Some people like to play, and some people live to play. A new movie in theaters, called "The Luckiest Man in America," tells the real-life story of Michael Larson, an Ohio man on a mission to outsmart a popular game show.
The 1980s game show “Press Your Luck” combined a bit of trivia with a bit of hand eye coordination and a lot of, well, luck.
A light would fly around a large board, seemingly at random, highlighting different squares, in which alternated prizes, money, chances for extra spins or the villain of the show: the Whammy.
If you stopped the light on the Whammy, instead of one of the prize boxes, you lost everything you had accrued to that point.
It struck a chord with a young Adam Nedeff, now a game show historian who credits the show with hooking him on the genre.
"The lights flashing all over the board. You've got all the colors of the rainbow on that game board. You have a cartoon character who's the villain of the game, the Whammy. That show is a gateway drug for little kids who get addicted to game shows," said Nedeff.
When the show "Press Your Luck" premiered in September of 1983, it almost immediately caught the eye of Michael Larson, an ice cream truck driver from Lebanon in Southwest Ohio.
"Michael's family has even commented that Michael was sort of driven by the notion that he was smarter than other people," said Nedeff, who's written extensively on Larson in his role as a historian for the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
Larson was known to watch a bank of TVs in his living room that would play different shows simultaneously, while he watched them all, looking for something to sink his teeth into. "Press Your Luck" specifically transfixed him, and he locked on to the big board with the lights flying around. After watching and re-watching episodes for several months, Larson came to realize he could beat it. So he drove across the country to be a contestant on the show.
After an uneventful trivia round, in which contestants answer questions to win spins on the big board in round two, Larson put his plan into motion. He went on an extended run, stopping the light only on the squares that offered cash and extra spins. He chose to "press his luck" again and again, risking landing on a Whammy and losing everything he'd made. But it never happened.
Instead, he won $110,239, worth over three times that amount in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars.
"This is something that nobody had anticipated. So everybody was really dumbfounded about how could this guy do this? What do we do in the case of something like this?" said Bob Boden, a network exec at CBS who worked on the show.
A new movie sets out to answer that question with a bit of extra dramatic flair. It’s called "The Luckiest Man in America," and it stars Paul Walter Hauser as Larson, and Walton Goggins as the show's energetic host, the late Peter Tomarken.
So what was Larson’s trick to beating the board? The lights weren’t really random at all. They followed a set of only five patterns. A set that Larson, in his room with his wall of TVs, had memorized.
But it soon became clear he was playing with a stacked deck.
"$20,000 especially in 1984 was a small fortune. So generally speaking a contestant who went on after winning $20,000 would agonize over it," said Nedeff.
Contestants playing the game as intended were constantly in danger of losing everything by hitting a Whammy. But Larson didn't need to deliberate at all before pressing his luck. In fact he didn’t even say the show’s catchphrase — "Big bucks, no whammies" — or much of anything at all. He was too focused on the board, and that was a dead giveaway to the show's producers.
Before the show had even got to air, its creator and director, Bill Carruthers, had recognized that the small number of light patterns could be exploited and he warned the network. it was beatable if anyone ever picked up on it and warned the network.
"CBS kind of blew that off because they didn't want to spend the extra money on computer software in 1983 that would allow them to either be more random or program more patterns into the board," said Nedeff.
It also seems, someone on staff detected something wasn't quite normal with Larson even before he made his way on the show.
"I know that Bobby Edwards, who was the head contestant coordinator at the time, had some, had some reservations about Michael [during the pre-interview process]," said Boden.
He couldn't elaborate in detail, and Carruthers overruled his objections and brought Larson on the show.
They deemed Larson hadn’t technically cheated and allowed him to keep his windfall. Still, after the game, CBS decided to increase the number of patterns to prevent such chicanery in the future.
Larson’s desire to outsmart people wouldn’t let him do something sensible like just riding off into the sunset with a newly flush investment portfolio. Instead, as Nedeff explained, he pressed his luck with a different game show: "Sale of The Century."
"The idea was they had a $40,000 jackpot up for grabs. And on every episode for about a month, they would put a series of six digits on the screen and they said if you mail in a $1 bill that has these serial digits on it in this order you'll win a cut of this $40,000," said Nedeff.
Larson decided to pull his "Press Your Luck" winnings out of the bank in $1 bills, so he could make a run at the serial number prize. He was seen coming home day after day carrying grocery bags […] that contained stacks of cash."
What happened next is about as predictable as a foolhardy contestant pressing their luck and losing it all to a Whammy:
"Somebody broke in one night and took off with money. So Michael lost a large chunk of his money in the robbery. So, Michael pretty much went through all the money he won in under a year," said Nedeff.
Michael's story fits the archetype of the Ohio man. An eccentric, misunderstood guy who lived life a bit unconventionally, who came into the public consciousness in a wave and disappeared even faster.
"I don't think that Michael was strange because he was from Ohio. I thought he was strange because he was strange. You could have a study done about the weirdness of Ohio contestants versus other states, and my hunch is that it might rank towards the top, but I couldn't verify that," said Boden.
But Larson made his mark.
"I think that it's indisputable that this is one of the greatest stories in game show history, if not the greatest," said Boden.
That's why Boden spearheaded the documentary, "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal" in 2003, while working at The Game Show Network. The documentary reunited the original host, Peter Tomarken, with the surviving contestants who had competed against Larson, who passed away in 1999 from cancer. It also featured interviews with the original creator, Bill Carruthers, and others who worked on the show.
"It was the highest rated show in the network's history and that record lasted for nine years," said Boden.
They didn't stop at a documentary. Boden and the Game Show Network also brought back the two surviving contestants who had lost to Michael Larson on the original show in 1984 to play a rematch with his brother, James Larson, on a special episode of the 2003 revival.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that ultimately, the Whammy comes for everyone. Michael Larson passed away in 1999, living in Florida, after becoming estranged from his family (and possibly hunted by the FBI, according to his brother). But he secured his place in the memories and imaginations of a generation of game show fans. With the release of "The Luckiest Man in America," he gets another chance for a posthumous victory lap.
See more from the interviews with Bob Boden and Adam Nedeff, with more details from Larson's historic run on "Press Your Luck" below.