Split Decision (pricing game)

Split Decision was a pricing game on the American television game show, "The Price Is Right". Played from November 9, 1995 through January 16, 1997, it offered a car and a three-digit prize worth between $300 and $999.

Gameplay

The contestant was shown a row of eight digits, which represented the five-digit price of the car and the three-digit price of the other prize. The prices were in order within the string, but not necessarily side-by-side, so the contestant had to pull three digits down from the first row to leave the car's price in the top row and the other price in the bottom row. Doing so won both prizes.

The contestant was given a 20-second time limit in which to attempt to find the correct prices. When the clock started, the contestant had to pull three numbers from the top row down and press a button to stop the clock. The prices were checked, and if they were not correct, the numbers were reset, and the clock was started again for the contestant to repeat the process. If the contestant did not find the correct prices before the clock hit zero, they did not win the prizes.

Toward the end of the game's life, if the contestant did not pull down the three correct digits for the smaller prize, Bob Barker left the digits as they were and did not reset them. This proved to help the contestants more than starting from scratch and resulted in a slightly better win percentage before the game's retirement in 1997.

History

The clock was removed from the game on May 24, 1996, and the contestant was instead simply given three chances to guess the correct prices. After only two playings under this format, the original format returned on June 5 and lasted until the game was retired.

One notable playing occurred on April 8, 1996. During that playing, two numbers fell off their markers (the second on the last attempt) and during one attempt the clock froze. After the first number fell off, Barker attempted to replace the number. When that failed, he threw the number out onto the stage to laughter. Unfortunately, the game ended in a loss.

Contrary to popular belief within the game show community, this only happened once and had nothing to do with the game's retirement.Fact|date=July 2007

The clock also froze on one attempt on the first playing of the game. However, the incident was an advantage to the contestant.

Retirement

Split Decision was retired due to its confusing rules. This is one of only four pricing games that premiered in the 1990s to be retired (the other three being Gallery Game, Joker and Fortune Hunter).