The price was rigged, according to comedian Drew Carey.
The “Price is Right” host recently joined “Jeff and Larry’s Comedy Roundup” on Sirius XM and brought up how a near-scandal almost rocked the game of Plinko.
Yep. If you thought Plinko was safe from controversy, plink again.
In the “Price is Right” game, contestants try to drop chips down a board, hoping to land them in a $10,000 slot. Carey recalled that at the start of his second season of taking over hosting from Bob Barker (which would be 2008), one contestant was getting unusually lucky.
“There’s a college girl that got to play Plinko, and she dropped her first three chips right down in the $10,000 spot,” Carey said.
In just three chips, the contestant had apparently obliterated the previous Plinko record.
“People were on their feet, jumping up and down and cheering. I mean, the crowd was going wild. She dropped the fourth chip, the floor director comes over, stops the chip, and leans in to me and he goes, ‘The game is fixed,’” Carey said.
All that excitement was gone in the plink of an eye. The sanctity of the game came under question, and Carey was wrecked.
“‘I’m going to jail. I’m losing my job. There’s gonna be a scandal,’ all these emotions going through my head,” he explained.
Apparently, it was more of an honest mistake. Prior to the season, the show had shot a commercial for a “Price is Right” video game and rigged the game with fishing line to have a $10,000 winner every time. But the fishing line was so thin that no one noticed it to take it off later.
The show briefly stopped while everyone decided what to do.
“Off-camera, we gave her the $30,000,” Carey explained, saying they wanted to honor her winnings but couldn’t have them count for her overall total, as that can determine how a contestant does later in the show.
They gave the contestant new game chips, no one at home was the wiser, and the honor of Plinko was once again restored.
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