So, there have been some comments recently suggesting that All Star Family Fortunes is fixed or something because the top answers in Big Money add up to a higher number then they typically would have done in the eighties.
But how do our transatlantic cousins deal with this sort of thing? Here’s a clip from the Ray Combs’ fronted version in 1989:
The Feud/Fortunes format is the most easily legitimately riggable format out there. All the surveys and results can be hand-picked by the producers to generate a specific outcome. You see lots of Feud episodes in America where the top answers are in the 25-30 point range, which makes it very difficult to win.
I’d expect it’s a lot easier to rig it so people actively lose than win though – the contestants still have to give the answers after all.
More easier to rig than Play Your Cards Right. I know Card Sharks were fair with the cards in the US but the 1990s revival here had some dodgy endgames.
Obviously the 90s version of PYCR didn’t make the same impression as the original version (and, of course, was quietly dropped once WWTBAM became big), but I wasn’t aware that it had some dodgy outcomes.
Any examples?
Classic example had seriously high cards in the endgame. So the first card was a King, couple went lower then an Ace turned up. Another one where a couple had two pairs, one on each row. Bruce Forsyth always said the cards are unkind/unlucky but you could tell they didn’t want to give away a car on every show.
Strike it Lucky did a similar thing with their endgame by placing two hot spots on some of the screens, espically on final set of so the odds advoiding it were long. It became more fair with Strike it Rich as they had one of each hotspot, question and arrow on each set of screens.
I don’t think your first example proves anything really – bad luck happens, I’d certainly be more surprised if an Ace never turned up after a King.
I saw such an example on Challenge this week, though it was the deciding two-pairs game and not the final. It looked like time was against them and both couples failed to complete the row – then Bruce offered a sudden death tiebreak and the chance to play or pass – the couple chose to pass and Bruce pointedly remarked it was a strange thing to do, instead of playing – the cards that the other couple turned were suspiciously extreme, Ace to a King to a three or something like that. I suppose they have to speed the game along and make sure it finishes but it looked very much like a rig. Surely there were better ways to resolve the game when time is tight.
Again this doesn’t really prove anything – besides the decks are in view of the audience, and right at the beginning Brucie asks if they’ve seen them cut the cards. If they’re short on time it’s much easier to edit the chat out, certainly nothing is gained time wise one way or the other in a sudden death situation. People pass on family Fortunes as well.
As for cards being extreme – well it will happen.
Incidentally, the odds on losing when playing off a King are in fact about 1 in 7 – the four aces and the three other kings. This is against the odds, but it’s hardly improbable.
I’d imagine that with games loosely based on chance like PYCR, there are much stricter regulations against “stacking the deck” (both literally and figuratively) than on knowledge-based shows where questions can be picked by the producers to affect the difficulty. I don’t doubt that FF could fall into the latter category. It’s hard to look up clips of The Price is Right on YouTube anymore without commenters making remarks about how “generous” producer X or Y was that day.
One nice thing about Card Sharks (US PYCR) was that they once showed how the cards were shuffled, and how the S&P folks monitored everything. I’d imagine a similar thing was done on PYCR, though I’m not familiar enough with the show to make a call either way. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RKGxJS21iw
Mmm, I’ve seen that film before. Ta.
It’s not a game they really need to fix, probability works. That’s why when you see pubs offer Play Your Cards Right as a sidegame to a pub quiz the jackpots are large – try it for yourself, deal out eight cards and see how many times you get to the end playing the mathematically correct game – higher for 7 or less, lower for 8 or more. It won’t be many, and the end game on PYCR is basically predicated on the players betting the house twice or three times to reach the £4k mark. That’s where the excitement is, as there’s usually AT LEAST (as suggested earlier) a 1 in 7 chance of the cards shafting them on any turn, and often the odds are much higher.
I suspect they’re might not “rigging” it, but rather simply throwing questions at them that have one or two really obvious answers. I can easily cook up a couple such questions:
“Name a food that’s stuffed.” – Turkey
“Name something made of denim.” – Jeans
“What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” – Chocolate or vanilla
Meanwhile, there are plenty of questions that are bound to be very tough, especially those which have a large number of possible answers. “What time do you get up in the morning?” for example. Do you answer in increments of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or some other increment? Plus a couple of those 100 people might get up unusually early or late, or have given an oddly precise response like “7:42”, each of which is a potential point down the drain. I tend to notice a LOT of these whenever I see a more recent US version Fast Money round.
By the way, this isn’t the only time it’s happened on the Ray Combs version. Here’s another one that I found on YouTube a long time ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gt1qh_bR-4
The frontgame of FF can usually be set up that even if one family manages to sweep all the answers, it takes at least 4 questions to win the game (since they only put answers on the board that have 2 points or more).
as to the endgame- if the #1 answer has only 25 or 30 points, that usually means the #2 answer is worth 15-20 points- I’d suspect that they figure out what the maximum number of points available between the top two answers, then set up the five questions so that the team needs 70-75% of the maximum to get the 200 points needed to win (so a team needs 2 or 3 top answers plus a few other reasonable scores).
Wow – didn’t think my comments about ASFF would result in this post… 😳