Original subtitles

Eleven feet.

Eleven feet.

It's no secret that carnivals exist to make money.

To do that most effectively, they employ a bunch of little tricks

to make you overestimate your chances of winning,

in some cases to such an extent that it's basically a scam.

I spent a couple of days coming to this amusement park,

observing and collecting data on all of the games.

I'm gonna tell you which games are the biggest rip-offs

and the scientific reasons why.

I even Nancy Drew-ed how much the carnival pays

for the prizes people can win.

But there is hope.

I'll show you some legitimate tricks on how to win the most popular games,

along with what happens when you show up

with your baseball-playing buddy who happens to play for the New York Mets.

[hip-hop beat plays]

Let's get started.

[carnival music plays]

[music fades]

Any legitimate investigation

needs to start with solid data as the foundation.

With the promise of churros,

I had some friends secretly help me collect data on all 24 games

for a full day.

Not only did we capture how many times each game was played

but also how many times people won each game

and the prize they won.

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.

To frame the observations, we'll divide the games into three groups.

The first group, random chance games.

Games like these where no skill is involved

and you're basically rolling dice.

The second group, skill-based games,

like the basketball shot, the milk bottle throw,

or the basket toss game,

where if you bring some skill or strategy, you can increase your chances of winning.

The final category are the games that are pretty much impossible.

These ones are borderline scams.

There are three games that lots of people attempted,

and nobody won.

If they did win, like in the ladder climb,

it was for a specific reason, which I will address later.

Let's start by talking about the random chance games.

Calculating your chance of winning is straightforward.

You divide the winning outcomes by the total outcomes

and get a percentage.

In this case, there are about 1,600 total cups and 160 winning cups.

So that's a 10% chance,

or one in ten throws will win.

There are a ton of games similar to this.

They use balls that are lightweight

and have a high coefficient of restitution,

meaning they bounce well off things.

This makes it much less likely the ball will end up where you aimed it.

Think how much easier this game would be with beanbags,

which are heavier and don't bounce.

With a ping-pong ball,

any imperfection in the aim of your original throw is magnified

which essentially randomizes things.

If you have no skills, these are the games to play.

But don't get too excited, because even when you win, you lose.

After some work, I uncovered where they ordered their prizes from,

and 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.

But you usually don't get it on your first try.

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,

which means you pay $7.50 for something that cost them 45 cents.

In the case of the big prize, by landing it in the super rare gold cup,

it's even worse.

It would take you an average of 25 tries,

which works out to $38 for something that cost them six bucks.

The number of people we observed winning

matched up pretty well with these statistical predictions.

Let's talk about the second group. The skill-based games.

One of the most popular is the basketball toss,

with 825 plays the day that we observed.

A standard three-pointer is 24 feet back on a rim that is ten feet off the ground.

But in this case, the line is 28 feet back on a rim that is 11 feet off the ground,

Which is subtle,

but if you have a deadly three-pointer in your muscle memory

you will tend to miss short, which is exactly what we saw.

They have the tarp in front so that someone can't stand underneath the rim

where the difference would be apparent.

And again, even if you go Steph Curry and drain your first three-dollar shot,

you still lose because they paid 80 cents for that basketball.

Here's another example of getting you to overestimate your chances

by making subtle changes, because the table is slanted up slightly

which will reduce the velocity of the ball after the bounce.

Even if you dominated this game all through college,

your previous experience almost becomes a handicap.

This measure-your-pitch-speed game is borderline fraudulent

as their radar gun registers about 15 miles an hour too slow.

I know this because I measured the distance

then recorded it in high speed and counted the frames.

This pitch was clocked at 69 miles per hour,

but it's much closer to 84.

For the milk bottle game, the catch is the bottles are metal,

therefore heavier and more stable

and harder to knock down than a typical bottle of that size.

I've seen carnivals where these are bottom-weighted

which would make them more steady and less likely to tip.

To figure out which kind you have, ask to hold it.

The point at which it balances on your finger is the center of mass.

The key to winning this game is hitting them right here

with a hard enough throw to introduce sufficient energy.

But don't throw too hard,

because we noticed those who threw hardest usually sacrificed on accuracy.

About one in 14 people knock this over on their first try.

Finally, the basket toss game.

The key is to have your first bounce hit on this front lip

to reduce the kinetic energy enough that it won't bounce back out.

About one in ten throws will win on this game, according to our observations.

This brings us to the final category of the near-impossible games.

There are three of them.

On this one, the goal is to shoot out this red star completely

with this automatic BB gun.

The best strategy is to shoot a circle around the star to cut it out.

Not only are the guns not accurate or precise,

the bigger issue is you start out doing well

because there's enough surrounding paper for the BB to easily rip through.

But Newton's third law tells us that you can only push on something

as hard as it can resist your push.

At the end, you have these barely supported pieces of the star

that move out of the way when the BB comes

without building up enough stress to rip the paper.

Out of 120 plays, we saw nobody win this game all day.

This ring bottle game is also impossibly difficult.

It's a lightweight object that's bouncy to encourage randomness,

but the actual inner diameter of the ring

is really close to the outer diameter of the bottle.

This means that any throw, besides this pretty much perfect one,

will send the ring bouncing away without settling on the bottle.

If you really want this bear, I suggest going on Amazon and getting it for $47.

I can't tell you how much money this will save you,

'cause of the 840 rings we saw thrown, none stayed on a bottle.

Which brings up an obvious rule of thumb.

If you want the feeling of winning a game,

do not stop at any booth that offers really big prizes.

For the final near-impossible game,

let me reiterate that the most lucrative games

are those in which the customers overestimate their chances of success.

No game is a better example of that than the ladder climb.

There's a subtle issue that I think people realize

but don't internalize the significance.

The ladder converges to be supported on the wall at one point instead of two.

If it was attached at two points it's like crawling across a rope bridge,

which is pretty easy.

Let's pretend this is you.

If you shrunk the weight of your body down to the average location,

we call that spot the center of mass, which we'll mark with this dot.

And we can double-check this is the right spot

because it balances perfectly on one finger.

If you draw imaginary lines connecting the different support points,

that creates an area.

As long as your center-of-mass dot is within that area,

it's impossible to fall off.

As soon as your center-of-mass dot is even a little bit outside the area,

you start to rotate and fall off.

This is true no matter which way you orient it.

If you've ever bent over to pick something up, you know this fact

whether you realize or not.

The region of support is between the back of your heels

and the tips of your toes.

When you reach over, you will naturally move your butt back

to keep your center of mass in between those support points.

Try picking something up while standing against a wall

so you can't move your butt back.

The moment your center of mass gets beyond your toes,

you start to tip over.

In the ladder game, you're only connected at one point.

Even though it looks wide because of the rungs,

that area of support reduces down to a line.

If you don't keep your center of mass above that line,

you will start to rotate and fall off.

In other words, to win this game,

you need to be able to crawl across a tightrope.

You might think, "I can do a slackline, so I can do this,"

but a slackline is much easier for two reasons.

You can flail your arms and legs to adjust your center of mass

to keep it directly above that line of support.

Your center of mass is higher, increasing your mass moment of inertia

making you more stable,

in the same way it's easier to balance this umbrella when it's extended

versus when it's collapsed.

There are videos that say tricks like maintain three points of contact.

They're all useless,

because keeping your center of mass directly above a line

is something you have to get a feel for that takes a lot of practice.

Once you've had enough practice,

this is the one game at the carnival that's all skill

so you can win every time and clean them out.

Unfortunately, the owners know this

which is why it's also the only game with this super lame caveat.

Now that we were experts, I called up Matt Winaker,

who was recently drafted to play baseball for the New York Mets,

to maximize our chances of winning any skill game to do with throwing.

[carnival music plays]

[chuckling]

Clearly, Matt had a deadly lock on any throwing game,

but basketball's more my game.

So to finish off the day, I decided I'd bring his ego into check.

But as it turns out, if you are a world-class athlete in one sport,

you are a really, really good athlete in all sports.

In conclusion, play the games if you think they're fun.

Just know the odds are stacked against you, so if you lose, it's NBD.

Unlike this guy, who lost his life savings playing carnival games.

If your motivation is to gain the love and admiration of someone special

via a stuffed animal, you don't need carnival games to do that.

Amazon works just as well.

I just bought this for you, my lady.

Why?