Game Breaker/Game Show

• Michael Larson, a contestant on the game show Press Your Luck. He memorized the patterns that the board revolves around ahead of time, and became the biggest winner in the show's history by a huge margin ($110,237 in cash and prizes). Following this, the patterns were repeatedly changed to prevent another such incident, and CBS refused to air the episodes (yes, it actually took two episodes for him to finish playing) on TV for over twenty years.
  • To put it into perspective, this was the most anyone had won on U.S. TV up until Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? debuted.
• Until 2003, Jeopardy! champions could win up to 5 games before being retired. Starting in the 2003-04 season, the producers instituted a "sky's the limit" rule, where champions could go on and on winning until being defeated. Towards the season's end, Ken Jennings came along and went on a 74-game winning streak that lasted into the next season.
• Many pricing games on The Price Is Right can be easily broken:
  • Clock Game often uses multiples of 100 or figures ending in 99. Many contestants have gone right to an $x99 price and gotten it right on the first guess.
  • Cliff Hangers can almost always be won with guesses of $20-$30-$40 or $25-$35-$45.
  • The prices in 10 Chances always end in 0, or 5 if there is no 0 pick from.
  • Now… or Then always has four "now"s and two "then"s. Any product with a "new" on its label used to be a guaranteed "Now"(because it didn't exist during the "Then" period), but the producers have since defied this trick by calculating reverse-inflation on the "new" products to get a "Then" price.
  • An unintentional dent in the Hole in One course once caused a contestant to win! See here:
    • ...Could it be that Bugs Bunny held a magnet under the golf ball course and drug the ball to the hole, a la Space Jam?
• Certain Wheel of Fortune puzzles are guaranteed to have certain letters in them:
  • Obviously, if the category denotes a plural, start with an S.
  • Star & Role always has the word AS in it.
  • Originally, contestants would always call B and Y first if the category was Song/Artist or Title/Author, because those always have the word BY in them. This practice seems to have all but disappeared, however.
  • Initially, Same Name always contained the word "AND". After literally every contestant started the round with N, D and A, they changed it so that an ampersand (&) would be in place of the word AND. Oddly, they sometimes revert to spelling out AND.
  • What Are You Doing? always has an -ING ending somewhere. Unlike with Same Name, it seems that contestants are encouraged to call N, G and I first.
  • In a non puzzle-related example, there used to be a Free Spin wedge on the Wheel. Countless contestants ended up banking large numbers of Free Spins due to hitting the wedge repeatedly, thus ensuring greater chances of keeping the Wheel out of their opponents' hands. This was finally circumvented by reducing Free Spin to a single disc placed over a dollar amount.
  • In W.O.F.'s early years, contestants would try to solve the final puzzle from scratch in 15 seconds by calling out five consonants and a vowel to fill in the blanks. However, a Follow the Leader trend broke out: call "R, S, T, L, N," and for the vowel, "E." These letters were so common in puzzles, it almost assured success. The producers caught on and realized the rules needed a change: so they made those letters a given from the start of every final round to fill in some blanks of the puzzle, and contestants now had only three consonants and a vowel (until the addition of the Wild Card let them pick another consonant), and a more difficult 10 seconds to figure out the answer.