Deal or No Deal

God what has television deteriorated to? This is one of the most watched shows on television now and they got Howie Mandell to host it? How far has he fell?

For those of you that haven’t seen this fine peice of turdvision: A “player” (used very loosely) picks a briefcase at random from a bunch of cases with varying dollar amounts in them. That case becomes theirs. They don’t know what is in it. They then have to pick 6 cases to remove. Again at random. The mystery banker then offers them a dollar amount to give up, based on the possible dollar amounts they have left. They make a deal or they don’t, then the process repeats with different amounts of cases they have to get rid of.

All of this is just randomly guessing as to what cases to remove. There are no clues and no intelligence is needed to play the game. The only aspect of the game that isn’t completely random is probaby the number the banker comes up with. I am sure he is fed that based on probability and odds.

There is no skill needed and only a small amount of brain activity to figure out if you should take the deal or not. This is the big deal on TV right now!

What happened to games shows that actually required you to be good at something. At least Who Wants to be a Millionaire
required you to have knowledge of something. It was still a lot of theater and needless drama, but it did require thinking and maybe a little logic. This is just sad.

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2 Responses to Deal or No Deal

  1. Pauline says:

    wow, that would be a very boring show. I hadn’t heard of it. I can believe that it is possible that it would be popular though. people like things that don’t require alot of thought

  2. Michael says:

    I ran across the show while flipping channels last night. I especially love how the people who play the game have developed a rather twisted set of heuristics to determine how “well” they’re doing.

    I only watched about 5 minutes of it, but the woman playing alternated between giddy excitement and despair depending on the ratio of high values left to low values left. I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have in MATH-329, but I’m pretty sure that it’s going to tend towards an even distribution (even in a 20-item sample set). I got the impression that the people who are really into this game are the same people who think you can actually win money from casinos.

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