Season 32 Bonus Round/Bonus Wheel Stats

Wow, that is a LOT of 32K hits. If I had to guess the Bonus Wheel's distribution based off of this, I'd say that we had 18 out of 24 spots being the minimum and one each of the car, 50, and 100/Million. As for the 40 and 45, I'd guess one 45 and two 40s, although the numbers lean in favor of 45.

The most likely distribution used through the end of the season is 17-2-2-1-1-1. Since the Car and $50K had equal or lesser hits than $100K/$1M, then that very likely means there's just one each of those, and $40K and $45K hover around twice as many hits, which would mean two each, leaving 17 left for $32K (and 73% of 24 is 17.52).


However, looking at the taping order of Bonus Rounds, it appears that the entire season did not have the same distribution even barring the six weeks with no car. Notice how the car was hit four times in the first 8 tapings, but then only once in the final 18 tapings with the car available. If we use the formula of "Times hit ÷ Episode span × 24" as a basis (Hits through taping 8: 34-3-4-0-4-2), then a possible distribution pre-Hawaii is 16-2-2-1(50K)-2(Car)-1.

Also see the two Secret Santa weeks. There definitely seems to have been a generous change there. Out of the 12 taped shows, only 5 had $32K hit, plus in those two weeks alone were 3 $40K's, 2 $45K's, and 2 Cars. While this is a small sample size to deal with, a possible distribution made only for these weeks is 12-6-2-1-2-1. Would have been nice if they had stuck with something like that for the whole season, if you ask me...

More than three quarters of the Wheel being $32,000... It's too much, but it's justified by the stats. And I agree with the distribution change, and probably it was after California Coast Week (week number 20). It's the 19th week taped and in the 20th all BRs were played for $32,000, although it doesn't indicate anything clear.

I didn't analyze how many times every prize was hit, so... Thank you, MarioGS! Good job

This is a pretty good sample size, not sure why you're saying bias.

Fifty-six 32 wins meant $112k more than if it was still 30, or equivalently, a bit more than converting one of those gettable 100k losses into a win. That definitely matters budget-wise assuming the same budget, and it looks like the effect will multiply by 1.5 next season.

Close to 40% as usual. We had more terrible BR play than usual IMO, explaining the couple extra losses.

I'm about 80% done on S32 on WOFT, I will get to it at some point this summer (still busy job searching!) and have other interesting data on the season. Thanks Mario for doing this important part too, I will probably crosscheck when I'm done

Because they can change it whenever they want to, plus they know it won't sound good if they say "Out of our 24 envelopes, 17 of them have the minimum of $32,000", so they keep quiet about it for those two reasons. Doesn't stop the public noticing the minimum's overabundance, though.

To clarify, this is in the official rules. The only thing that doesn't change is that there's always one $100,000/Million envelope; everything else can be changed at Harry's discretion, including their placement in the Bonus Wheel.

The contestant's odds of winning the $100K/$1M are still 1/24, regardless of how many envelopes containing the minimum are on the wheel. If they were one step removed from rigging against the contestant, they wouldn't put The Big One on the wheel at all.

Besides, as a former contestant, I certainly wouldn't complain about winning $32,000 for spitting out a couple of simple words. I, in fact, envy all the $32,000 winners for winning $2,000 more than I did in the Bonus Round.

What about the other amounts, then? 143 + 13 + 19 + 6 + 7 + 7 = 195.

Hmm, I also went through each episode's outcome in comparison to Bobby's site and I still can't find where I went wrong. I even counted the green "WIN"s next to 32's and I counted 55 but Excel is counting 56. Weird...