The Story of Michael Larson and the "Press Your Luck" Gameshow Scandal

Last night I learned of a pretty cool little story that I was totally unaware of, even though it's based around a show that I absolutely loved watching as a kid.

On May 19, 1984, a man named Michael Larson - an unemployed Ohio man who spent nearly 12 years driving an ice cream truck - was a contestant who made American gameshow history.

First, keep in mind that back in those days, the biggest winners usually never got luckier than, say, a $40,000 payday. And those are the episodes people usually tend to really remember. Mr. Larson, however, managed to do something which earned him a whopping $110,000+ payout, more in one day than anyone in the prior history of television. As it turns out, the story behind this event ended up leading to a bit of a scandal.

Mr. Larson had an affinity for finding ways of making a lot of money fast, and he tended to behave a bit abnormally, to boot. For example, at one point he piled several televisions in his living room and bombarded himself with different channels of television simultaneously, paying particular attention to programs that concentrated on making money fast, especially gameshows. This, invevitably, led him to the CBS gameshow "Press Your Luck".

For those who aren't familiar with this gameshow, it ran from 1983 to 1986. It had 3 players, and a huge game board that lit up and flashed in different patterns. Each player took individual turns and they had a button they would slap to stop the pattern. Whatever the player landed on, that's what they won. Sometimes it was $500 or maybe a home gym set worth a thousand dollars or so, and other times there were the big money prizes that could earn you $2,000 or $5,000.

And then there were the ones that, if you landed on it, was a cartoon called a "Whammy", and Whammies took all your money and sent you back to $0. As a kid, these were my favorite part.

Well, Michael Larson was known for what his then-wife would refer to as falling into a trance while watching this gameshow. Until, one day, he had a "Eureka" moment about the pattern of the lights on the game board, and became bound and determined to to go to California to be a contestant on the show.

Now, I won't break the episode down for you, because that's exactly what the video below does. They analyze Larson's episode down to the frame - of which there are 30 per second - to get inside his head, and I found it incredibly fascinating.

The game board had only 5 different patterns, and in order for Larson to do what he did, he had to memorize all 5 of them. He knew where to avoid the Whammies, and he knew enough trivia to stay in control during those segments of the game. But when he took his turn on the game board, you can see the level of concentration in his eyes as as they scan the board, following the pattern of the lights, his hands ready to strike the stop button the moment it gets to the one he wants.

He stayed in control so well that he actually managed to make the show run over in time, causing the network to air it in 2 halves in 2 consecutive days. He took a total of 45 turns, or "spins", before passing it over to another contestant. CBS producers found that the average should be that a contestant will get a Whammy within 6 spins.

CBS did everything they could to bust him with cheating to keep from having to pay him such a high sum of money, but in the end, they all agreed that he did nothing wrong. They had a system, and Michael Larson beat that system. Needless to say, CBS then employed a system with many more than just 5 patterns.

Since Larson's appearance on the show, he attempted to continue with his "get rich quick" mindset, using the money from his winnings to try and make big bucks doing sometimes pretty crazy things, such as entering a radio contest which would grant $30,000 to anyone with a matching serial number on their 1 dollar bill to a random number given out on the air. So, he brought home the remainder of his Press Your Luck winnings, all in 1 dollar bills, and they sifted through them, looking for that serial number. He found he didn't have the number, so deposited half of it back into his bank. Then, during a Christmas party they left home to attend, they returned to find the backdoor kicked in, and all the money gone. Suffice it to say, Larson seemed better at recognizing simple patterns than actual money management.

According to Wikipedia,

Larson soon got caught up in an illicit scheme to sell part of a foreign lottery, and he fled Ohio. His family was contacted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but his whereabouts were unknown until his death from throat cancer on February 16, 1999, in Apopka, Florida.

Here's the documentary about Michael Larson and his appearance on Press Your Luck.
The video, unfortunately, will not play here since the owner has embedding disabled.
It'll just take you directly to Youtube where you can play it there.

I hope you find this as fascinating as I did.

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