No, don't remember that, did they call it cheating or give him his money?
While Larson was running up the score, the show's producers contacted Michael Brockman, then head of CBS' daytime programming department.
[3] In a 1994
TV Guide interview commemorating the Larson Sweep, conducted at the time the movie
Quiz Show was released, he recalled "Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy. He kept going around the board and hitting that box."
[5]
The program's producers and Brockman met to review the videotape. They noticed that Larson would immediately celebrate after many of his spins instead of waiting the fraction of a second it would take for a contestant to see and respond to the space he or she had stopped on, effectively showing he knew he was going to get something good. It was also noticed that Larson had an unusual reaction to his early prize of a Kauai trip, which was out of his pattern – he initially looked puzzled and upset, but then recovered and celebrated after a pause.
[3]
At first, CBS refused to pay Larson, considering him a cheater. However, Brockman and the producers could not find a clause in the game's rules with which to disqualify him (largely because the board had been constructed with these patterns from the beginning of the series), and the network complied.
[3] Because he had surpassed the CBS winnings cap (at the time) of $25,000, Larson was not allowed to return for the next show.
[1]
The five light patterns on the Big Board were immediately erased and replaced with five new ones for about a month. Then, to make sure no one was memorizing those, they were again replaced with five new patterns for another month. Finally in August, new software was installed which gave the Big Board a total of 32 patterns, effectively ensuring that no one would ever duplicate Larson's trick.
[3]
