Mo- (W)NBA Carnation

A man on The Price Is Right guessed the showcase at $23,743. The actual retail price was $23,743. The show's own staff thought he had cheated. In September 2008, Terry Kniess was on stage with a trailer, a pool table and a karaoke machine in front of him. His opponent passed the showcase to him. He didn't round the number. In the video below, host Drew Carey reads the result: "Actual retail price, $23,743. You got it right on the nose." Kniess won both showcases, $56,437 in prizes. It was the first exact showcase bid since the early '70s. Behind the scenes it was a crisis. Carey and the staff worried the show was rigged and that someone had fed him the answer. Kniess later said he had recorded and watched every episode for four months and had seen all three items before. The 743, he said, was his PIN, built from his wedding date and his wife's birth month. But there was someone else in the audience. Ted Slauson, a math teacher, says he went to 37 tapings and spent years tracking prices. "The same refrigerator freezer is on four different episodes... $789 all four times." Slauson later claimed he helped Kniess make the perfect bid. Kniess says he did it alone. After that, the producers started rotating in more and different prizes so the prices couldn't be memorized. Bob Barker, who hosted for 35 years, put it best: "Without those people, I would have had to work for a living." Was it the smartest contestant in the show's history, or the best-hidden helper in the crowd?