Eric
July 13th, 2010, 09:56 AM
This is a cool story about the first-ever perfect bid on a showcase showdown in The Price Is Right:
http://www.esquire.com/features/impossible/price-is-right-perfect-bid-0810
It's a bit long, but a pretty cool story. Here's page one:
In thirty-eight years, The Price is Right never had a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase showdown. Until Terry Kniess outsmarted everyone — and changed everything.
By Chris Jones
Terry Kniess has prepared. Over the back of the living-room couch, he's draped the yellow T-shirts he and his wife, Linda, wore that fateful morning on The Price Is Right. Hers has a photograph of their beloved departed Maltese on the front: "This is my Krystal and she was spayed," it reads. "Is your pet spayed or neutered?" Host Drew Carey's signature is on the back. Terry's shirt is simpler, and it's unsigned: "Las Vegas loves The Price Is Right." On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005 — right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up — TERRY KNIESS — because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. "I know I would ask to see it," he says. He turns over the back of the giant white cue card to show the meticulous notes he jotted down after the show, including his final take — actual retail price, $56,437.41 — after he won both Showcases, the game's ultimate prize, with yet another perfect bid, the first in the show's thirty-eight-year-long daytime history: $23,743. And then, last, he lifts up a copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline DREW CAUGHT UP IN PRICE IS RIGHT RIGGING SCANDAL and with a story about Terry on page 9, his name misspelled ("Terry Neese") but the numbers exactly right.
"If there's one thing I've learned through all this," Terry says, "it's that there's such a thing as being too perfect."
Terry is sixty years old, with silver hair and glasses. He looks like he might design bridges or maybe sell cars, but he began his career as a television meteorologist in Las Vegas. Today, many TV weathermen don't know any more about weather than the guy doing sports. Terry is different. He understands how weather works. He sees patterns in things like wind lift and barometric pressure and the way Krystal used to hide behind the furniture; he has a better understanding than most of causes and effects. Although friends joked about his working in Las Vegas — I'm guessing today's going to be hot and sunny — Terry knew that Las Vegas was a tough place for him to be right. Las Vegas has storms, sudden and violent. But even in those storms, Terry became expert. He could see the rain coming even when others couldn't.
He was good on TV, too, had a strong, deep voice and a friendly face. But more important, Terry was accurate. That combination made him a weatherman worth pursuing, and he and Linda began jumping across the country to bigger and more lucrative stops. First they went to Waco, Texas, and then to Springfield, Missouri, before Terry finally cracked a Top Ten market in Atlanta. There, he won two Southeast Regional Emmy Awards, back to back, in 1993 and 1994. They are on his fireplace mantel. "Other than The Price Is Right," he says, "winning those was probably the biggest moment of my life." But he and Linda never felt about Atlanta the way they felt about Las Vegas, and they were about to be trapped there by Terry's success. Was this the life they wanted? Terry quit TV, and he and Linda returned to their natural desert habitat, with all its sunshine and possibility.
Linda eventually got a job with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, overseeing staff scheduling. She has a head for numbers, which she uses to balance 260 part-time staff and their delicately calibrated hours. Linda's stone-cold on arithmetic. Terry's gift, as always, remains patterns, and after some false starts in slot machines and at a toilet-paper factory, he found his next calling: casino surveillance.
He pulled the night shift in a windowless room at Circus Circus and watched the floor through dozens of monitors. Over months of training, he learned how to spot the steady-handed men who were out to break the games. No matter how good they were, they had routines. They had patterns, and Terry could read them like the weather. He could see them in the way they bet or which tables they chose or their body language or how they nursed a drink. He saw how they counted cards. He saw how they worked holiday weekends, when the floors were busier. He saw how they shopped for dealers — hunting for the hacks who used a pinch tuck instead of a palm tuck when they cut the cards, all the edge a pro needed. They didn't cheat, exactly. They exploited imperfections, and Terry, because of the way his brain works, soon found himself sitting at his kitchen table, flipping through decks of cards and learning to count them. He could turn over fistfuls of them at a time and keep perfect count, and he would imagine that if he were playing blackjack right about now, he would be pushing out a stack of chips and feeling the hairs on the back of his neck go up.
And also because of the way his brain works, Terry necessarily found himself walking into a casino and taking a seat at a blackjack table — the one seat, to the dealer's immediate right, because a weak, pinch-tucking dealer might also show his hole card to that seat more than most — and doing the very things he had been trained to spot, but doing them better. Terry believed that his brain and his eyes and his strong, deep voice made him the perfect vessel for exploiting weakness, for capitalizing on the imperfections of others — for seeing in their patterns an opportunity, a chance for him to break the game.
http://www.esquire.com/features/impossible/price-is-right-perfect-bid-0810
It's a bit long, but a pretty cool story. Here's page one:
In thirty-eight years, The Price is Right never had a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase showdown. Until Terry Kniess outsmarted everyone — and changed everything.
By Chris Jones
Terry Kniess has prepared. Over the back of the living-room couch, he's draped the yellow T-shirts he and his wife, Linda, wore that fateful morning on The Price Is Right. Hers has a photograph of their beloved departed Maltese on the front: "This is my Krystal and she was spayed," it reads. "Is your pet spayed or neutered?" Host Drew Carey's signature is on the back. Terry's shirt is simpler, and it's unsigned: "Las Vegas loves The Price Is Right." On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005 — right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up — TERRY KNIESS — because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. "I know I would ask to see it," he says. He turns over the back of the giant white cue card to show the meticulous notes he jotted down after the show, including his final take — actual retail price, $56,437.41 — after he won both Showcases, the game's ultimate prize, with yet another perfect bid, the first in the show's thirty-eight-year-long daytime history: $23,743. And then, last, he lifts up a copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline DREW CAUGHT UP IN PRICE IS RIGHT RIGGING SCANDAL and with a story about Terry on page 9, his name misspelled ("Terry Neese") but the numbers exactly right.
"If there's one thing I've learned through all this," Terry says, "it's that there's such a thing as being too perfect."
Terry is sixty years old, with silver hair and glasses. He looks like he might design bridges or maybe sell cars, but he began his career as a television meteorologist in Las Vegas. Today, many TV weathermen don't know any more about weather than the guy doing sports. Terry is different. He understands how weather works. He sees patterns in things like wind lift and barometric pressure and the way Krystal used to hide behind the furniture; he has a better understanding than most of causes and effects. Although friends joked about his working in Las Vegas — I'm guessing today's going to be hot and sunny — Terry knew that Las Vegas was a tough place for him to be right. Las Vegas has storms, sudden and violent. But even in those storms, Terry became expert. He could see the rain coming even when others couldn't.
He was good on TV, too, had a strong, deep voice and a friendly face. But more important, Terry was accurate. That combination made him a weatherman worth pursuing, and he and Linda began jumping across the country to bigger and more lucrative stops. First they went to Waco, Texas, and then to Springfield, Missouri, before Terry finally cracked a Top Ten market in Atlanta. There, he won two Southeast Regional Emmy Awards, back to back, in 1993 and 1994. They are on his fireplace mantel. "Other than The Price Is Right," he says, "winning those was probably the biggest moment of my life." But he and Linda never felt about Atlanta the way they felt about Las Vegas, and they were about to be trapped there by Terry's success. Was this the life they wanted? Terry quit TV, and he and Linda returned to their natural desert habitat, with all its sunshine and possibility.
Linda eventually got a job with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, overseeing staff scheduling. She has a head for numbers, which she uses to balance 260 part-time staff and their delicately calibrated hours. Linda's stone-cold on arithmetic. Terry's gift, as always, remains patterns, and after some false starts in slot machines and at a toilet-paper factory, he found his next calling: casino surveillance.
He pulled the night shift in a windowless room at Circus Circus and watched the floor through dozens of monitors. Over months of training, he learned how to spot the steady-handed men who were out to break the games. No matter how good they were, they had routines. They had patterns, and Terry could read them like the weather. He could see them in the way they bet or which tables they chose or their body language or how they nursed a drink. He saw how they counted cards. He saw how they worked holiday weekends, when the floors were busier. He saw how they shopped for dealers — hunting for the hacks who used a pinch tuck instead of a palm tuck when they cut the cards, all the edge a pro needed. They didn't cheat, exactly. They exploited imperfections, and Terry, because of the way his brain works, soon found himself sitting at his kitchen table, flipping through decks of cards and learning to count them. He could turn over fistfuls of them at a time and keep perfect count, and he would imagine that if he were playing blackjack right about now, he would be pushing out a stack of chips and feeling the hairs on the back of his neck go up.
And also because of the way his brain works, Terry necessarily found himself walking into a casino and taking a seat at a blackjack table — the one seat, to the dealer's immediate right, because a weak, pinch-tucking dealer might also show his hole card to that seat more than most — and doing the very things he had been trained to spot, but doing them better. Terry believed that his brain and his eyes and his strong, deep voice made him the perfect vessel for exploiting weakness, for capitalizing on the imperfections of others — for seeing in their patterns an opportunity, a chance for him to break the game.