- 12 hours ago
Mark Rober's Crunchlabs - Season 2 Episode 4 - Beating Carnival Scams With Science
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Eleven feet. Eleven feet.
00:09It's no secret that carnivals exist to make money, and to do that most effectively,
00:13they employ a bunch of little tricks to make you overestimate your chances of winning,
00:18in some cases to such an extent that it's basically a scam.
00:21So I spent a couple days coming down to this amusement park and observing and collecting data on all of the carnival games.
00:27So today I'm going to tell you which games are the biggest rip-offs and the scientific reasons of why.
00:32I even Nancy-Jude how much the carnival actually pays for the prizes that people can win.
00:36But there is hope, because I'll also show you some legitimate tricks on how to win the most popular games,
00:41along with what happens when you show up to the carnival with your professional baseball playing buddy
00:45who happens to play for the New York Mets.
00:53Let's get started.
00:57Any kind of legitimate investigation needs to start with solid data as the foundation.
01:10So with the promise of unlimited churros, I had some friends secretly help me collect data on all 24 carnival games for a full day.
01:17Not only did we capture how many times each game was played,
01:20but we also recorded how many times people actually won each game, and the prize they won.
01:24And so the first observation, based on the data we collected, is that this relatively small park collects $20,000 a day off their carnival games alone.
01:33So to help frame the rest of the observations, we'll divide the games into three groups.
01:37The first group, you've got the random chance games.
01:39Games like these, where no skill is involved and you're basically just rolling dice.
01:44And for the second group, you have your skill-based games, like the basketball shot, or the milk bottle throw, or the basket toss game,
01:50where if you bring some kind of skill or strategy to the table, you can increase your chances of winning.
01:54And the final category are the games that are pretty much impossible.
01:57These ones are borderline scams.
01:59There are three games in this category that lots of people attempted and nobody won.
02:03And if they did win, like in the case of the ladder climb, it was for a very specific reason, which I will address later.
02:09So let's start by talking about the random chance games.
02:12Calculating your chance of winning here is pretty straightforward.
02:15You just divide the winning outcomes by the total outcomes and you get a percentage.
02:19So in this case, there are about 1,600 total cups and 160 winning cups.
02:24So that's a 10% chance, or 1 in 10 throws will win.
02:28There are a ton of games similar to this, but the catch is they always use balls that are lightweight
02:32and have a high coefficient of restitution, meaning they bounce really well off things.
02:36This makes it much less likely the ball will end up where you originally aimed it.
02:41To illustrate this point, think how much easier this game would be with beanbags, which are heavier and don't bounce.
02:46With a ping pong ball, however, any imperfection in the aim of your original throw is magnified, which essentially randomizes things.
02:53If you have no skills, these are the games that you want to play.
02:56But don't get too excited, because even when you win, you lose.
02:59After some investigative work, I uncovered the source where they ordered their prizes from.
03:03And so even if you got lucky and won on your first throw, it would cost you $1.50 for a prize that cost them 45 cents.
03:11But you usually don't get it on your first try.
03:13So treating this as an expected value problem in statistics, it would take you an average of five times to land it in a yellow cup,
03:19which means you pay $7.50 for something that cost them 45 cents.
03:24In the case of the big prize, by landing it in the super rare gold cup, it's even worse.
03:29It would take you an average of 25 tries, which works out to $38 for something that cost them six bucks.
03:35And I'll add, the number of people we observed winning matched up pretty well with these statistical predictions.
03:40Now let's talk about the second group, which are the skill-based games.
03:43And one of the most popular in this category is the basketball toss, with 825 plays the day that we observed.
03:49Now a standard three-pointer is 24 feet back on a rim that is 10 feet off the ground.
03:53But in this case, the line is 28 feet back on a rim that is 11 feet off the ground.
03:59Which is subtle, but if you have a deadly three-pointer locked into your muscle memory, you will tend to miss short,
04:04which is exactly what we saw a bunch.
04:06The reason they have the big sloped tarp in front is so that someone can't stand directly underneath the rim,
04:10where the height difference would be much more apparent.
04:12And here again, even if you go Steph Curry and drain your first $3 shot, you still lose, because they only paid 80 cents for that basketball.
04:19Here's another example of getting you to overestimate your chances of winning by making subtle changes,
04:24because the table is slanted up slightly, which will reduce the horizontal velocity of the ball after the bounce.
04:29So even if you dominated this game all through college, your previous experience almost becomes a handicap.
04:35This measure your pitch speed game is borderline fraudulent, as their raider gun registers about 15 miles an hour too slow.
04:41And I know this because I measured the distance and then recorded in high speed and counted the frames.
04:45This pitch was clocked at 69 miles per hour, but it's much closer to 84.
04:50For the milk bottle game, the only catch here is the bottles are metal, and therefore heavier and more stable,
04:54and harder to knock down than a typical bottle of that size.
04:57I've seen some carnivals, though, where these are bottom weighted, which would make them more steady and thus less likely to tip.
05:02To figure out which kind you have, you can ask to hold it, and the point at which it balances on your finger is the center of mass.
05:08The key to winning this game is hitting them right here with a hard enough throw to introduce sufficient kinetic energy.
05:14But don't throw it too hard, because we notice those who threw their hardest usually sacrificed on accuracy.
05:19About 1 in 14 people knocked this over on their first try.
05:22And then finally we have the basket toss game, and the key here is to have your first bounce hit on this front lip
05:27to reduce the kinetic energy enough that it won't bounce back out.
05:30About 1 in 10 throws will win on this game, according to our observations.
05:34And now this brings us to the final category of the near impossible games, and there are three of them.
05:39On this first one, the goal is to shoot out this red star completely with this automatic BB gun.
05:44So the best strategy is to basically shoot a circle around the star to cut it out.
05:48Not only are the guns not accurate or precise, but the bigger issue is that you start out doing really well,
05:53because there's enough surrounding paper for the BB to easily rip through like this.
05:57But Newton's third law tells us that you can only push on something as hard as it can resist your push.
06:02So at the end you have these barely supported pieces of the star that just move out of the way when the BB comes,
06:07without building up enough stress to rip the paper.
06:10Out of 120 plays, we saw nobody win this game all day.
06:14This ring bottle game is also impossibly difficult.
06:17Again, it's a lightweight object that's really bouncy to encourage randomness,
06:21but the actual inner diameter of the ring is really close to the outer diameter of the bottle.
06:26This means that any throw, besides this pretty much perfect one,
06:29will send the ring bouncing away without settling in on the bottle.
06:32If you really want this bear, I suggest going on Amazon and getting it for $47.
06:37I literally can't tell you how much money this will save you,
06:40because of the 840 rings we saw thrown, none stayed on a bottle.
06:43Which brings up sort of an obvious rule of thumb,
06:46if you want the feeling of winning a game,
06:48do not stop at any booth that offers really big prizes.
06:51And for the final near impossible game, let me reiterate that as a carnival owner,
06:55the most lucrative games are those which the customers overestimate their chances of success.
07:00No game is a better example of that than the ladder climb.
07:03There's a subtle issue with this game that I think people realize,
07:05but don't internalize the significance.
07:07The ladder converges to be supported on the wall at one point instead of two.
07:11If it was attached at two points, it's like crawling across a rope bridge,
07:15which is pretty easy.
07:17Let's pretend this is you, and if you shrunk all the weight of your body down to the average location,
07:21we call that spot the center of mass, which we'll mark with this dot.
07:26And once again, we can double check this is the right spot,
07:28because it balances perfectly on one finger.
07:31If you draw imaginary lines connecting the different support points,
07:34that creates an area, and as long as your center of mass dot is within that area,
07:38it's impossible to fall off.
07:40But as soon as your center of mass dot is even a little bit outside of the area of supports,
07:44you start to rotate and fall off.
07:46And this is true no matter which way you orient it.
07:48If you've ever bent over to pick something up,
07:50you actually know this fact whether you realize it or not.
07:52In this case, the region of support is between the back of your heels and the tips of your toes.
07:56When you reach over, you will naturally move your butt back to keep your center of mass in between those support points.
08:02If you don't believe me, try picking something up while standing against the wall so you can't move your butt back.
08:07At the very moment your center of mass gets beyond your toes, you start to tip over.
08:11In the case of the ladder game, you're only connected at one point.
08:14So even though it looks wide because the ladder rungs, that area of support reduces down to a line.
08:20So if you don't keep your center of mass directly above that line, you will start to rotate and fall off.
08:25In other words, to win this game, you basically need to be able to crawl across a tightrope.
08:29And you might think, well I can do a slack line, so I can do this.
08:32But a slack line is actually much easier for two reasons.
08:35You can flail your arms and legs out to adjust your center of mass to keep it directly above that line of support.
08:41And your center of mass is higher, increasing your mass moment of inertia, making you more stable.
08:45In the same way, it's easier to balance this umbrella when it's extended versus when it's collapsed.
08:50So while there are a few videos that say tricks like maintain three points of contact, they're all basically useless.
08:56Because keeping your center of mass directly above a line is just something you have to get a feel for.
09:01That takes a lot of practice.
09:02But once you've had enough practice, this is the one game at the carnival that's basically all skill.
09:07So you can win every time and clean them out.
09:09Unfortunately, the carnival owners know this, which is why it's also the only game with this super lame caveat.
09:14So now that we were carnival experts, I called up my buddy Matt Winneker, who was recently just drafted to play baseball for the New York Mets,
09:20to maximize our chances of winning any skill game that had to do with throwing.
09:24So clearly Matt had a deadly lock on any throwing game, but basketball is more my game.
09:37So to finish off the day, I decided I would bring his ego back into check.
09:53But as it turns out, if you are a world class athlete in one sport, you are a really, really good athlete in all sports.
09:59So in conclusion, you should play the games if you think they're fun.
10:02Just know the odds are heavily stacked against you, so if you lose, it's NBD.
10:06Unlike this guy, who lost his entire life savings playing carnival games.
10:10And if your motivation is to gain the love and admiration of someone special via a stuffed animal like this,
10:15you don't need carnival games to do that. Amazon works totally just as well.
10:19I just bought this for you, my lady.
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