One this day in 1984, as Damn Interesting informs, television game show contestant in front of a live studio audience, Michael Larson, netted an incredible and record-setting cash prize in excess of one hundred thousand dollars. Although eliciting anxiety from his fellow panelists and host, Larson’s winning streak continued despite risking it all with each spin of the big board, dodging ruin for an improbable thirty-six rounds before ceding his surplus turns. It was not, however, luck that resulted in this sizeable fortune but rather a calculated modus operandi, gleaned from a long history of side-deals and schemes, an ice cream truck driver who during the off-season poured through media for get-rich quick ideas—maximising his productivity with an array of twelve tv sets tuned to different channels. 
Eventually a new game show called Press Your Luck captured Larson’s interest, realising it paid out better than others and confident he could beat the odds, studied the behaviour of the supposedly random squares and (with the help of a video cassette recorder to advanced the board frame by frame and practising with the pause button as a stand-in for the buzzer) detected the limited patterns that the gameboard followed. There were no rules restricting card-counting of this sort and Larson kept his winnings but his proclivity for easy opportunities left him outsmarted by a Ponzi scheme involving real estate flipping, relieving him of a chunk of the prize money. In response to a local radio station contest that offered a prize of thirty-thousand dollars to any individual who could produce a dollar bill with a matching serial number—which seems to have vanishingly small odds of occurring—Larson, with some objection from the bank—withdrew the rest of the prize money as singles. Larson and his common-law wife spent hours sorting through the cash in hopes of finding a match for this daily call-in segment.
synchronoptica
one year ago: more camping on the farmstead (with synchronoptica)
seven years ago: American apartheid plus an auditory illusion
eight years ago: a history of the t-shirt, a Norwegian prison plus the release of Chelsea Manning
nine years ago: the posters of the 1968 Paris Riots, a visit to Portsmouth plus coming attractions
ten years ago: automating trucking plus a visit to Fort Morgan in Gulf Shores Alabama
