I love The Price is Right (henceforth, TPIR). Always have.  I love contestant’s row. I love(d) Barker. I love his skinny little mic. I love his scandals with Barker’s beauties.  I love the pricing games (Plinko is best, I will not entertain arguments to the contrary, especially not arguments involving Hole-in-one-or-two). I love how the crowd can help you. I love how you don’t know you’ll be on the show until they call your name from the live studio audience. I love(d) Roddy.  I love how people wear ridiculous t-shirts and get way too excited about his and hers exercise bicycles.  I love it all.

I can remember racing into my house each day at 11:30 after I got home from kindergarten so that I could see the second half of the show. I can remember being home sick from school, feeling awful, and thinking, “well, at least I get to watch TPIR today.” I can remember scheduling my summer days as a kid around it.  When Barker left, I was sad. The show has lost something without him, but it’s not unwatchable with Carey.

So maybe you haven’t seen the video below before. It’s the only time in TPIR  history that a contestant has bid exactly the right price on his/her showcase showdown package. It’s pretty amazing, but the thing everybody talks about after they watch the video is how Drew Carey just butchers the moment.  Doesn’t even get excited. Just deadpans “You got it right on the nose” and moves on. Just kills it.

I assume my first reaction — Barker would have nailed this — is the most common. But after I watched it four or five times, I came to the conclusion that it had to be Carey doing some sort of ironic joke. There’s just no way that’s a natural reaction.

And, as it turns out, it wasn’t. There’s actually a huge backstory to that moment, written up in detail in this month’s Esquire (and, as written, also a great insider’s look at TPIR, highly recommended). The guy who hit the perfect bid had also hit his contestant’s row bid perfectly. And the Price is Right producers were already suspicious that he was cheating. So during the commercial break during the showcase (when, evidently, the host discovers the results of the bids and the winner), Carey was informed that not only had he hit the bid perfectly, but he was also most likely a cheat. And so Carey believed that the show would never air. Which is why he deadpanned it — he thought that they had just wasted 45 minutes filming an unusable episode.

But they hadn’t. It turns out that Terry Kniess wasn’t cheating. He had just found a flaw in the show — they basically recycle the same products over and over again. So he and his wife spent months learning all the prices and memorizing them.  Which, if you’ve ever heard the story, should remind you of Michael Larson, the ice-cream truck driver who beat Press your Luck in the mid-80’s because he realized the movement of the boards wasn’t random, but instead was based on just 5 simple patterns.  (Video here.)

Even crazier is that during the show that Kniess hit his perfect contestant’s row bid and perfect showcase bid, there was a man sitting next to him in the studio audience who was well-known to TPIR as a ringer — a guy who had 10,000 flash cards on his computer with TPIR products that he used to help himself really memorize the show. And while he waiting to get his name called and get on the show again (you can be on multiple times, but only once every ten years), he would sit in the studio audience and signal every single player with the right bids on contestant’s row and amazing-close bids on showcases.  If you just knew where to look. And in the case of Kniess, he happened to be sitting right next to Kniess’s wife while Kniess was on stage.

I have four thoughts on all of this:

(1) Isn’t there a boatload of luck in TPIR, even if you know all the prices? This isn’t Press Your Luck. Once you have the PYL boards memorized, you’re only job is to get yourself on the show and hope that you can time the ring-in buzzer well enough to implement your knowledge. But on TPIR, you need to (a) show up at the studio not knowing if you are going to be a contestant, (b) win the lottery to be on contestant’s row, (c) win the big-wheel spin to get into the showdown, and (d) hope that the prizes for the games you get to play aren’t crappy. Seems like a lot of built-in risk, even if you are sure you can nail your contestant’s row bid, pricing game, and showcase showdown. And none of that is a given, either, since TPIR must introduce new products on a regular basis.

(2) How stupid is it to bid exactly right on your showcase showdown? You get both showcases if you get within $250 (used to be $100). So the only possible outcome of trying to make a perfect bid is that you might go over by a few dollars and lose the whole thing. Which, as it turns out, is basically what happened to Terry Kneiss — he admits in the Esquire article that he didn’t know the price of one of the showcase items, so he just guessed. But wouldn’t you make a radically conservative guess at that point, since you know you’re going to be pretty close?

(3) I didn’t know that TPIR was on the hook for the prizes. Contrary to popular belief, the sponsors do not give TPIR the prizes. TPIR pays for them out-of-pocket. So even though Barker might be all giddy if the contestants go six-for-six on pricing games, the producers are cringing at the effect it will have on their bottom line — to the point where they might roll out tougher pricing games (like the range game) in the second half of a show (or, more likely, in the later episodes of a taping session) if the contestants are on a winning streak. Or they might weaken the expected payout value of the showcases (by including more trips, which are typically cheaper than other showcase prizes).

(4) I wonder how many people have caught onto this and used it effectively. It’s always been obvious that a good sense of retail prices can help you at TPIR, but I can honestly say that I don’t recall a ton of repeat items, and I was religious watcher in the summer as a kid. Sure, things like the mentos or the brownie mix or the his/hers exercise bikes were always there. But it never looked to me (even now in retrospect) like the prizes repeated enough to form a strategy around it, nevermind that all of them repeated. Still, if you realized that they did and were able to implement it, it wouldn’t be hard to disguise your advantage. Both Kneiss and the ringer hit perfect guesses on contestant’s row. I wonder how many contestant’s row perfect guesses are luck, and how many of them are exact knowledge.