Skip to main content

A former rocket scientist explains why carnival games are a huge scam

CARNIVAL SCAM SCIENCE- and how to win
Ex-NASA scientist and prolific inventor Mark Rober seems like a fun guy. He made a snowball machine gun, constructed a giant Nerf launcher, and even built a dartboard where it’s impossible to miss the bullseye.

For his latest adventure, he traveled to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park to explain why you can never win the giant stuffed panda at the ring toss, even if you end up spending your life savings. Most carnival games seem quite simple, some even look ridiculously easy, but the creators have science on their side that ensures that you’ll end up shelling out many times what the prizes are actually worth before winning – that is, if you manage to win at all.

The basketball toss is one example. Even if you’ve got a killer three-point shot, you’ll likely come up short at the carnival. That’s because the rims are 11 feet high, rather than the regulation 10 feet. A regulation three-point line is 24 feet out, but at the carnival you’re shooting from 28. Even the back of the attraction is draped with a slanted tarp, to make the basket appear closer than it really is.

“Which is subtle,” Rober explains. “But if you have a deadly three-pointer locked into your muscle memory, you will tend to miss short, which is exactly what we saw a bunch.”

Rober enlisted the help of an army of churro-fueled volunteers to track each game over the course of a full day to see how many people played, and how many actually won a prize. The results are hardly surprising, but it highlights how much money these attractions bring in. Rober estimates the amount at $20,000 per day, just from the carnival games alone.

There are many factors that skew your observations, making the games seem easier than they are. For instance, the beer pong table is slanted, making the balls bounce in a different direction that you’re used to. The milk bottles are weighted differently than normal bottles, making them harder to knock down than you would expect.

In addition to basic physics, the carnival operators have math on their side. For a one-dollar game that has a 10 percent chance of winning, you’ll drop ten bucks (on average) before scoring that pink teddy bear. A pink teddy bear that cost the carnival two dollars.

The entire video is entertaining; Rober even highlights one game that’s actually a test of skill, which you can win every time after a little bit of practice. There’s a catch, though, so you won’t be impressing your date any time soon. Maybe you can impress them on the Ferris wheel waterslide instead?

Editors' Recommendations

Mark Austin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Mark’s first encounter with high-tech was a TRS-80. He spent 20 years working for Nintendo and Xbox as a writer and…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more