On Friday, I accused Drew Carey of retroactively ruining my childhood with his incredibly underwhelmed reaction to an exactly perfect bid on a showcase.  OC tipper Jim accuses that bidder of cheating:

"While it is legal to hear bid ideas from audience members, on that September 22, 2008 taping, CBS Standards and Practices and host Drew Carey were both suspicious of some audience members during the bidding. As a result, there was a 45-minute shutdown between the Showcase presentation and reveal on that taping. Some in the audience noted Carey's cold, subdued reveal of what should have been one of the show's most historic moments was related to the suspicion that the production staff had on the win."

So what of it? Did Terry Kneiss, the Perfect Bidder, actually cheat?

Presumably, the only evidence of cheating is the bid itself.  Perfect.  Also, incredibly unlikely, as revealed by the fact that nobody had ever done it before.  But is this evidence in and of itself incriminating enough?

Jim, in his comments, notes that there have been previous winners who were as close as $1 to the actual retail price.  I would also make the following observations:

- If Mr. Kneiss had previous knowledge of the bid prices, I would expect him to bid slightly under the actual retail price, rather than the exact retail price, for fear of drawing suspicion on himself.  Why risk an exact bid?

- Mr. Kneiss was in the second position, meaning he could not know ahead of time which showcase he would be bidding on.  He would then have needed advanced knowledge of both showcase prices.

Instead of using the bid as prima facie evidence of Mr. Kneiss' guilt, let's examine that claim further.  What are the odds of getting a showcase bid exactly right?

For this analysis, we will make some assumptions.

- Any person getting to the showcase showdown will be a reasonably skilled bidder. As such, his bids will generally be within +/- $10,000 of the actual retail price.

- Bidders are much more likely to bid a round number (say, $25,000 instead of $25,162).  I will estimate that 3 out of 4 bidders guess round numbers. 

If a typical Price Is Right showcase bidder is able to get within a $20,000 range of the actual retail price, that makes the initial odds 1 out of 20,000 that the bid will be exactly right.  If we further weight the bids such that a round number (say, $1000 increments) are more likely to be bid by a 3:1 margin, the odds drop.  If, say, the value is $25,162, and there is only a 25% chance you will even bid a number that is not an increment of $1000, then the odds shift accordingly, from 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 80,000.

These are long odds, but they are not ridiculous.

Consider: there have been 7,000 episodes of the show taped so far, with 2 showcase bids each show, for a total of 14,000.  That is 14,000 chances for an exact bid. 

Every instance there is a bid, the odds are 79,999 out of 80,000 that it will not be exactly right.  If this process 14,000 times, the odds of no exact bid ever occuring are:

(79,999/80,000)^14,000 = 84%

That means that, after 14,000 instances, there is a 16% chance that an exact bid HAD occurred.  Unlikely, but not zero.  Any event which has a non-zero probability of happening, however small, will eventually happen if given enough chances.  That is why, despite odds of 100 million to one against, somebody eventually wins the Powerball after enough tickets are sold.  Terry Kneiss is the vessel by which the hands of fate showed The Price Is Right viewers the power of infinity. 

And Drew Carey? That motherfucker RUINED MY CHILDHOOD.