How the “Luckiest Ever” Contestant on ‘The Price Is Right’ Just Shocked the Audience With This Wild Win
If you ever have a chance to be a contestant on a game show, here’s a helpful piece of advice: Google it. The odds are good that someone, somewhere, has discovered a way to beat the game, or at least figured out how to play it so that you increase your odds of winning. Your good friends here at Collider have even posted a game-winning tip or two, like this one that reveals how to win at The Price Is Right‘s 3 Strikes, notorious for being the most difficult on the show, as well as this one that betters your odds at winning Cover Up. But sometimes, all the hacks and tips simply don’t help, and you may have to lean on a higher power, a little lass we call Lady Luck. And she’s been busy lately, helping one contestant win a jaw-dropping $44,000 on Wheel of Fortune on May 19th, and then again on The Price Is Right on May 28th. That’s the only explanation for how contestant Michael Ambrese landed a brand-spanking new Kia Niro LX, because it certainly wasn’t skill.
Contestant on ‘The Price Is Right’ Needs Luck To Win a Car With Pocket Change
Contestant Michael Ambrese earned a spot on stage after successfully bidding on a 65-inch 4K television, winning the TV, valued at $524, with a winning bid of $400. Ambrese made his way on stage, where host Drew Carey congratulated him and said he would be playing Pocket Change. In Pocket Change, the contestant is given $0.25, which is the selling price for the car up for grabs, which, in this case, was a 2025 Snow White Pearl Kia Niro LX (equaling the box office returns of Snow White… too soon?). Six digits are shown, five of which belong to the car’s price. The contestant then has to guess the remaining four numbers, one at a time. An incorrect guess raises the car’s selling price by $0.25, but if they are correct, that number is removed and the contestant is allowed to pick one out of 20 envelopes, each containing a value between $0.00 and $2.00. Once the final number has been guessed, the envelopes they have chosen are opened (unless they’ve guessed all the digits correctly, that is). The values in the envelope have to total up to either meet, or exceed, the final selling price. If it does, they win the car, and if they don’t… sing it with me… bum bum ba dum whaaaa.
Ambrese did not start off well, guessing six, five, and seven for the second digit after the first number, two. That increased the price of the car to $1.00, but with his next guess he selected eight, which was correct. He picked an envelope, with Carey saying, “Don’t lose hope. This is still very winnable.” On the third number he guessed wrong initially, adding another quarter to the price, but was right with his next guess and got to pick another envelope. On the fourth number, he guessed incorrectly twice, making the price now $1.75, before choosing correctly and getting another envelope. It didn’t look good for Ambrese on the final number, where, with only two numbers to choose from, he selected the wrong one, bringing the total to $2.00.
Lady Luck Smiles on ‘The Price Is Right’
This meant that the values of the four envelopes Ambrese selected needed to be at, or over, the $2.00 mark in order to win the car. The odds were decidedly against him, with the bulk of the change distribution between 5 and 50 cents. “You’re going to need a little bit of luck,” Carey, aka Captain Obvious, suggested. The first two envelopes each had $0.50, which left him $0.75 cents short of the $2.00. If the odds were bad before, they were even worse now. But the third envelope had the elusive $2.00 in it, a 1 in 20 chance selection that won Ambrese the car at a total of $3.25. Ambrese was ecstatic, the crowd went nuts, and the reveal of the final envelope having a value of exactly nothing was rendered irrelevant.
Fans were quick to hit Reddit with their takes, one calling Ambrese “the luckiest contestant in that game I’ve ever seen,” provided how everything that could go wrong did. Another simply wrote, “So happy for him.” But, however, the drama of the moment could have been much, much higher. “Amazing karma. AND he pulled the 0¢ for the last card. Imagine the drama if he pulled that one first and the $2.00 one last,” the person wrote. There’s no denying that would have made excellent television, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Ambrese was just fine with how things played out.
The Price Is Right is on weekdays on CBS.
