A $300,000 Glitch - The Michael Larson Story

Michael Larson was an ordinary man from Ohio.

He became famous for his incredible win on the game show "Press Your Luck" in 1984.

The show, hosted by Peter Tomarken, featured contestants answering trivia questions to earn spins on a large electronic game board known as the Big Board.

The Big Board had various prizes and cash amounts, but it also had a few squares that were labeled "Whammy.”

If a contestant landed on a Whammy, they would lose all their accumulated winnings and receive a comical animation of a cartoon character called the Whammy...

The goal of the game was to accumulate as much money as possible without hitting a Whammy.

Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver, became intrigued by the show's patterns during his extensive study of recorded episodes.

He noticed that the random patterns on the Big Board were not entirely random.

The show used five different patterns that would cycle through randomly during each episode. Larson recognized that he could potentially memorize these patterns and predict the movement of the lights on the board.

In the spring of 1984, Larson made the decision to try his luck and become a contestant on CBS’s "Press Your Luck.”

He applied to be on the show and, after being accepted, traveled to Los Angeles for the taping.

During the show, Larson's strategy was to press the button to stop the flashing lights on the board at precise moments when he knew they would land on cash or prizes rather than Whammies.

Larson's approach was risky because if he hit a Whammy, he would lose all his winnings…

However, he had meticulously memorized the patterns and was confident in his ability to anticipate the board's movements.

As the game progressed, Larson's winnings grew rapidly, reaching unprecedented amounts.

He won a total of $110,237 in cash and prizes, which was the largest one-day total in the history of daytime television at the time.

In 2023 terms, this is over $330,000

Larson's winning streak stunned the show's producers and staff, who suspected him of cheating. They reviewed the footage extensively but found no evidence of wrongdoing. Larson had simply exploited a flaw in the game's design and outsmarted the system.

The show's producers initially refused to pay Larson his winnings, alleging that he had cheated.

Larson threatened legal action, and after several months of negotiations, he received his full prize money.

The incident prompted the show to revise its game board patterns to make them more difficult to memorize and predict.

Aside from identifying a pattern, another thing stands out about Larson...

I suspect that Larson was not looking for the pattern when he watched this game show, but that it leapt out at him.

For everyone else these flashes were random, with no discernible pattern, but to Michael, there was a pattern, a sequence.

The lights shown in a specific series over exact periods. Hundreds of thousands had watched and many had played on this game show, and yet it seems no one but Michael saw this, or if they did, they decided not to monetize it.

When he first thought he had identified this pattern, he could have been a realist and simply said to himself, “I’m sure I can’t predict this pattern. Someone would have noticed this by now,” and refused to admit to himself that he was capable of knowing when these flashes would land in the winning squares.

But he didn’t. He tested himself, recording episodes of the show in a beta or VHS VCR and playing it back, and learning how these predictable motions transpired.

That’s how I felt in November of 2019, never having looked at a single stock chart, or bought a single stock, or learned a single thing about the stock market…and yet I saw this thing happening that seemed completely obvious to me, in which a stock dropped and rose rather predictably, everyday around the same time. I never thought it would help catapult a series of successes so soon after.

To me, the moral of the story is see what you see, not what the naysayers say. It’s how innovation and progress occur. What do you think is the moral of the story?

Eddie Edwards
20-Minute Trader

P.S. If you want (access to the pattern) I discovered, it’s available right here for you to get started. ==>https://cutt.ly/iexVKK9x<==