When the CBS morning game program Press Your Luck debuted in late 1983, Michael Larson, an Ohio truck driver for Mister Softee ice cream, 35, saw it as his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He had been watching game shows for months, trying to find one that he could win. He took a bus to Los Angeles after realizing there was a serious problem with the way Luck’s game board worked.
When Larson came on the show in May 1984, he was so poor that he was wearing a thrift store blouse that he had purchased nearby CBS’ Television City. The game consisted of two sections and was scheduled to return on June 12 in primetime on ABC, hosted by Elizabeth Banks. Peter Tomarken, the host, questioned the competitors first.
An 18-space board concealing cash and rewards might be spun for a right response. Instead of stopping on a “Whammy,” which would have erased the player’s accrued earnings, the randomly bouncing cursor was supposed to stop on a lucrative space. Larson discovered that there were only five unique patterns, proving that the cursor was not truly random. What he did was commit them to memory.
Michael Brockman, the head of CBS’s daytime programming at the time, claims that pilots are test cars where shortcuts can be taken. The light design on the board for this presentation was very costly to make. That was too much money for any one person to spend on a pilot. When the performance was put into production, the pattern was still not sufficiently developed. (Brockman’s game show experience dates to 1977 when David Letterman, then 30, hosted a pilot for a show called The Riddlers. “David had talent,” he says. “The show just didn’t work.”)
Larson accepted Press Your Luck for $110,237 (about $283,00 in modern currency), which included excursions to Kauai, the Bahamas, and a sailboat. At the time, it was the biggest win anyone had ever had on a single game show program. Similar to rolling a seven at a craps table, the chances of hitting a Whammy were one in six. Larson had not hit a spin in forty-five attempts. It was not possible statistically. This is why CBS refused to give him the money; they felt he had cheated, according to the Standards and Practices department of the network. “I questioned how he had cheated. He overcame the system,” Brockman remembers. “CBS ultimately consented to pay him the winnings.”
Larson’s strategy was guaranteed to fail when the board was reprogrammed with 32 patterns shortly after his victory. 1986 saw the end of the program’s run.
“Invest in houses,” was Larson’s response when Tomarken asked him on the show what he was going to do with his riches. Although he did invest some of the money in Ohio real estate, he also lost $50,000 in a home burglary. Larson had the money because he was attempting to win a radio game in which you had to match digits on a $1 bill with those that were announced in order to win.
After working for Walmart for a while as an assistant manager, he later sold stock in Pleasure Time, Inc., a company that raised $1.8 million from 14,000 investors through what the Securities and Exchange Commission called “a fraudulent multi-level marketing scheme” involving a fictitious American Indian lottery. Larson had developed into one of the first online con artists.
In 1995, the SEC brought legal action against the enterprise. Larson left Ohio for Apopka, Florida, knowing that the FBI, SEC, and IRS were hunting for him. Before being located and brought to justice, he passed away there in 1999 at the age of 49 from throat cancer.
