Michael Larson was an ordinary man from Ohio.

He became famous for his incredible win on the game show "Press Your Luck" in 1984.

The show, hosted by Peter Tomarken, featured contestants answering trivia questions to earn spins on a large electronic game board known as the Big Board.

The Big Board had various prizes and cash amounts, but it also had a few squares that were labeled "Whammy.”

If a contestant landed on a Whammy, they would lose all their accumulated winnings and receive a comical animation of a cartoon character called the Whammy...

The goal of the game was to accumulate as much money as possible without hitting a Whammy.

Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver, became intrigued by the show's patterns during his extensive study of recorded episodes.

He noticed that the random patterns on the Big Board were not entirely random.

The show used five different patterns that would cycle through randomly during each episode. Larson recognized that he could potentially memorize these patterns and predict the movement of the lights on the board.

In the spring of 1984, Larson made the...