2129 replies to this topic

[Vgmastr]

NBC will be airing this new game show every night at 8pm the week of Dec. 19-23. A contestant picks one of 26 briefcases, each one with a dollar amount inside ranging from one penny to one million. The contents of the briefcases not selected are slowly revealed, and every so often the bank will give the contestant a cash offer. The contestant can take the money and quit, or continue on with their briefcase. If the contestant never accepts a deal, they leave with whatever is in their briefcase. Howie Mandel will host.

This looks like it could be fun, and a little tense if the bank's offer is large with the million still not revealed.

NBC's Deal or No Deal website

[MaddenMustLose]

This show might pull worse ratings than Winning Lines. Seriously, who wants to watch a game show that has practically no gameplay?

[Ivang]

But it's got Howie Mandel! What, that's not enough for you?

[muchsarcasm]

I agree MaddenMustLose. The game is "Let's Make A Deal" minus costumes minus surprises minus variety.

[Screamie]

I'd love to know why NBC thinks a primetime game show is going to change their bad luck.

Howie Mandel's chin pubes. Ugh.

[skeevo666]

I'd love to know why NBC thinks a primetime game show is going to change their bad luck.

'Coz it worked for ABC with "Who Wants To Be A Millionare" . . ?

[muchsarcasm]

Actually I just realized what this game reminds me of: "The Punch Game" from The Price is Right. Call me when NBC has a one hour version of Plinko.

[A World Of No]

Blech. I'd rather they brought back Winning Lines, or at least the Wonderwall portion of it with a different front-end game. But this show is basically just a 1-in-25 pick for a million dollars. I'll watch on Monday and hope against hope that it's good, but I'm not optimistic.

[mtvcdm]

I dunno, I played their online game and I can see myself loving every minute of this.

Of course, I liked Lost. (Not the one we have recapped now. The one we recapped 4 years ago where they dumped people in some obscenely remote region of Earth and made them get back to New York.)

Edited by mtvcdm, Dec 17, 2005 @ 12:04 AM.

[skydvr]

Yeah, I originally thought "what a stupid concept", but the online game is kind of addicting. I didn't understand how the deals worked until I played the game. I thought it was more of "do you want whats in YOUR suitcase, or this other (random) one?" I like that they offer you a computed value based on what's still remaining. Even if your suitcase doesn't contain the million, as long as it's still out there, you can make some decent money....

[pablito]

The online game has shown us that there's a lot more strategy than just the initial briefcase selection. If players can find all the low-end briefcases in the first few rounds, they can make upwards of 100k. If three briefcases are left - the 0.01 the, 750k and the mil, you can win a huge amount of money even if the intial briefcase had 1cent.

The concept sounds so bad, but the online game is so addicting. I think that the first show won't do so hot, but it will make moderate gains throughout the week considering that practically everything is a repeat next week.

[MaddenMustLose]

Mtvcdm, I actually liked the 2001 Lost as well. It may not have suffered such a fate if it didn't get removed from the NBC schedule for almost a month after 9/11.

[mjamief]

I agree. After playing the online game, it sounds really interesting. Hopefully they'll have some contestants who will be willing to take a risk. It will be get very boring fast if each contestant always takes the bank's offer.

[mtvcdm]

Well, as I note from playing the game, the bank's offers will steadily go up as long as your first rounds aren't spent unceremoniously dumping the top amounts down the toilet. Think of it like this:

*The bank's amount seems to be the mean of the remaining suitcases (or, as you get into later rounds, slightly less- especially if you have a high-end briefcase still alive late in the game). You'll note that the first half of the suitcases are under $1,000. Then you have progressively bigger jumps to the million.
*As the average gets weighed down less and less by the less valuable suitcases, the bank's offer stadily rises.
*Therefore, even if you're chicken, it will usually pay to stick around a little while so the bank's offer can rise. The strategy is either hoping you picked a big-money suitcase, or closing a deal just before finding those big suitcases (and seeing the bank's offer plummet). Basically, this game looks to be one big monetary mind-fuck.

[mjamief]

I agree with you mtvcdm. I played it many times and found the bank's offer to be always less than the mean. I would be interested in finding out the exact formula though. I found the offer to be the average occassionally if there were two values left reasonable close to each other. The concept for the show is deceitfully simple - but the thought process when you play it is much more complex.

As a math/business/economics teacher, I've played these kind of activities with my students and so often they are very conservative. I can only assume these students represent the population at large. Hopefully, the show will select contestants who won't grab the cash when it hits a relatively high amount
(like $10 000).

I managed to win $500 000 after playing it only five times. I can only assume the placement of dollar values is random and is not skewed to keep people playing online.

I hope it lasts for more than a week. Maybe it can hook up with The Apprentice and be one of the tasks the teams do. Which ever team wins the most money wins the task. I think it would be a blast!

Edited by mjamief, Dec 17, 2005 @ 10:30 PM.

[aujoshh]

Even though the concept sounds dumb, I actually got hooked on this show watching it afternoons in Australia. Despite the presence of Howie Mandel, it's all kinds of awesome, as it seems to becoming apparent here.

[iMissEthan]

I heard that members of the home audience will be able to win $ by texting in to the show during the airing. That might help boost the ratings if they get that word out widely enough.

[redbirds]

care or don't care



don't care!

[Canadian Tyler]

Yeah, I'm with you redbirds.
There needs to be something else to the show. Just seemed to drag on a little, but maybe it depends on the contestant.

ETA: What is with the "Wall o' Babes" (good name for it, kib)? I don't care what their names are, just open the case. And of course the jokes involving them and their boxes are running rampant in my dirty little mind.

Edited by Canadian Tyler, Dec 19, 2005 @ 9:05 PM.

[kib]

There needs to be something else to the show

Perhaps something inappropriate with the "Wall 'O Babes"

BTW - Howie is an insufferable asshat

[amnewsboy]

It seems rather anticlimactic when, in a situation like tonight, you have a dumbass who gets offered a huge amount of money, declines it, then loses any chance of getting more than that.

Having said that... I can't believe I was entertained for that long by people opening suitcases and a fake cell phone.

[CindyBee]

BTW - Howie is an insufferable asshat

Gawd, Howie was awful!!

And that stupid husband cost that lady $113,000! Bet he sleeps on the sofa for awhile. Idiot.

[A Conspiracy]

It lacks the standard game show interaction where you can feel good because you knew an answer that the person didn't (or you got it before them).
You might can guess the right case to pick or offer to take, but there's no knowledge base that gets you involved to make that decision

[depthfunction]

When I tuned in to this show and saw Howie Mandel was hosting, my first instinct was to change the channel. I should have followed my instincts because --

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!

They could have squeezed this entire program into about 30 minutes, if they had only reduced the number of commerical breaks from about 40 down to just 3.

On shows like this, the Million dollar reveal is, quite literally, the money shot. Ideally, you want it to occur in the case that the contestant has chosen, but more likely than not, the audience is subject to a premature ejaculation.

And that wasn't a real banker in the shadows, just some dude surfing the net for porn. He probably had a better time than those of us watching this crapfest.

But day-um! That "grandmother" looked very, very young--her husband too. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Edited by depthfunction, Dec 19, 2005 @ 9:20 PM.

[AgentX]

BTW - Howie is an insufferable asshat

Word. Go back to the Boston Pizza commercials Howie.

They could have squeezed this entire program into about 30 minutes, if they had only reduced the number of commerical breaks from about 40 down to just 3.

But day-um! That "grandmother" looked very, very young

In complete agreement here with both points. They dragged it on for so much longer than necessary, well past American Idol and Millionaire draggings. I thought that each contestant was going to get thirty minutes so they could fit the better part of two people per show.

[Fleuryous]

The bank's offers were consistently below the mean (except for the second to last one when there wasn't much to lose at that point), but that's because the bank should be taking into account human beings' inherent risk averseness.

If I were going to be on a million game shows with a million chances, then pretty much my behavior will be close to expected value calculations. I *have* other chances.

But these contestants don't, and hence, the bank can offer a buffer for people not taking risks.

There were a couple of huge subtexts to this episode that I found really disturbing. While I'm sure her family was comfortable, she expressed an interest in buying a house. $140k, $90k, $80k, they would go a lot farther to making that a reality than a 20% chance of winning $500k. If you cannot afford to take chances, you *shouldn't* be taking chances.

Secondly, I am a little bit disturbed by how much she deferred to her husband. Her daughter seemed to be the most intelligent calculator of things here. But her husband kept making silly grand signs, slitting his throat, and waving his arms. I hope that he's willing to work however many extra hours it would take to make the extra $50k-$75k that they lost.

Weird aside: Did anyone else recognize any of the models? I saw Lindsay from the Get Out! travel show. And also, Bonnie Jill Loughlin from an episode of Young, Beautiful, and Trying to Make it (in Hollywood).

Edited by Fleuryous, Dec 19, 2005 @ 9:46 PM.

[mtvcdm]

I played enough rounds to have an idea of how 'the book' (ala blackjack) would play it.

The book said to get out at $138,000, and that's where I said 'deal'. I figured she could dodge the $500,000 for one or two cases, but not forever. She didn't want to go one more, she was afraid 8 was the $500,000, but then she deferred to her family. And just like she feared... contestants, play the online game, get some experience, and go with it. There are times to go for it, there are times to stop. This was a time to stop.

As for the show, the pacing was on the slow side, yeah. They really should speed it up.

[alexmarsz]

well past American Idol and Millionaire draggings.

At least it didn't hit Greed records. I swear, the first time someone got near $1mil on that show they went the last 12 minutes of the show and the first 16 of the next without asking a single question. I always felt that show could have been interesting due to the "most popular" type of questions, if not for the pacing. But I digress.

The expected value of a starting game is $131,477.54. Obviously it varies by round, but at a random point in a random game with random cases removed it's a rule of thumb. Not surprisingly they tend under, but I think the online version goes way under. Played through a few games fast to get a feel and at one point there were only two choices left (my "aside" one and the one in front of me.) Values were $75k and $100k. The "deal" was $73,000.

It's pretty disappointing. I was hoping they'd have some twist to at least approximate the Monty Hall problem, but this vanilla version has all the intrigue of flipping quarters behind the gym in 7th grade. At least they can spice it up later, should it survive.

[BitterOldJoe]

Weird aside: Did anyone else recognize any of the models?[/quote]

Embarrassingly enough, yes. Two of them -- Leyla and Kristal were part of the... uh... WWE Raw Diva Search.

I'll go crawl back into my hole of "you watch that?".

Edited by BitterOldJoe, Dec 20, 2005 @ 2:48 AM.

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[Fleuryous]

Speaking of the models (again), I really found it odd that Howie kept referring to them by name. Not that models don't deserve names, but it seems a little odd because there were so many of them. I'm sure Howie had a good time meeting and greeting to remember their names for the show.

Seemed very Price's Right of the producers to add that element to the show, especially since they seemed to have included quite a few models who have been on other shows.