The Worst Plinko Cheating Scare On The Price Is Right

"The Price Is Right" has been a game show institution for decades now. Numerous people dream of ending up a contestant on the show to play fabulous games for a shot of winning money or new appliances. Really, the only way to prepare for being a contestant is to brush up on how much common household items generally cost. Other games, like Plinko, are purely based on luck, so it's not like there are many ways to gain an upper hand in the competition, right?

While cheating seems farfetched for the game show, it's always a concern, as evidenced by one instance where a woman played Plinko and got the chip in the $10,000 spot three times in a row. It seemed like a crazy happenstance, but surely, this woman simply had some good karma stored up she was finally cashing out on. As it turns out, there were exterior forces at work, and while it seemed like cheating initially, the contestant actually had nothing to do with the fixed results. 

"The Price Is Right" host Drew Carey sat down for a chat on the podcast, "Jeff and Larry's Comedy Roundup," and he shared a tale most people were probably unaware of beforehand. It has to deal with a game of Plinko where a woman won $10,000 three times in a row. It seemed like insane odds to win that much all in a row, and right before the contestant let the fourth chip fly, someone behind the scenes stopped it and informed Carey that the game was rigged. 

Don't worry; there weren't any nefarious machinations at play. As it turns out, the team used a rigged Plinko board to film a commercial prior to the episode filming. The ad wanted to show the chips falling into the $10,000 each time, so they used a thin piece of fishing line so that it would guide the chip into the right spot. After filming, they didn't take down the fishing line, so it was still there when it came time to play a real game. No one knew until the contestant started playing, and someone recognized the error. 

Fortunately, they were nice to the woman and let her keep the $30,000 she had won on top of getting to play Plinko again (without the fishing line this time). That second round is what they used in the episode, and they moved on. Fortunately, Carey's able to laugh about the incident these days, and he was just grateful to the guy who stopped the game before the woman won any more with the fishing line aid, going on to say, "As far as I'm concerned, this guy saved us an extra $10,000, and nobody bought him dinner or anything. So I bought him a steak dinner." All in all, everything worked out for everyone in the end.