Press Your Luck

Format

Three contestants competed on each episode, usually a returning champion and two new challengers (if a champion retired undefeated, then three new contestants would appear on the next episode).

Each game began with a trivia round where the contestants tried to earn spins, which was then used on the show's gameboard, referred to as the Big Board. A question was posed to the contestants, who tried to be the first to buzz in with a correct answer. Once a contestant gave an answer, the remaining opponents were given a choice of that answer or two additional answers provided by Tomarken and selected one. If the contestant that buzzed in gave the correct answer, it earned three spins. A correct multiple choice answer was worth one spin. If none of the three contestants buzzed in with an answer within five seconds, three answers were given to the contestants and they earned one spin each if they chose correctly. If a contestant buzzed in but failed to give an answer, that contestant was locked out of the question and it was treated the same way as if nobody had buzzed in.

After four questions were asked (five in the pilot), play moved over to the Big Board. The board consisted of 18 squares arranged in a 6✕5 grid, each of which had a screen in it that displayed one of three items which changed rather rapidly, and a randomizer light which the contestants stopped by hitting their buzzer. The most common spaces offered cash, with an extra spin attached to some of them, and prizes, with some being directional spaces that either allowed the contestant to choose between two or three squares, or moved their position to a different part of the board. Cash amounts and prize values were added to the contestant's score, while landing on any of several Whammy spaces reset the player's score to zero.

In the first Big Board round, play started with the contestant with the fewest spins unless there was a tie, in which case the contestant seated furthest left started. For each square the contestant stopped the randomizer light on, the value of that square was added to the contestant's bank and that contestant kept playing ("pressing his/her luck") until running out of spins or deciding to pass. Any passed spins went to the contestant's opponent with the higher amount of money (or, if tied, the opponent chosen by the passing contestant). A contestant receiving passed spins had to take them and could not pass until all the passed spins had been used. Spins awarded from hitting spaces offering them were placed in the earned column, and hitting a Whammy caused the contestant's remaining passed spins to move to the earned column, allowing the contestant to pass. Play continued until the contestants exhausted all of their spins. A contestant was eliminated from the game and any unused spins remaining were lost if at any point in the game a contestant hit four Whammies.

Once all spins had been played, a second round of trivia questions followed with the same rules as before. A second Big Board round followed, with much higher stakes in play. This time, contestants played in order from least amount of money to highest amount of money unless there was a tie between two or more contestants, in which case the contestant with the least amount of spins started the round. Any passed spins, as before, went to the opponent with the higher amount of money.

The contestant in the lead at the end of the second Big Board round became the day's champion, kept his/her winnings, and got to return on the next show as long as the show's winnings limits were not reached (see below). If two or all three contestants finished the match tied, they returned on the next show. In the rare occurrence that two contestants Whammied out of the game and the remaining contestant had spins left, the remaining contestant was given a choice to end the game immediately or keep spinning to try to win more money. The choice was given after each spin the contestant took, and the game continued until all spins were exhausted, the contestant stopped the game, or the contestant Whammied out. If the contestant managed to Whammy out, the game ended with no winner and three new contestants played on the next show.

Board values

In the first Big Board round, cash amounts ranged from $100 to $1,500 ($1,250 in the pilot and early episodes) and prizes typically were worth no more than $2,000. The second round featured cash amounts from $500 to $5,000, and prizes potentially worth $6,000 or more. Three rare but special squares also appeared throughout the course of the show. The first, Double Your $$, multiplied the contestant's dollar amount at the time by two. This square later became Double Your $$ + One Spin, awarding an extra spin in addition to the multiplied cash amount. Add-A-One added a "1" to the front of the contestant's current score (e.g., $0 became $10; $500 became $1,500; and $2,000 became $12,000). The third, $2000 or Lose-1-Whammy, offered the contestant a choice of adding $2,000 to his/her score ($2,000 was automatically added if the contestant had no Whammies), or removing a Whammy received earlier in the game. Add-A-One was only featured in the first Big Board round, with the others only appearing in the second Big Board round.

One square present in both Big Board rounds was Big Bucks. This square, appearing third from the right in the bottom row, automatically moved the selector light to the corresponding position in the top row. The top dollar values in this square in round one were $1,000, $1,250 and $1,500 (in the first month and pilot, these values were $750, $1,000, and $1,250.) For the second round, the top dollar values were $3,000, $4,000, and $5,000, all of which awarded an extra spin.

In both rounds, the value of a prize was announced only after it had been claimed, and a new prize was put on the board in its place (the aforementioned Add-A-One and Double Your $$ [+ One Spin] spaces were also treated as prizes in this respect).

Limits on winnings

Any contestant who won five games or exceeded the winnings cap (whichever occurred first) retired undefeated. From September 19, 1983 to October 31, 1984, any contestant who won over $25,000 retired undefeated, but was allowed to keep any winnings over that amount up to $50,000. The CBS game show winnings cap was doubled to $50,000 on November 1, 1984, with contestants now being allowed to keep any winnings over that up to $75,000.

Home Player Spin

"Home Player Spins" were featured at various points over the course of the series' run. Each of the three contestants was assigned a postcard with the name of a home viewer prior to the start of the episode. One spin in the final round was designated as the Home Player Spin at the start of the round, and when that spin came up, whatever the contestant landed on during that spin was added to their own total and was also awarded to the home player. If the contestant hit a Whammy, the home player received $500. If the contestant landed on a space that awarded money and an additional spin, the contestant received the money and the spin, but the home player only received the money. If the contestant landed on a prize instead of money, then the home viewer would also win that prize.

At the close of the October–November 1985 contest, that episode's in-studio winner drew a card from a bowl containing the names of each of the 75 at-home participants featured over the five-week period. After drawing the name, the contestant took one spin on a modified board that showed only cash values and directional squares (no Whammies, prizes, or cash amounts with additional spins were present). The value landed on, multiplied by the total number of spins earned by the three contestants in the second question round, was then awarded to the home player whose name was drawn.

Original run

Peter Tomarken, who had just ended a 13-week stint as the host of Hit Man on NBC, was tapped as host for Press Your Luck. The pilot was taped on May 18, 1983,^[3] and the actual show began both tapings and airings four months later on September 10 of that year.^[1] The show premiered on September 19, 1983, on CBS at 10:30 a.m. ET (9:30 CT/MT/PT), replacing Child's Play, and placing it between The New $25,000 Pyramid and The Price Is Right. Press Your Luck competed against Sale of the Century for first place in the 10:30 a.m. morning time slot over the next two years.

On January 6, 1986, CBS relocated Press Your Luck in order to make room for a Bob Eubanks-hosted revival of Card Sharks. Press Your Luck replaced Body Language in the network's 4:00 p.m. afternoon time slot. Tomarken stated that by the Fall of 1985, the contract for The Price is Right was up for renewal, but CBS was unable to pay Mark Goodson Productions the kind of money they wanted to continue that show on their network. Goodson came up with the solution of taking over the 10:30 a.m. timeslot.^[4] Although some CBS affiliates carrying the program in 1986 outside of the 4:00 p.m. ET time slot tape-delayed it for broadcast the next morning (including the network's flagship owned-and-operated stations in New York^[5] and Los Angeles^[6]), many CBS affiliates dropped the program (with a few markets subsequently picking the show up on independent stations).

The last episode of the show aired on September 26, 1986, but it was not acknowledged as the finale. The final tapings took place in August of that same year, when its cancellation was first announced.^[7] After the show ended its run, CBS returned the 4:00 p.m. timeslot to its affiliates.

Reruns

In early 1987, 130 episodes of the show were packaged by Republic Pictures for off-network syndication to a handful of local stations. These episodes originally aired on CBS from February 25 to August 23, 1985,^[8] and were also the first to be shown on USA Network from September 14, 1987 (the day USA Network picked up the show for its block of afternoon game show reruns) to December 30, 1988. Press Your Luck remained on its schedule until October 13, 1995, when USA dropped its game show block altogether.^[9]

The series was later purchased by Pearson Television (which later became FremantleMedia, which now owns the rights to the series), who also owns the Goodson–Todman and Reg Grundy libraries. Since then, the company has handled revivals and video game licenses, such as with Whammy! and the 2009 video game. On June 8, 2006, Press Your Luck was featured as the fourth round of Gameshow Marathon on CBS.

Game Show Network (GSN) aired the show from September 2001 to March 2009, airing episodes from February 1984 to November 1985. GSN resumed airing the show in 2012, airing episodes from the September 1983 premiere to February 1984. From 2014 to 2016, GSN aired episodes 561 to 696, which originally ran from November 1985 to May 1986; after this, GSN aired episodes from the summer of 1984 to February 1985 until the show was removed from GSN's schedule again in May 2017. From December 2017 to February 2018, GSN aired episodes from summer 1984 as part of a Saturday night game show block.^[10]

On July 2, 2018, reruns of Press Your Luck started airing on GameTV in Canada.^[11]

Michael Larson

In 1984, a self-described unemployed ice cream truck driver named Michael Larson made it onto the show. After watching the show at home with the use of stop-motion on a VCR, Larson discovered that the presumed random patterns of the game board were not actually random and he was able to memorize the sequences to help him stop the board where and when he wanted. On the single game in which he appeared, an initially tentative Larson spun a Whammy on his very first turn, but then went 45 consecutive spins without hitting another one.

The game ran for so long that CBS aired the episode in two parts, on June 8 and 11, 1984. In the end, Larson earned a total of $110,237 in cash and prizes, a record for the most money in cash and prizes won by a contestant in a single appearance on a daytime network game show. In 2006, when Vickyann Chrobak-Sadowski won $147,517 in cash and prizes on the Season 35 premiere of The Price Is Right, it was not enough to surpass Larson's inflation-adjusted record ($110,237 was equal to $215,690 in 2006 dollars).^[12]

Larson, through meticulous watching of the show, memorized patterns of the board to land on a space in which all three slides contained smaller amounts of money plus a spin or the spot in the top center of the screen in which the largest amounts of money plus a spin always resided. Not only would he not hit a Whammy if he landed on those two squares, but he would also be guaranteed to continue gaining more spins as long as he desired.

Although CBS investigated Larson, they determined that memorizing the board patterns was not cheating and let him keep his winnings. The board was subsequently reprogrammed with up to 32 new patterns to help prevent against another contestant from being able to memorize patterns as Larson had. In 1994, TV Guide magazine interviewed Larson and revealed the background of this episode including his decision to pass his remaining spins after he lost concentration and missed his target squares.^[13]

The story was featured in a two-hour documentary on GSN titled Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal in March 2003. GSN aired a special rematch edition of Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck, featuring the two runners-up from the show, host Tomarken and Michael Larson's brother James. (Michael Larson had died of throat cancer in 1999.)^[14] In July 2010, Michael's brother James, and his former wife at the time of winning, were interviewed for PRI's This American Life for the episode Million Dollar Idea.^[15]

His story was also featured on the first episode of GSN's documentary series Cover Story in 2018.^[16]

Others

Aside from Michael Larson, several contestants later found fame outside of game shows:

• Randy West: Game show announcer who appeared on Press Your Luck from September 29 to October 3, 1983. West later became an announcer for several game shows (including Hollywood Showdown) and filled in for Rod Roddy on The Price is Right during Roddy's illnesses and after Roddy's death in 2003. West was the first contestant in the show's history to land on and win a car and won a total of $25,742 over the three episodes on which he appeared.
• Jenny Jones: Talk show hostess who won $18,706 over the course of three episodes from January 28 to 30, 1985.
• Steve Bryant: A wide receiver for the NFL's Houston Oilers^[17] when he won $16,655 on July 12, 15 and 16, 1985.

Sam Schmidt won $16,350 on Press Your Luck

Neil Flynn was one of the final contestants on Press Your Luck

• Ralph Strangis: Later became play-by-play announcer for the Dallas Stars.^[18] Also had a small stint on AWA Championship Wrestling on ESPN. On the May 28 and 29, 1984 episodes of Press Your Luck, Strangis won $7,431 in cash and prizes.^[19]
• Sam Schmidt: Won $16,350 over the course of three episodes between January 2 to 4, 1985. He went on to become an Indy Racing League driver before a testing accident paralyzed him and ended his driving career. He later started Sam Schmidt Motorsports, a successful Firestone Indy Lights championship-winning team, and the Sam Schmidt Paralysis Foundation. Schmidt Motorsports has become a top IZOD IndyCar Series team, winning the 2011 Indianapolis 500 pole position in the Firestone Fast Nine, but was the hardest hit in the 2011 IZOD IndyCar World Championship tragedy.^[20]
• Neil Flynn: Later known for his role as Janitor on the NBC/ABC medical comedy-drama Scrubs and as Mike Heck on the ABC sitcom The Middle was a contestant on the show's third to last episode in September 1986.