The Price is Right is about taking risks and getting big rewards. It also might be about fiscal responsibility. Contestant Kevin is well aware of this, which is why he befuddled host Drew Carey and a livid studio audience and took $1,500 over a very good chance to win a new car.
Kevin was playing “Let ‘Em Roll,” a game where dice with money amounts and cars are on all six sides. The point of the game is to roll five cars with three chances. It’s like Yahtzee except if things go well you pay taxes on a Nissan Versa.
And Kevin got off to a good start! He rolled four cars on his first try, along with one die with $1,500 on it. That meant if he kept the cars he had two rolls left to turn one die into a car.
But Kevin did not want to keep the cars. He wanted that money, and he told a stunned Drew Carey that he was done. The crowd was shocked, and Carey himself was stunned.
“You don’t want to roll that one to try and win the car?” Carey asked.
“No, I’ll take the $1,500,” an excitable Kevin responded.
Carey was basically pleading with him at one point, desperate for Kevin to reconsider. But his mind was made up, disengaging from the conversation and looking off into the crowd to scream a bit.
“I love the Price is Right,” he said. “Wooooooooooo.”
It’s a technique that ultimately works. Carey lets him walk away with the money, and the car is presumably crushed or hucked into the ocean or whatever happens to Nissan dreams deferred.
There are a lot of things going on here, and I’m not going to run the numbers on all of them. But basically, Kevin passed up an enormous opportunity to win a car over the guarantee of a small amount of money. In fact if money is what he’s after, he could have possibly rolled all five die again to try and win more cash.
As SN Nation’s James Dator points out, it’s even likely that Kevin made the best fiscal decision here, taking the sure money over a chance to win a car he’d have to pay taxes on that could even bump his tax bracket and cause further financial harm.
But the problem is that my lede was a lie. The Price is Right is not about fiscal responsibility. It’s about being loud, full of energy, and interacting with oversized dice and a comically large, pulsating wheel. And the odds Kevin had of winning that car were pretty good at that point. Literally the best they could possibly be without already winning it on the first roll.
Kevin is no financial wizard. He’s just a guy who got nervous on a bright stage in front of a bunch of screaming lunatics. And that’s OK. At least he got some money out of the deal.
