How Does The Price is Right's 'Perfect Bid' Coup Rank Among Game Shows' Greatest Scandals?

3. Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: Charles Ingram's Secret Lifeline

Oh, Charles. What the hell were you thinking? Ingram was a contestant on the UK version of Millionaire, and he ascended the ladder of prize money until, well, he stopped knowing the correct answers. Then he began to listen to fellow contestant Tecwen Whittock in the audience, who coughed once if the answer was "A," twice for "B" and so forth. Even Charles's wife Diana contributed a telltale cough to a pop music question. Ingram was convicted on one count of deception after "winning" the full 1,000,000 pounds (and he, his wife, and Whittock were sentenced to jail time), but he's now a novelist.

2. Press Your Luck: No Whammies for Michael Larson

One thing's for certain: No game-gaming mastermind was creepier than Michael Larson. The "unemployed ice cream truck driver" pulled a fast one on '80s staple Press Your Luck by memorizing the gameboard's patterns of dollar amounts, prizes, and Whammies. Winning contestants usually won around $10,000 on Press Your Luck, but since Larson had effectively deduced how to always hit the "Big Bucks" on his spins, he kept building his jackpot until he climbed to over $110,000. It wasn't cheating, and in fact, it wasn't even that ingenious a plan -- Larson had simply conquered a gaming device that flaunted its limited "randomizing" capabilities.

1. Twenty-One: Charles Van Doren vs. Herbert Stempel

The other game show scandals have their titillating moments, but none of them brought down an industry the way the original bad boys of complicity Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stempel did. As chronicled in the killer biopic Quiz Show, producers and sponsors of the '50s game show Twenty-One were tiring of their relatively low-key champion Stempel and wanted to replace him with someone more all-American and "likable." They forced Stempel to miss an easy question concerning that year's Best Picture winner Marty and fed Van Doren answers about everything from Columbus's journeys to Henry VIII's wives. After Van Doren's subsequent winning streak landed him the cover of Time and a correspondent spot on NBC's Today, suspicions arose about the veracity of his performance. One magnificent court case later, big money game shows disappeared from the airwaves and viewers were left to find comfort in Arlene Francis's fabulous blindfolds on What's My Line?.

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