On this day in 2008, things got weird during a recording of The Price Is Right.
One of the most popular pricing games on the show is Plinko, where contestants can drop special chips down a giant pegboard and, depending on where the chips fall, win some money.
As Now I Know explained, during the 2008 taping, a contestant climbed atop the Plinko set and dropped her first chip… winning the biggest prize, $10,000.
It happens from time to time.
She dropped another chip, and won ANOTHER ten grand.
That’s a little less common.
She dropped a third chip from a different part of the board, and once again she hit the jackpot.
No matter what she did, she couldn’t lose.
But when she dropped the fourth chip, a member of the production team ran onto the set, stopped the chip from falling and cut the recording short.
After a break, host Drew Carey came back out with the contestant and explained what happened.
The show had just come back from a two-week break, and during that break producers filmed some promos for the show.
The promos showed Plinko chips going right into the $10,000 slot, because the production team had strung wires on the pegboard so chips would always go there.
The only problem was, no one took those wires down when the show came back.
So when a real contestant started playing, she was dropping chips onto a rigged board.
The show decided to let her keep the $30,000, and they let her play Plinko on the regular board, where she won another $3,000.
She also got to spin the big wheel, and I’m sure they double-checked to make sure that was operating normally.
Today in Key West, Florida, it’s preliminary round two of the annual Hemingway Look-Alike Contest.
Sloppy Joe’s Bar says the original Ernest Hemingway suggested the name for the saloon, so now they host would-be Hemingways as they try to out-Hemingway each other.
THE PRICE IS FIXED (Now I Know)
SLOPPY JOE’S 41ST ANNUAL HEMINGWAY® LOOK-ALIKE CONTEST JULY 21-23, 2022
