‘Pure luck’: Alberta man makes ‘Price is Right’ history with Showcase bid

When you’re playing a guessing game, hearing “you’re just a little bit off,” is usually a good feeling. Now imagine you’re on a televised game show and that little bit puts you in the show’s history books.

That’s what happened to Patrice Masse on The Price Is Right, a long-running American game show.

The point of the show is to guess the price of retail items. Sometimes it’s ordinary household cleaners, sometimes it’s boats.

You don’t want to guess over the price, or overbid, you want to guess the closest to the cost, or the exact cost.

The finale of the game is the Showcase, where contestants guess the combined value of items in one of two showcases.

“I just blurted it out, I tried to estimate the cost,” Masse said. “There was a 20 minute delay before they actually carried on with the show and at that time I already thought that I blew it.”

Masse guessed the showcase price at $39,500. The actual price was $39,501.

He was off by $1.

Patrice Masse on The Price Is Right. (CBC)

The audience can be seen going wild, Masse himself has a look of shock as he and his wife celebrate.

“That was the best showcase bid in the history of the show,” host Drew Carey said on the episode. “With absolutely no help from anybody in the audience, by the way.”

Since Masse’s guess was within $250 of the actual amount of the showcase he was guessing for, he actually won the contents of both showcases.

Some of his prizes include a trip to Miami, a new car and a trip to Hawaii.

The fact that he and his wife were even at the show is actually a bit of a fluke, according to Masse. They were talking to a woman who mentioned that she had been in the audience.

“We were sure that it took years to get tickets for the show, we didn’t even dream of (it) and suddenly, Tina went online and looked at the tickets and we got tickets for the next day,” Masse said.

“Everything was pure luck. If you look at the whole show, my first bid was horrible, just horrible, I had no clue what I was bidding on, I had no clue what I was doing.”

The experience is a bit of a blur for Masse, he said it took several days for it to really sink in that he won.

“The prizes are just a bonus, just to be part of the show is amazing,” Masse said. “My wife, Tina, she grew up watching the show with her mom, so it was very emotional.”

They plan to go back and be in the audience again, to experience it from that angle.

In the history of the show, only one contestant has ever guessed the exact price of a showcase. That story is told in the 2017 documentary Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much.