I’m a huge fan of “The Price Is Right.” In fact, I’ve traveled to California several times to try to get on the show. I got to see both Bob Barker and Drew Carey, but alas, I’ve never been picked to come on down.
If you don’t want to go to California, or if you’re in Vegas anyway, you can get a good taste of “TPIR” at Bally’s Jubilee Theater, with the stage version of the show (when it’s running; currently, it’s not).
The show plays during the afternoon, so it won’t interfere with your Vegas nightlife. Think of it as a scaled-down version of the real thing. They do pick members of the audience to come on down, they do play the actual games that you will recognize from TV, and they even have their own version of the big wheel for the Showcase Showdown. (Grumpy old man alert: One of my pet peeves in life is the confusion surrounding this. The “big wheel” is the Showcase Showdown, but what most people refer to as the Showcase Showdown (i.e., the final head-to-head matchup) is simply called “The Showcase.”)
The main difference between this version and the real thing is the size of the prizes. When playing the pricing games, you bid on big prizes and packages just like they do on TV, but your prize for winning is only one smaller item, as opposed to the larger items or the entire prize package. For example, for correctly guessing the price of the car, you might win a TV instead of the car. Still, if you can walk out of a Vegas casino with a prize like that, on top of an hour or so of entertainment, that’s a winning day indeed.
The other big difference is that you don’t play every round yourself. In other words, in the TV version, out of the first four contestants to bid on a prize, the winner gets to come on stage and play a game for another prize. In Vegas, once the first winner is determined, a different contestant is selected to play a game on stage and additional people are chosen to participate in the Showcase Showdown and in the Showcase. This has the benefit of allowing more people to play, thus increasing your chances of getting picked to come on stage.
If you’re even the smallest fan of “TPIR,” you’ll thoroughly enjoy the Vegas version, even if you don’t walk away a winner. Just don’t expect it to be exactly like it is on TV.
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when I used to drive a carpool of kids to school we would pass CBS Studios early in the morning, we often would see a bunch of you dressed-up Price Is Right people dutifully waiting for what I assume was hours in line to be in the studio audience… I appreciate your enthusiasm, when I was a young person I used to camp out for L.A. Kings playoff hockey tickets and concerts…
There’s a documentary detailing a story about how a guy basically beat the price is right. I believe it’s on Netflix and it’s fantastic.
I know there was a documentary about how a guy won big on Press Your Luck by knowing the sequences of the game board to miss out on the whammys, but never heard about a TPIR doc. Cool.
One thing you didn’t address is the cost of attending. I thought that you buy tickets, just like any other show in town. Can you give an approximate price? Are there different prices for different seating areas?