into possibly correct territory.
Chad Mosher is a past game show contestant, and has experience in many aspects of the game show industry. He contributes a weekly column here at About.com Game Shows, answering your questions and tackling all facets of the game show genre. If you have questions for Chad, you can post them here in the comments, or contact him directly through the link in his bio.
Photo courtesy CBS