Michael Larson took the game show Press Your Luck for $110,237 in 1984. He took forty-five spins in a row without getting the dreaded whammy. CBS called him a "cheater," but Larson walked away from the network with three-times the amount of money than the game show's second biggest winner.

The Game Show Network's "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal" is certainly better than that other documentary you might have heard about. Larson's life as a two-bit scammer, coupled with his amazing feat that graduated him to this larger scam, makes for a fascinating story.

Press Your Luck features a board with eighteen individual squares. Contestants spin and try to accumulate money and prizes while avoiding "whammies," which bankrupt the player's earnings. Boxes--with prizes (good) or whammies (bad)--are rapidly highlighted on the big board. Contestants are compelled to "press their luck" and guess when to stop the board.

Michael Larson, however, relied on something other than luck. For six months, Larson studied the show. He tracked repeating patterns on its big board and discovered that the show's board featured only a half dozen repeating patterns, and that in one of the patterns two squares never hosted whammies.

The tape from the May 19, 1984 episode shows Larson's eyes fixated on the playing board. They bob back and forth. Clearly, he was up to something. He wasn't pressing his luck, he was working his brain. His competitors' plastic smiles hardly masked their frustration. Network executives, the documentary reports, were "depressed" and "angry." Larson kept pressing on, and on, and on. Curiously, Larson always seemed to land on one of two of the board's eighteen squares. And he always seemed to defy the laws of probability by never losing.

So who was Michael Larson? Was he a mathematician? A psychic? A financier? No, he was an out-of-work ice-cream truck driver who fathered three kids by three different women. He used his winnings from CBS on other scams, earning the attention of more powerful three-lettered outfits: the FBI, SEC, and IRS. Larson ended his life penniless and estranged from his family, but he did get his fifteen minutes of fame.

"I think it was a David and Goliath story," former CBS employee Bill Mitchell remarked. "He slew us."