The Price Is Right is one of the longest-running shows in television history. Since 1956, lucky contestants have been called to "come on down" to test their skills at a variety of games.

The Price Is Right

Terry Kniess and his wife, Linda, were fans of the show who attended a taping hoping to be among the lucky few who get to play. Unlike most other potential contestants, however, they had a plan that could result in some serious cash.

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The plan was actually quite simple and quite ingenious. Terry and Linda noticed that many of the games used the same products and had contestants attempt to guess the price. Since the products were the same through the years, the prices stayed within a highly predictable range. Granted, guessing the exact price has been done before:

But Terry and Linda took it to the next level. They watched every single episode and memorized the prices.

They even made little cards and tested themselves to ensure they had those prices down cold.

The Price Is Right

When Terry got called down to Contestant's Row, he was anxious to see if this plan might actually work. The product he was asked to bid on was a Big Green Egg smoker.

Terry nailed the price with a perfect bid.

Although this was a nice prize, the real money would come when he made it to the Showcase Showdown.

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Here, the plan actually relied on a little bit of luck. Since the prizes for the showcase differed each episode, there was really no way to memorize how much these packages might actually be worth. But Terry did recognize a pattern and noticed approximately how much each prize package was worth.

When it came time for him to bid, he made a bid of $23,743. He chose this number for a few reasons. First, he knew that the packages were generally worth around $24,000 and he wanted to make sure he didn't go over, hence the $23,000. The $743 came from a combination of his wedding anniversary (7th of April) and his wife's birth month of March (3). He just hoped to get close enough to win.

He did better than come close—he got the bid exactly correct.

He was the first contestant in Price Is Right history to get the bid right on the nose. And because he was within $250, he actually won both showcases. Host Drew Carey, when revealing Terry's winning bid, didn’t really celebrate. That's because he was sure that Terry had somehow cheated. In reality, it was just a combination of luck and skill.

Luck, skill, and a lot of preparation, that is.

As Carey must have asked himself that day in the studio, who exactly is this Terry guy? Why was it his destiny to break a game that had been nothing if not predictable for half a century?

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The answer takes us back to the epicenter of chance and fortune: Las Vegas, Nevada.

Decades before Terry's historic The Price Is Right win, he was predicting the weather on the local news in Las Vegas. Trained as a meteorologist, he developed an unparalleled ability to predict future weather patterns. He began to see patterns everywhere.

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His wife, meanwhile, was the numbers person. Linda got a job running scheduling for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, an extraordinary task of arithmetic and organization. It was almost as if Terry and Linda were training their entire lives to take on The Price Is Right.

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By the 2000s, Terry had left television.

Staying in the business involved too much moving.

He and Linda loved Las Vegas, and they didn't want to chase promotions around the country, which is what you have to do in TV news.

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Terry found his home (where else?) at the casinos. He worked in surveillance, sealed in a room high in the building surrounded by video monitors. There he looked for patterns that would give away the card sharks—telltale bets, counting cards, eyeing the dealer's hand, etc. He was good at that too.

There was another member of the Kniess family in those days.

Krystal was a gorgeous Maltese. Terry and Linda doted on her. In 2008, though, Krystal's health declined. She had to be put down.

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They were devastated, of course. Years after the events in this story, Terry teared up when discussing Krystal with a reporter from Esquire. "Oh, such a special little dog," he is quoted as saying. "She could walk backwards, you know."

The Kniesses wanted to find a goal to focus on, something that would help them get through their grief.

They didn't know what, but they needed something. Then one of Linda's friends from work returned from a trip to California.

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She couldn't stop talking about how much fun it was to appear in the audience of The Price Is Right. Linda had found their new obsession.

For months after that, Terry and Linda studied tapes of the program.

That's when Terry's pattern-seeking mind made the discovery that led him to his historic win.

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The show cycled through the same pool of products. The prices of the products didn't vary. All Terry and Linda had to do was memorize prices for every product featured on the show, and they would have cracked the code. The game would be theirs to exploit.

If Terry spotted a gambler enacting a plan like this one while he was at work at the casino, he would have to notify security.

Still, there was nothing in the rules of The Price Is Right banning preparation. What they were doing was totally legal, despite later accusations of "cheating" and, presumably, the unending ire of Drew Carey.

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In the end, Terry took home a package of prizes worth $56,437.41. It included four luxury vacations—to South Africa, Scotland, Chicago, Canada. The Kniesses sold a camper, a pool table, and a karaoke machine to cover the taxes on their prizes. They kept the smoker.

They no longer watch The Price Is Right, which has changed since Terry's appearance. Prices are much more random now, and the prizes are also more upscale and less familiar to the ma-and-pa core of the show’s audience.

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At any rate, the days of gaming The Price Is Right ended with the Kniesses. The producers now change the brands of products that they use and alter small details that will affect prices (for example, changing a stereo package in a car can boost or lower the sale price). You can study to get an idea of how much things cost, but memorizing the prices is now almost impossible.

There's a long history of gaming the game shows.

Terry Kniess wasn't the first person to exploit the vulnerabilities of a popular game show. A guy named Michael Larson famously memorized the pattern on Press Your Luck to win more than $100,000 in cash and prizes.

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CBS actually refused to pay Larson, claiming that he had cheated. But when they reviewed the rules, there was nothing technically preventing someone from memorizing the board patterns, and he received his prizes. After that the show altered their patterns to ensure this couldn't happen again.

If you're a dedicated and careful game show viewer, you may notice small things like Terry and Michael did that can lead to some big paydays.

With a keen eye and a little bit of work, you could really cash in on your favorite game show.