Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
pittmike wrote:
Douchebag wrote:
rogers park bryan wrote:
Bernstein is aging rough, but it could be worse....
This man was 34 years old when this picture was taken
Everyone looked old in the 80's. I'm in a facebook group dedicated to memories of the town I grew up in. Lots of photos posted from the 1980's of people who were in high school. Most of these women looked like they were in their 40's or 50's. Just an awful decade for everything.
Who is the guy in the pic?
Michael Larsen! He was on Press Your Luck (the big bucks, no whammies show) and, while out of work, taped all the shows and memorized the pattern of the gameboard (a ring of slide projectors outlined in lights, very primitive) so that he always knew when to stop and land on the $5000+Spin space. He broke the game such that the whole second round of the game had to stretch out over an episode and a half because he kept landing on free spins and never lost control of the board. He won about $100,000 (in 1984 dollars), blew it all on harebrained gambling schemes, and died penniless.
I get that he memorized the patterns, but how did he know when to stop? Did he just have to get the timing down? And that's why he missed on the +Spin a couple times and got better at hitting square 4 as he went on?
I think part of it was getting a feel for the actual board mechanics -- remember, he hit a whammy his first spin. I think he also memorized a fallback where there was another square that never had a whammy on it, so if he blew stopping on the 3000+/4000+/5000+ square, he could land safely on one that had less money and no free spins but also no whammies. And of course, being only human, he started getting shaky as it went on and finally knew well enough to pass. The show's supposed to be coming back again this summer, but surely so random as to make this impossible.
I also think he must have played dumb in his audition (and some of the first round). I've watched enough of this dumb show to know that coordinators were obviously looking for babbling idiots, but here's this guy who's watching the board intently and not saying a word. To be a fly on the wall as one guy's draining two weeks' worth of their prize budget.
pittmike wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
As I've mentioned before, I watched tons of Press Your Luck on USA as a kid (sad day when I realized they stopped running game show reruns in middays). They were never allowed to show his episodes. Never got to see the actual episodes until I was in high school, I could only read about them.
Buddy. Buddy. Buddy? You read about game show episodes as a kid?
The game show reruns went away in 1995. I first got the internet in December 1996. One thing I wanted to do early on was remember the TV shows I used to watch. Sorry I wasn't using the nascent internet to fuck chicks as a ten-year-old.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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