Five of you have sent me links to this webpage which tells the story of Michael Larsen and Press Your Luck. The article has some errors in it, most notably in claiming…
In order for Michael to keep his winnings, he'd have to remain trapped on the stage of Press Your Luck forever. His situation was an infinite loop from which there was no escape: he'd learned how to trigger only plunger-hitting patterns nailing a cash prize and a free spin. According to the game's rules, this "free" spin would eventually have to be spun. In other words, each plunger push would lead to another. Nobody else could play, and Larsen himself could never stop playing. The only way to break this loop would be for Larsen to abandon any pretext of surefire pattern matching. He would literally have to Press His Luck like a regular contestant, plunging the Big Board onto a non-winning square, a non free-spinning square, and one possibly yielding a Whammy capable of draining him of every penny. When he pushed the plunger the last and final time — Michael Larsen won a trip to the Bahamas. He stopped playing, to thunderous applause.
Absolutely wrong. The rules of the game allowed a player to pass his remaining spins at any time, which is exactly what Larsen did as soon as he crossed the $100,000 mark. The trip he won to the Bahamas was won when he slipped and didn't hit one of the two spaces for which he was aiming. At no point was he intentionally out of control of the board.
What always interested me about Press Your Luck (much like Deal or No Deal, recently discussed here) was that its rules were cleverly configured to usually promote an exciting conclusion. Yes, it was largely a game of chance — so is Deal or No Deal — but near the end, the player is forced into increasingly-tough decisions about how far to push that game of chance and must keep making decisions that mean the difference between a big cash win and going home with nada. What Larsen did was to take the rules used to foster those suspenseful conclusions and use them to wring serious dollars out of the show. Landing on a big money square also gives one an extra spin which therefore (usually) gives one another hard decision to pass or play. Larsen just kept using the extra spins to win more until he hit his target goal.
I'm not suggesting Larsen was heroic or admirable. From all reports, he seems to have been something of a creep. I just like the fact that a guy from out of nowhere could, with a little ingenuity, walk into a big time TV studio, make so much money and create so much chaos.