6 Counterintuitive Tricks to Beating Popular Game Shows

Let's say you find yourself going first in the speed round. If you've watched Wheel of Fortune, you'll probably guess "E." Vowels don't cost anything in this round, and every Wheel watcher knows that "E" is the most common letter in the English language. As you hear the pleasing ding and watch Vanna walk up to the glowing puzzle pieces and flip them around, you'll probably feel pretty good about your guess.

Congratulations, you've just done the stupidest thing you could have done with your turn. What you should have done is ask for something you're fairly certain won't be up on the board, like a "Z," or an "X," or an ampersand. This is because, despite what your impatient monkey brain tells you, going first is almost always a huge disadvantage.

How Does That Work?

Remember in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when the Nazis are trying to pass a series of trials to get to the Holy Grail, but all they're really doing is racing against each other to see who can die more horribly? Indy goes last and beats the game! Sure, Indy's smarter than Nazis, but how far do you think he would have gotten if he hadn't watched a bunch of them get decapitated and make poor cup choices?

It's called the "first mover disadvantage," and it says that in most turn-based contests, the first person to move has the worst chance of success because he or she is going in completely blind. As a result, the person going second gets the benefits from the information gained by the first mover without any of the costs.

This applies to any real world situation where people are competing to come up with the best answer to the same question. Steve Jobs knew this better than anybody. Despite his reputation as a great modern-day inventor, Jobs never really invented anything. Not the windows-based operating system, not the MP3 player, not the tablet and certainly not the cellphone. Jobs' business strategy was to sit back and wait for other companies to invent new products, then figure out what the coolest version of that product would look like.

Returning to the hypothetical Wheel of Fortune scenario, now that you've "taken advantage" of having the first turn, you have to pick a famous quotation solely by the position of its "E"s. If you guess "X," you pass your first mover disadvantage on to the second contestant and wait for the board to come back to you.

Of course, there's nothing stopping all three contestants from adopting this strategy, turning the speed-up round into the Mexican standoff round as they scrape their way through the bottom half of the alphabet. That's where the pleasant ding and the sight of Vanna White come in. A good sign that a show is screwing with one of your logical blind spots is if they surround the illogical option with good-looking women. For instance ...

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Despite its simplicity, economists love the game, and have described it as a nationally televised psychology experiment. In reality, every single offer the "banker" makes is determined by the average value of all the briefcases that haven't been opened yet. If you were to ask the world's foremost economist to put a valuation on your briefcase, he would come up with an almost identical figure.

The show goes to great lengths to hide the fact that there's a simple equation behind each offer. The American version even gives the banker a shadowy silhouette that you can practically feel sexually harassing his secretary through the frosted glass. This is presumably why even risk-averse contestants usually react to the first offer as though the banker just told them they could wash his balls for $20.

But as the game wears on, the contestants become far more likely to get into a downward spiral based on the "sunk cost fallacy," the illusion that the money you have lost is somehow recoverable. But when the banker's offer keeps going down, we will go down with it to the bitter end, comparing it to the offer we had five minutes before (Deal or No Deal helpfully leaves past offers up on the screen to make this extra easy). This means that the longer you play, the more likely you are to receive a lower offer, and the more likely you are to continue rejecting perfectly reasonable offers even if it requires you to act like an idiot.

How Does That Work?

Let's take the downward spiral of a contestant who we'll call Mary, because that's her name.

As the above screencap shows, each of her offers was equal to or less than the one that had come before. When the banker made the second $31,000 offer, her husband reminded her that they'd both agreed that "$25,000 would mean a lot" before the show started. But she rejected it, and kept rejecting his offers, taking on more and more risk because she was trying to get back to that first offer of $51,000 she'd turned down.

It's not just Mary. If you've ever sunk money into car repairs because you've already spent too much money on a piece of crap car, you were using the exact same brain muscle that robbed Mary up there of $50,000 (she ended up walking away with an offer of $10).

Because of the way our brains process the past and the future, we're more likely to compare our current situation to what things were like before. Logic and economists would advise you to immediately forget every offer that's been made to you the second you turn it down because, and this is important, that money no longer exists. It is imaginary money. And pretending otherwise is going to make you poorer.

Turning off the "What happened last time?" part of our brain is easier said than done. And any offer that's lower than past offers will make us feel we've "lost" however much the difference was. And so, like an episode of VH1's Behind the Music, this heady mixture of attractive women, easy money and fleeting fame can result in a rapid downward spiral caused by living in the past and fixating on the way things used to be.

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But that's just buying into the fictional premise of the show. The true key to winning Jeopardy! is not to know more than most people know about everything, but instead, to know as much as anyone knows about most things. In other words, don't become a trivia expert, just become a really good trivia amateur.

How Does That Work?

Computer scientist Roger Craig decided to figure out if there was a mathematical strategy to beating Jeopardy! because that is what nerds think about for idle entertainment. To do this, he downloaded thousands of Jeopardy! questions and answers into his computer, which went "Beep beep boop" and spat out some statistics on the average thing they're likely to ask.

What he found was that it's an illusion that you can be "asked anything" on Jeopardy! because most of it comes back to the kind of trivia you learned in high school and then quickly unlearned -- state capitals, the table of elements, the works of Shakespeare and stuff like that. When Jeopardy! does ask a more obscure question, the answer is usually the only answer you do know -- if you're put off by a question about early 20th century architects, for example, the answer is probably going to be Frank Lloyd Wright.

That's because Jeopardy! isn't really trying to find the world's biggest know-it-all. Like any television show, it's all about the viewers, who are going to be put off if every question goes way over their head. So the contestants aren't so much competing against the experts as they are competing against the plumbers and middle managers playing at home, who won't watch if they can't feel smug about knowing a bunch of the answers.

To test his theory, Craig mapped all the questions that have ever been asked on Jeopardy! and quizzed himself on how he did in each different category, then studied the biggest dots that he could answer the lowest percentage of questions in. The big green and red dot, for instance, is a section he calls "diffuse wordplay" -- the categories where all of the answers start or end with a certain letter or letter combination.

The blue dot at the bottom is presumably "social lives, and the people who have them." By visualizing what his biggest problem areas were, he was able to make himself a better Jeopardy! player without having to master any particular area of knowledge. When Craig finally went on the show to put his theory to the test, he set the all-time one-day record for the game ($77,000) and then won $250,000 in the Tournament of Champions. In short, he became the Neo of Jeopardy!

His work was just another example of data mining -- using computer programs to organize huge masses of information in an efficient and meaningful way. By visualizing the entire history of questions, he was able to discover unexpected things about how to win at Jeopardy! just like Bill James used stats to learn unexpected things about winning baseball teams. Craig's method actually helps us better analyze terrorist threats and even track your periods, if you're into that sort of thing.

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The key element of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is the constant drama provided by the lack of a game clock. This element allows contestants to mull over their eventual choice before diving all-in with their "final answer." During this period, the contestant talks out his thought process with the host and attempts to reason his way to the right answer. Even if that means spending more time trapped with Regis.

In reality, every word you say in this section of the game makes you more and more likely to do something extremely stupid.

How Does That Work?

While you're sitting and thinking about a question you're frankly clueless about, you become subject to what's known as "escalating commitment" -- you start talking yourself into an answer. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the correct answer, just that, for one reason or another, you have a vague preference toward it. Maybe just because you like the shape of the word, or the option is "bacon" and you really like bacon.

Of course, you're not going to actually admit that you're choosing an answer because it has that correct shape to it. So instead, your brain will start coming up with rational-sounding reasons why it might be true. In the end, you can make yourself almost sure of an answer you realized you didn't know only five minutes ago.

And then there's what all your "thinking out loud" does if you ultimately decide to use the audience lifeline.

In a study into how good crowds are at coming up with the right answer, James Surowiecki observed that over an extended stretch, the "Ask the Audience" lifeline produced the correct result 91 percent of the time, as opposed to 65 percent for "Phone a Friend." This is counterintuitive, since the audience is just a big group of dumbasses they pulled off the street. But when you think about it, the dumbasses who don't know the answer will just spread out randomly so that no wrong answer can dominate, while those who do all choose the right answer will bump that one to the top.

That's an amazing weapon to have at your disposal, and the only way to ruin it is by thinking out loud. If you say, "Well, I know it's not 'D,' because 'D' is a stupid letter," you've totally tainted the audience's magical truth-divining properties, even if "D" is the correct answer. If you poll the audience after a lengthy brainstorm session with Regis, the audience members who don't actually know the answer are going to agree with whatever the answer you clearly want to choose is because, hey, you're the smart guy talking to Regis. Basically by announcing any answer, even if it's wrong, a contestant herds the audience toward his "safe" option, completely destroying the power of the group.

The lesson is that a group as a whole tends to be smarter than the smartest person in that group until one jackass convinces everyone otherwise.

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In The Weakest Link, contestants are faced with a risk-reward system along with their trivia. For each question a player answers correctly, the reward for the next question is for even more money. This money is only safe, however, once it has been "banked" by a contestant who fears the show might actually be getting interesting.

The cash reward rises exponentially for every successive right answer -- $1,000 for the first, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 for the third, right up to $125,000 if you get eight in a row right. Of course, the second you get one wrong, you lose all the money that you'd built up with the previous five questions.

People who play the game often bank the money after three or four questions to be safe. That big dollar figure is just there to trick you. Right?

Actually, hard math says the "Now sounds about right" banking strategy is about the stupidest thing you could do. Due to the lopsided pay scale in which the game operates, it is actually most advantageous for teams to never bank, instead opting to attempt a full eight-combo chain each round, earning themselves $125,000 every time they make it.

On the other hand, if teams simply can't agree to collectively grow a pair, the second best option involves banking after every question, thus effectively providing the best ever example of go big or don't go at all.

How Does That Work?

It's all about maximizing your potential earnings, and no other possibility in the game can compete with the potential for winning $125,000. The only thing that's close is if you bank after every question, because every right answer earns you money. If you don't, you risk wasting whole strings of right answers on your group's one dipshit. On the other hand, if you don't bank at all, the chance of six right answers in a row can earn you more than you might otherwise have over the entire game. Either strategy will earn you more money than banking every three or four answers, which is what everyone does.

The reluctance for players to go all-or-nothing despite mathematical assurance is an example of loss aversion on a massive scale. The prospect of potentially leaving with no prize money terrifies contestants into accepting smaller, less fulfilling bank amounts that guarantee at least some reward. Basically, contestants are being offered an 80 percent chance of big money or a 100 percent chance of medium money, and even though cold math says to go big, fear overtakes logic within the mind and they wind up with just enough for the bus fare home.

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Wipeout is the Funniest Home Videos version of the game show, in which contestants padded up like football players race each other across an obstacle course made of slippery cushions, bouncy things and giant mechanical swinging shit that breaks every health and safety law it's possible to violate. If they fall off at any point, they are humiliatingly dunked into the water below and made to swim to the next portion of the course, but not before 16 or 17 multiple-angle replays of the exact moment of their crushing failure.

Short of months of intensive training flailing like an idiot in a makeshift version of the game made of lawn furniture and a garden hose, what can you do to get the upper hand at Wipeout? The answer is simply fall down as quickly and as often as possible.

How Does That Work?

If the courses on Wipeout look practically impossible by the outer limits of human ability, then you're absolutely correct. They're designed that way. Unlike most game shows, in which the thrill comes from watching a contestant win, people watch Wipeout purely to see people's flailing rag doll bodies fall on their faces. By the creator's own admission, only 10 percent of Wipeout contestants succeed in each challenge, and that's just the way they want it.

So in the first round of the show, contestants are faced with an obstacle course which, again, is designed for failure. When a contestant does fail, he must instead swim alongside the course to the finish line. But most of the slowest contestants are those who spend too much time attempting to navigate difficult portions of the course before inevitably falling into the water anyway. In lieu of all that, it's a much smarter option for a player to just jump right into the water immediately and swim for his life.

In business literature, this is known as "failing efficiently," which means that if failure is already presumed, then the most logical use of resources is in failing the best way possible. In the case of Wipeout, you give yourself a 100 percent chance of getting past the first round if you just accept the fact that you're going to fail. Don't worry if this makes you feel like a quitter. There will be plenty of opportunities to make a hilarious spectacle of your spinal column in the later rounds.

Michael Voll is an independent writer living in Maryland. Contact him about pretty much anything at michaelvoll@msn.com. Matthew Culkin is a junior English major at Tulane University. He wants anyone offering a summer internship in the Bay Area to let him know. Reach him for comment at MRCulkin@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter.

For more ways to beat the system, check out 5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness and 5 Bizarre Brain Hacks That Make You Better at Sports.

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