Terry Kniess has prepared. Over the back of the living-room couch, he's draped the yellow T-shirts he and his wife, Linda, wore that fateful morning on The Price Is Right. Hers has a photograph of their beloved departed Maltese on the front: "This is my Krystal and she was spayed," it reads. "Is your pet spayed or neutered?" Host Drew Carey's signature is on the back. Terry's shirt is simpler, and it's unsigned: "Las Vegas loves The Price Is Right." On the coffee table, he's laid out the iconic name tags he and Linda were given, as well as their green seat assignments for the first of two tapings on September 22, 2008, in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS's Television City: 004 and 005 — right down in front, immediately to the left of the four podiums on Contestant's Row. He has the giant white cue card that a stagehand held up — TERRY KNIESS — because most contestants can't hear announcer Rich Fields telling them to come on down above the sound of the crowd. (Terry couldn't.) He also has the operating instructions for the Big Green Egg, "The World's Best Smoker and Grill," which Terry won with a perfect bid of $1,175 from Contestant's Row. It's by the pool out back, and Terry agrees that it's awesome. He has Linda's passport out, just in case, and their marriage certificate, dated April 7, 1972. "I know I would ask to see it," he says. He turns over the back of the giant white cue card to show the meticulous notes he jotted down after the show, including his final take — actual retail price, $56,437.41 — after he won both Showcases, the game's ultimate prize, with yet another perfect bid, the first in the show's thirty-eight-year-long daytime history: $23,743. And then, last, he lifts up a copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline DREW CAUGHT UP IN PRICE IS RIGHT RIGGING SCANDAL and with a story about Terry on page 9, his name misspelled ("Terry Neese") but the numbers exactly right.

"There's such a thing as being too perfect."

"If there's one thing I've learned through all this," Terry says, "it's that there's such a thing as being too perfect."

Terry is sixty years old, with silver hair and glasses. He looks like he might design bridges or maybe sell cars, but he began his career as a television meteorologist in Las Vegas. Today, many TV weathermen don't know any more about weather than the guy doing sports. Terry is different. He understands how weather works. He sees patterns in things like wind lift and barometric pressure and the way Krystal used to hide behind the furniture; he has a better understanding than most of causes and effects. Although friends joked about his working in Las Vegas — I'm guessing today's going to be hot and sunny — Terry knew that Las Vegas was a tough place for him to be right. Las Vegas has storms, sudden and violent. But even in those storms, Terry became expert. He could see the rain coming even when others couldn't.

He was good on TV, too, had a strong, deep voice and a friendly face. But more important, Terry was accurate. That combination made him a weatherman worth pursuing, and he and Linda began jumping across the country to bigger and more lucrative stops. First they went to Waco, Texas, and then to Springfield, Missouri, before Terry finally cracked a Top Ten market in Atlanta. There, he won two Southeast Regional Emmy Awards, back to back, in 1993 and 1994. They are on his fireplace mantel. "Other than The Price Is Right," he says, "winning those was probably the biggest moment of my life." But he and Linda never felt about Atlanta the way they felt about Las Vegas, and they were about to be trapped there by Terry's success. Was this the life they wanted? Terry quit TV, and he and Linda returned to their natural desert habitat, with all its sunshine and possibility.

Linda eventually got a job with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, overseeing staff scheduling. She has a head for numbers, which she uses to balance 260 part-time staff and their delicately calibrated hours. Linda's stone-cold on arithmetic. Terry's gift, as always, remains patterns, and after some false starts in slot machines and at a toilet-paper factory, he found his next calling: casino surveillance.

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He pulled the night shift in a windowless room at Circus Circus and watched the floor through dozens of monitors. Over months of training, he learned how to spot the steady-handed men who were out to break the games. No matter how good they were, they had routines. They had patterns, and Terry could read them like the weather. He could see them in the way they bet or which tables they chose or their body language or how they nursed a drink. He saw how they counted cards. He saw how they worked holiday weekends, when the floors were busier. He saw how they shopped for dealers — hunting for the hacks who used a pinch tuck instead of a palm tuck when they cut the cards, all the edge a pro needed. They didn't cheat, exactly. They exploited imperfections, and Terry, because of the way his brain works, soon found himself sitting at his kitchen table, flipping through decks of cards and learning to count them. He could turn over fistfuls of them at a time and keep perfect count, and he would imagine that if he were playing blackjack right about now, he would be pushing out a stack of chips and feeling the hairs on the back of his neck go up.

And also because of the way his brain works, Terry necessarily found himself walking into a casino and taking a seat at a blackjack table — the one seat, to the dealer's immediate right, because a weak, pinch-tucking dealer might also show his hole card to that seat more than most — and doing the very things he had been trained to spot, but doing them better. Terry believed that his brain and his eyes and his strong, deep voice made him the perfect vessel for exploiting weakness, for capitalizing on the imperfections of others — for seeing in their patterns an opportunity, a chance for him to break the game.

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For a fan, walking into the Price Is Right studio is a surreal experience: It's like walking inside your TV, if your TV were one of those giant wooden behemoths that left radiation burns in the carpet. After surviving more than seven thousand episodes, nearly every piece of the set is worn smooth and instantly familiar. Backstage, the seventy-three pricing games that have been used for generations — Plinko, Any Number, Cliff Hangers, Secret "X" — are lined up in tidy rows. There are jungles of cables and drawers with masking-tape labels containing the flags from Hole in One or the little prize tickets from Punch a Bunch. In person, the set looks less like an American institution — home to the longest-running game show in history — and more like a traveling carnival that can be torn apart in minutes.

But then the studio fills with people and it becomes electric: a strange, optimistic mix of frat boys and blue-haired biddies and tough-looking Latino kids, hollering themselves hoarse over the price of Chips Ahoy! in one of those rare rooms where ordinary people can make their ordinary lives seem larger, the unsung against the world. Game-show designers talk about The Price Is Right and its perfect act structure, its high wins-per-minute ratio, and its elemental combination of skill and luck, but mostly, The Price Is Right works because in it, the housewife who has cut coupons her entire life can finally see her reward for years of paying mind. It's all within reach. It's a game that anyone can win. "The more you've lived life, the better you'll do here," says Mike Richards, the show's new executive producer. "Boom, you get picked, and boom, you walk out of here with $50,000 worth of stuff. It's insane."

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In May 2008, Terry and Linda had to put Krystal down. Linda has photographs of the Maltese all over her office, and Terry still gets a little choked up when he talks about her. "Oh, such a special little dog," he says. "She could walk backwards, you know." They decided they needed something to focus on, some spot on the horizon, to get them over their sense of loss. Arica, a friend of Linda's from work, had just come back from The Price Is Right and raved about how much fun it was.

The Price Is Right. Here was a perfect challenge. It fit the ways their brains worked. They began watching the show in earnest. Before they stepped foot in the Bob Barker Studio, they were going to be prepared; "Good TV is rehearsed TV," Terry likes to say. For four months during the summer of 2008, they recorded The Price Is Right every morning and watched it together in bed every night, Terry hunting for patterns and Linda doing the math. It didn't take long for them to find their edge. In The Price Is Right's greatest strength, he and Linda also found its greatest weakness: It had survived all those years because it seemed never to change. Even when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker — the show's own version of Vatican II — he rocked a similar skinny microphone. Behind all the screaming and seeming chaos, there was a precise and nostalgic order. Terry says he first sat upright in bed when a distinctive grill called the Big Green Egg came up for bid again and again. It was always $1,175.

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In 1984, there was a part-time ice cream salesman named Michael Larson who became a contestant on a game show called Press Your Luck. At the heart of that game, which also aired on CBS, there was a "Big Board" with eighteen squares on it. Each square lit up for a microsecond; when a contestant pressed a button, the lights stopped flashing and the player "landed" on that square. Behind it might be a prize, usually cash, or a Whammy. The Whammy erased the contestant's earnings to that point — hence, each successive spin meant pressing your luck.

Unless your name was Michael Larson, and you had invested in a newfangled machine called a VCR, and when you weren't selling ice cream, you recorded Press Your Luck and watched for patterns in the lights. And Larson found those patterns. He gave numbers to the squares and he found that, for whatever mechanical hitch or cosmic reason, there was never a Whammy behind what he labeled Square 4 or Square 8. And so Larson pressed his luck without relent, far longer than any other contestant in the history of the game, always landing on 4 or 8, collecting a record $104,950 in cash as well as a sailboat and trips to Kauai and the Bahamas.

Now, the way Larson studied lights, Terry Kniess studied prices. He saw that virtually every prize on The Price Is Right, from a pack of gum to the flashiest car, repeated. He and Linda memorized their values the way Terry had learned to count cards. When they felt they were ready, they made their way to California. They got up in the early morning hours of September 22, 2008, and waited in the dark outside the metal gates at Television City. There were only three people in line in front of them: an older couple named Norbert and Frances and a middle-aged man from Texas named Ted. At exactly six o'clock in the morning, the gates swung open, and Terry and Linda walked across the parking lot, dizzy with the numbers flashing in their heads.

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On the best game shows, the contestants go on a journey, climbing toward an almost mystical apex. The Price Is Right ends with the Showcase, the final showdown between the two players who have traveled from the audience to Contestant's Row, up onstage, through a pricing game, and past the Big Wheel. Two collections of prizes are presented to them, and the contestants each bid on one — the closest without going over wins. And if one of them comes within $250, that contestant wins both. Now, against all odds, Terry suddenly found himself standing beside an excitable woman named Sharon. It was down to them. The first Showcase opened with a karaoke machine. Next came a pool table. Then a seventeen-foot camper. Sharon passed on that Showcase, which meant that it was Terry's to win or lose. He looked into the audience for a moment, leaned into his microphone, and said his bid as though he were reading it from a slip of paper: $23,743.

"Wow," Drew Carey said. "That's a very exact bid." Then Sharon saw her Showcase: trips to Chicago; Banff, Alberta; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Cape Town, South Africa. She bid $30,525. "We'll be right back, folks," Carey said. "Don't go away."

And then the show just stopped.

Even before the Showcase, there had been a feeling among some of the show's staff that something was amiss. The Price Is Right pays out of pocket for most of the prizes that it gives away, and the prize budget is fixed. If it's been giving away too many cars especially, it'll pull out some of the harder pricing games, Range Game or That's Too Much, to balance the books. They're not rigged, but they rely on the natural tendency of most contestants to guess somewhere in the middle. In the first instance, contestants almost always stop the game too early; in the second, they almost always stop it too late. The further the producers push the prices toward the extremes of possibility, the less likely someone will win. On that morning, however — no matter the game, prize, or price — everybody was winning. The show was getting rolled.

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A young man named David kicked things off by winning a car playing Any Number, nailing it with his last guess. Then another young man, a chiropractic student named Zachary, won $2,000 with It's in the Bag. Then came Terry and his perfect bid for the Big Green Egg. Strangely, Terry lost one of the easier games, Switch?, because he believed that an Apple computer was worth more than a pair of exercise bikes. ("I didn't see that there were two bikes," he says today, shaking his head, "and I thought a terabyte sounded like a lot of memory.") But after Terry hit ninety cents on the Big Wheel to win his way into the Showcase, every other contestant swept clean through: Sharon had also won a car, and another woman, Julie, won an entertainment center after she changed her guess on Pick a Number at the last second.

Kathy Greco, whose job includes holding the sacred book that contains the winning prize values, was among the first to get a sick feeling in her stomach. Mike Richards had been on the job only a few weeks; just thirty-three years old, he had auditioned to replace Bob Barker before he was given the role of executive producer instead. To make room for him, Roger Dobkowitz — who had been one of the producers since 1972 and was widely considered the show's institutional memory — had been let go. The twin losses of Barker and Dobkowitz — among other changes, including the arrival of a rotating cast of young models to replace the aging familiars — had left devoted fans of The Price Is Right feeling out of orbit. They complained bitterly in online forums, pinning much of the blame on Drew Carey. He represented change, and for Loyal Friends and True — Bob Barker's term of affection for the show's most obsessive fans — change was the enemy. For nearly four decades, they had found a joy and a comfort in a place that had been made just for them.

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Greco had decided the fix was in. Charles Van Doren on Twenty-One; Michael Larson on Press Your Luck. There were whispers backstage that Dobkowitz had somehow exacted his revenge, spilling the show's secrets. Then Terry and Sharon had made their Showcase bids, and Greco had looked in her prize book. That was it. She fled behind the curtain to the left of the two podiums where Terry and Sharon danced to the music being pumped into the studio, oblivious to the unfolding drama. Greco pulled the plug.

Drew Carey had noticed that a lot of people were winning, but he liked when that happened. "I'd like everybody to win," he says today. He's finished one taping and is waiting to begin the second. This morning he enjoyed bantering with an obsessive fan from Hawaii named Michael; during a commercial break, Michael rattled off the historical values of Range Gameprizes with alarming precision. Carey smiled down at him from the stage and said, "I'm taking you to Vegas."

Carey likes to gamble — he plays blackjack — and it had been his custom to place side bets with the crew on which of the two contestants would win the Showcase. He knew something was up the instant he asked Greco whether Terry or Sharon had won. "She was white as a sheet," he remembers.

"She says, 'He got it right on the nose.'

" 'Has that ever happened?'

"And she says, 'No.'

"I said, 'Holy shit.' "

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And then Carey remembers what happened next: "Everybody thought someone had cheated. We'd just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, 'Are we ever going to air this?' And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job."

And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. "I was like, Fuck this guy," Carey says. "When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It's not airing anyway. So fuck him."

Carey announced Sharon's bid first. Actual retail price, $31,019. She had missed by just $494 — a remarkably close bid, since trips were notoriously difficult to figure. Trips were budget savers.

Then came Terry. "You bid $23,743," Carey said through his teeth.

Today, at his kitchen table, Terry says he'd seen all three prizes before. The karaoke machine was $1,000. The pool table, depending on the model, he says, went for between $2,800 and $3,200. Terry went with $3,000. The rule of thumb for campers, he knew, was about $1,000 a foot, plus a little more; he says today he'd actually misheard the length of the trailer, thought Rich Fields had said it was nineteen feet long — so, $19,000. That gave him $23,000. And then, he says, he got lucky. He picked 743 because that was the number he and Linda had used for their PINs, their securitycodes, their bets: their wedding date, the seventh of April, and her birth month, March. Here's their wedding certificate, he says, and here's her passport: $23,743.

"Actual retail price, $23,743," Carey said. "You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases."

When the show aired that December after all — pushed by CBS into the ratings doldrums — Carey was torched mostly for his lack of enthusiasm when he announced the perfect bid. The only scandal — outside the supermarket tabloids — was that he hadn't done what Bob Barker would have done. Bob Barker would have made Terry Kniess into the greatest contestant in television-game-show history. Terry Kniess would have been anointed. "Oh, I would have run with that, you bet," Barker says today from his happy retirement. Here was studio magic, here was perfection, here was this man who had never met innocent Roger Dobkowitz — no, here was only a smart man with silver hair, a disciplined man, a weatherman who had spent a lifetime being accurate, and who had also been a little bit lucky, and who had won a game that was made to be broken.

"Yeah, but that's not what happened," Carey says.

What happened?

"There was that guy, in the audience," he says. "Ted."

Ted Slauson is forty-four, a native of northern California but now a resident of San Antonio, where he writes math problems for standardized tests. He first started watching The Price Is Right when he was six or seven years old. By the time he was in high school, he'd noticed that prizes repeated — Turtle Wax and Rice-a-Roni and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (which kept cropping up because Bob Barker had insisted the show be vegetarian; no fur, no meat) — and he began keeping track of their values. Although he had a knack for numbers, he found his memory worked best when he had visual cues; like Michael Larson, he bought a VCR and took mental snapshots. Between 1989 and 1992, he attended more than twenty tapings but never became a contestant. On July 15, 1992, he finally heard his name called to come on down. His name tag read THEODORE. He couldn't stop pumping his fists.

Bob Barker came onstage and recognized him immediately. "Theodore!" he said. "You made it! You made it! Theodore has been a Loyal Friend and True. How many times have you been here?"

"Twenty-four," Ted said.

It wasn't long before an old standby — the Berkline Contemporary Rock-a-Lounger, a flesh-colored beast of a chair — came up for bid. The deepest recesses of Ted's brain fired up and three digits flashed in his head. It was a magical moment, all those years of time and effort about to be rewarded. He leaned into his microphone. "$599," he said.

The bell announcing a perfect bid rang. "One of you is exactly right!" Barker said.

The other three contestants began jumping up and down. They wondered whether they were right. Ted was the only one of them who was still. Because Ted knew.

Ted got to play Punch a Bunch. He played it perfectly, too, netting $1,000. His run ended only at the Big Wheel. Luck betrayed him. Two spins netted him fifty-five cents. The next contestant soon beat him with seventy cents, and Ted was done. The dream was over.

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Until, that is, The Price Is Right loosened its eligibility requirements. After ten years away from the stage, a contestant could play again. In 2002, Ted began returning to Television City. By then, he was using a video-capture device to make electronic flash cards on his computer. He could work his way through his catalog of thirteen hundred prizes, rattling off the prices for each, in about an hour. In May 2002, he helped a young stranger named Brandon — they had met in line — hit a perfect bid from Contestant's Row on a Ducane gas grill. Brandon looked to Ted, and Ted signaled with his hands: $1,554. The bell rang, and soon Brandon was leaping his way across the stage.

Ted Slauson might have been the best player The Price Is Right had seen, a kind of Ken Jennings of the grocery aisle.

"We have to get that story of that bid before we go on," Bob Barker said. "Have you seen that prize on the show before?" Brandon said no, that he had taken the bid from a young man in the audience. He pointed at Ted, and the cameras showed Ted giving the thumbs-up. "Well, that explains it," Barker said. Within four minutes, Brandon had gone on to win a car.

He never gave Ted a cut. But Ted found that he gained nearly as much happiness in helping others as he had in helping himself. He liked being perceived as an expert, liked going online and seeing raves about his uncanny ability on The Price Is Right — that from his seat in the audience, he had even guessed Showcases perfectly, twice, with witnesses. "It was like being a celebrity," he says today. Ted Slauson might have been the best player The Price Is Right had seen, a kind of Ken Jennings of the grocery aisle, and he kept making his pilgrimages, believing that he could beat the game once and for all. And failing that, if one of the other contestants seemed friendly, then Ted would help him beat the game instead.

On the morning of September 22, 2008, he pressed his name tag to his chest for the thirty-seventh time. He was wearing jeans and a powder-blue T-shirt. He looked down at his green seat assignment: 003. An older couple named Norbert and Frances sat to his immediate left. Another couple sat to his immediate right. Ted liked them instantly. Their names were Terry and Linda Kniess.

Terry says that he had no idea Ted was a ringer. Even if he did, he says that he couldn't have heard Ted shouting out numbers, the way he couldn't hear Rich Fields call out his name. That if it seemed as though he was looking in Ted's direction during his bid, he was actually looking at Linda, who confirmed his math by holding up fingers on both her hands: a two and a three, twenty-three. That Linda had gently scolded him after for giving away their PINs, which they've had to change since, and that it would have been impossible for him to have concocted, after the fact, such an elaborate creation myth, pulling out their wedding certificate and passports to explain why he had bid $23,743, a very exact bid. "I have no regrets," Terry says, "but there have been times I've wondered, What have I done?" Other players had come close before. Five dollars. Eight dollars. It was easy. The answers were right in front of you. If only he'd bid $23,700, he still would have won both Showcases, and no one would have accused him of anything other than good fortune. Terry's only sin that morning, he says, is that he was perfect.

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Ted says that when he went back for the afternoon taping, the producers moved him to a part of the studio where the contestants couldn't see him. He says that he has heard "through unofficial channels" that he has been banned from the Bob Barker Studio, the way casinos have started asking Terry not to play blackjack inside their walls again. That Kathy Greco gave him a "Sicilian death stare" after the show, and that nobody ever needs a three-digit PIN. That according to his database, the Big Green Egg had appeared on the show only twice — before Terry and Linda began recording it — and that it was $900 before it was $1,175. That so many contestants — not just Terry — had won that day because they had listened to him. That his only mistake came when Terry played Switch?, because Ted didn't realize there were two bikes, and he thought that a terabyte sounded like a lot of memory. That he was edited out of the show when it aired, that he can be seen only once, shaking his head when the prize is a Burberry coat, a prize that had never before appeared on the show. Otherwise, he would have known how much it was worth, the way he knew that a Berkline Contemporary Rock-a-Lounger was worth $599, and Brandon's Ducane gas grill was worth $1,554, and Sharon's car was worth $18,546. And for all that knowledge, for all his devotion, Bob Barker had called him a Loyal Friend and True, and Drew Carey called him that guy in the audience.

It's highly unlikely, but it's possible that Terry and Ted are both telling the truth. It's possible that each came up with the right number independently. Their brains work the same way. In the end, it doesn't really matter which one of them was right; all that matters is that one of them was. Together or not, they were perfect, and that's meant that no one will get the chance to be perfect again.

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Neither of them watches The Price Is Right anymore. Ted loved what it was too much for him to love what it has become. The producers no longer rely on Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup; now they have different soups. They have different everything. They've built more luck into the games, dumb luck, and they've started doing sneaky things like changing the options on the cars — adding floor mats, taking away the stereo system — to mess with the prices. And they've started adding more luxury items, like Burberry coats, the sorts of things for which ordinary people who have lived their ordinary lives would never have clipped a coupon.

"It's just not much fun anymore," Ted says. "It's just guessing now. The prizes might as well be a million dollars."

Terry and Linda sold the karaoke machine, the pool table, and the camper. That helped them pay the taxes on their winnings, and money's been a little tight since Terry lost his job at the casino after Las Vegas was crushed by the recession. He wrote a book about his experience called Cause and Effects. They've kept the Big Green Egg, and they've taken three of the four trips. "They've been first class," Terry says. "Just wonderful." They haven't been to Chicago yet, but they loved Scotland and South Africa, and in Banff, they used a GPS device that, in addition to giving the usual directions, offered interesting facts and figures, a kind of trivial narration that made small things seem big. It was called the GyPSy Guide, and Terry and Linda have bought the rights to it in Las Vegas. Terry wrote and recorded all the audio himself, in his strong, deep voice. "It's crazy how random life is," he says, "all the strange things that have happened since we decided to go on the show. It's almost scary."

In Banff, he says, he and Linda saw the most incredible thing: a wolf carrying a beaver in its mouth. Terry had tried to get his camera out — had wanted proof — but the wolf had disappeared into the trees. Terry and Linda guessed they had seen something unusual, but it wasn't until they went back to their hotel that they realized just how rare it was, that a wolf carrying a beaver in its mouth represented the extremes of possibility. They told people what they had seen, and people said it was so amazing, it was almost hard to believe.

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