TOP 07 OF 07: Number Seven
For the remainder of the year, we’ll be counting down the most memorable game show moments of 2007 that our staff decided on. There’s only one sad stipulation. It had to be regulated to things we had video clips for, which was most of it, but there were a few we couldn’t do. We’d place the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? $500,000 win really high, but we couldn’t get the rights to it, sorry!
At number seven is an international one: the first ever £250,000 UK Deal or No Deal win. It’s not involving our country directly, but it was sure a big one. Laura Pearce had a tough decision to make with a low value left, £250,000 (the top prize); and a middle-of-the-road offer. I’m usually excessively evil with the offers I like, but I even felt that they were begging for a £250,000 win with this one. But regardless, it was a pretty big moment, and very exciting. Take a look at my seventh most memorable moment of 2007.
[youtube MmI13MngfPo]
notice to all bankers out there: DON’T OFFER ON THE CHEAP, OR THIS WILL HAPPEN!
The silly thing is she’d earlier turned down £19,999 with £5k and two blues alongside the £3k and £250k. I’d have gone there, what with three boxes to open and hence a 60% chance of being reduced to £5k or less and a 30% chance of leaving two blues, but would almost certainly not have taken this; I’d have looked for (and offered) £60-70k, probably the latter.
This was the death of the show in my opinion, as the next few weeks of games saw incredibly inflated offers being rejected with alarming ease, aided and abetted by horrific host intervention, and the show was never that exciting again for me.
the reason why those kinds of low offers are turned down, is once again, the banker’s lack of math education. see the vast difference between trevor’s drop from 9,900 to 1p and laura’s rise from 19,999 to 250,000? when either situation is just about as likely, we have a net loss of over 220,000 quid! and, did you notice, banker, if you’d been a BIT less stingy and offered 50K (which i STILL would take), she’d be out and you still wouldn’t have written a 250K check to this DAY!
All other things being equal, that is.
I suspect you’d have had one person with the £250k going to the end when in reality they didn’t, simply to ‘be the first’.
That said, the £250k win triggered a great wave of risk-taking (see my previous post)…
Sometimes these offers are taken. A near-identical offer to Trevor’s went once, and Laura’s £19,999 was rather more generous and I’d have taken it myself. But £45,000? No, I’m going for it there. I’m risking £42,000 to gain £205,000.
The reason that you get players turning down spectacularly generous offers and taking mean ones – and believe me, there’s been a ton of both, and sometimes it happens in the same game! – is *their* lack of ‘math education’. They don’t consider offer generosity that much… :S