Michael Larson: The Ice Cream Man Who Broke Press Your Luck in 1984

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In May 1984 a CBS control room descended into panic as a man in a thrift store shirt drained Press Your Luck of more than $100,000 without breaking a rule. This episode tells the story of Michael Larson, born in 1949 in Lebanon, Ohio, an air conditioning repairman and ice cream truck driver who spent his days watching a wall of 12 televisions for ways to get rich. Recording the show on a VCR and studying it frame by frame, he found that the supposedly random game board ran on just five patterns, and that two squares always paid cash plus an extra spin.

Larson spent his last money on a flight to Los Angeles and talked his way onto the show with a hard luck story. Then he held the board for spin after spin while executives searched the rulebook for a reason to stop him. His win became television folklore, but the instincts that beat the game wrecked the rest of his life. The winnings vanished into a Ponzi scheme and a bizarre radio contest gamble, and he ended his days as a fugitive from federal investigators.

• Larson deliberately hit a Whammy on his first spin, using it to calibrate his timing on the studio's heavy plunger after months of practice with a VCR remote.
• He landed on squares four and eight for 29 consecutive spins and finished with $110,237 in cash and prizes.
• CBS reviewed the tape frame by frame, found no cheating, paid him, then reprogrammed the board with 32 patterns and capped winnings at $75,000.
• Chasing a radio contest tied to a dollar bill's serial number, he kept $50,000 in one dollar bills at his girlfriend's house, where burglars stole it during a Christmas party.
• In 1995 he launched a fraudulent marketing scheme that took $1.8 million from 14,000 investors, and he died of throat cancer in Florida in February 1999 at age 49.