Video: Most Unlucky “Deal or No Deal” Ever?
If you’ve searched YouTube for Deal or No Deal videos you’ve, most likely, found an Australian clip featuring contestant Josh removing the top four values in a row. He left with just $10. I think what happened on yesterday’s edition of Deal on Channel 4 may trump this moment. Our contestant is Mark. It’s a special “Gold Medal Deal” week where, if a contestant can successfully use a catapult to get a ball into one of three rings, (s)he will get the right to go one box at a time and possibly win a holiday. In Deal‘s Hall of Fame is Nikki Tucker, who had the unluckiest game on the British version, never having an offer higher than £250. We’ve got a new record holder.
Luck is clearly not with Mark. The boxes don’t work out, the board doesn’t work out, the catapult mini-game doesn’t work out, and even The Banker’s rare instances of giving disastrous contestants a chance at something extra doesn’t work out. I’d go into more specifics but it just needs to be seen to be believed. The picture attached to this article doesn’t give full justice to what happened and, somehow, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve got no idea what the odds of removing 10 of the 11 reds in the first 11 box selections are but it can’t be good. The game gets no better from here. Instead of a clip, which won’t give you the full experience, someone uploaded the episode on YouTube. Take a look. You have to see it to believe it.
The game bounces between hysterical, depressing, and jaw dropping all at once. It’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like this on any version of Deal. Easily the most unlucky game of all time. Mark had no shot, sadly.
The probability of choosing, from the 22 boxes, 10 of 11 from the red and 1 of 11 from the blue is, mathematically: the product of (11 choose 10) times (11 choose 1) divided by (22 choose 11), or (11*11/705432) = 0.0172%. Expressing this as a fraction, he had a less than 1 in 5000 chance of this happening.
Very unlucky indeed.
But you know it could’ve happened with equal probability the other way– picking 10 of 11 blue boxes.
Also, it’s likely that his bad luck was balanced out, figuratively speaking, by someone who had phenomenal good luck. (Although there is no explicit guarantee made by the laws of mathematics of this happening, of course.) But I do recall seeing one Deal episode where the last two choices someone had were the two highest amounts.
Speaking of odds, what really irritates me about this show is that despite having a 1 in 22 (4.5%) chance of picking the quarter-million, no male has won it in over 1900 episodes. At least 3 came so close but dealt at the last offer, and at least another 3 went for it at the very end but didn’t have it. Even a guy earlier this year who denied an unprecedented 160,000 pounds with 50,000 and 250,000 remaining just for the title didn’t have it. I really hope the guy with the right box and the right amount of guts goes on that show and wins it already. Who knows, it might be Noel Edmonds himself when he plays the 2000th episode.
The only way that 1 in 22 players will win the £250,000 is if all players continued to open boxes at least until the top case is revealed. Whenever a player takes the deal, he ends the game prematurely. If you calculate the percentage of times that a player selects the £250,000 case at the beginning of the game, it will be very close to the expected 4.5%.
The opening of this game mirrors the opening of a previous game (around February) where a guy opened 10 blues in the first 11. It’s a rarity no matter which way you go.