In an interesting follow up to Kniess' big win. One month to the day after the perfect showcase bid aired, Kniess' (pronounced niece) niece, Jodi Colteryahn, got on "The Price Is Right". The Kniess show aired 12/16/08 and Colteryahn's show aired 1/16/09. There are some other amazing coincidences to "realitives" shows. Colteryahn, like Kniess, was one of the 1st four contestants called to "Come On Down". Colteryahn and Kniess sat in the same seat before being called. Both relatives got up on stage by winning the third item up for bid. When Terry did his spin during the Showcase Showdown he hit $.90 on the first spin. Colteryahn's first spin on the wheel was $.95. Kniess hit the exact price on his showcase, while his niece got her showcase with a $1 bid.

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/4130480/11126329

Here is the link to a better video showing when the contestants made their bids

Don't be suckers, this man was COACHED. Look at the video again carefully, you can see him repeating the number again after he gives his answer to Drew Carey. I am so disappointed in The Price Is Right, I am through watching this show.

I thought that he was a little under with trailers being so expensive. Thought that the showcase overall was $30,000 or more. But he made a very interesting bid, even it didn't end in 5 or 0, as most contestants like to bid. Never would have thought that he bid it right on the nose! Even Drew Carey himself couldn't believe it--you could see his shocked reaction! I don't think he was cheating. It came from his head. Most of us need to do that more often--use our brains more often to make decisisions.

LOL. . . .Sing it bruce!!!!

Still, even for the guy to have a chance at the showcase he had to 1 Be randomly picked from the audience to start with, 2 win to play a pricing game (which he didn't win) and 3 win the showcase showdown buy spinning a wheel randomly. I think he was honest and this was a fluke, even when I play while watching I never round up or down I add a few extra bucks.

Where did I say or imply that I'm against people winning?

And you can't compare this with picking lottery numbers, because lottery numbers are purely random, whereas an aggregate of several MSRP's is not a random number. Plus you're talking about picking several random numbers versus one (aggregate) nonrandom number. Apples to oranges.

When someone guesses the (aggregate value) showcase price to the exact dollar (which is different from guessing the price of just ONE item, as people do in order to play one of the games on TPiR), it raises questions of cheating. I don't know what the odds are, but the fact that it's only happened one other time, in 1973, is informative, and that could have been the result of cheating as well.

If extreme geek fans of the show are allowed to sit in the audience and yell out what they know to be the winning value, the show becomes unfair to the contenstants (one or more of them). Imagine if Jeopardy allowed audience members to yell out the answers (err... the "questions").

But audience "participation" has long been a factor on TPiR. So rather than suddenly ban it after 3 decades, simply tweak the winning values a little bit, a few percentage points, so people can't memorize the winning values from previous shows in order to influence future shows. Seems like common sense to me. People winning is one thing, but winning unfairly is another.

Things could get nefarious, too, like racist audience members getting together and conspiring to sit there yelling wrong values to black contestants but correct values to the white contestants.

Even if audience participation was not the reason this guy won to the dollar, I refuse to believe he simply guessed the price exactly, to the last dollar ($....173 or whatever it was). If all prices were rounded to the nearest hundred dollars, I wouldn't be as skeptical. But in this case, one of three things happened:

1) audience member who is extreme show geek knew prices based on previous shows and yelled it out to him;
or
2) he was extreme show geek and knew the prices himself based on previous shows;
or
3) he received insider information from someone on staff at the show, or otherwise managed to wrongly acquire the winning value - to the exact dollar.

He did not just guess it. And you won't convince me that he did. So now there's someone out there who thinks the show is crooked, one way or another. I have not watched TPiR since I was 12 years old, so I don't matter to their ratings, but surely I'm not the only one questioning the validity of this guy's exact-dollar win. Clearly lots of people, since it's being yapped about on the internet, with video and all. To be clear, I don't think the first two are "cheating" per se, but they should not be permitted on a game show, especially when it could be easily stopped.

My point is simple - there's an easy way to fix two of the three possible ways he may have won.

Bruce said "But my point is, there is an easy way to prevent it from ever occurring."

But the show is largely based on "the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP)" of various items, not "a sampling of ten different retailer's selling prices." The way to get around any supposed unfair advantage is to simply switch the prizes more often, and have fewer identical prizes on the show. Regardless, it's not a big problem. One guy in 36 years of the show hit it on the head.

Barney!

The "problem" of people who watch the show way too much being able to know the prices of recurring items so they are able to remember said prices and add them up to win showcases to the exact dollar.

It's not cheating, but it allows for an unfair advantage and were it to happen frequently, it would ruin the show. that being said, it clearly does not happen frequently - quite the opposite. But my point is, there is an easy way to prevent it from ever occurring.