The Ultimate Price is Right Strategy Guide: Items up for Bid

Items up for bids

Rules

A prize is shown. Each contestant bids on the prize; whoever bids closest to the actual retail price (ARP) without going over wins the prize and goes on stage to play a pricing game. If all four contestants give a bid that is over the ARP, a buzzer sounds and the contestants get another chance to bid on the prize. If a contestant bids the exact price, they get a $500 bonus.

Random fact

If you want to impress your friends, you can call these "one bids," as that's the term used by the show to refer to the prizes the contestants bid on. This term goes all the way back to the original The Price is Right hosted by Bill Cullen in the 1950s and 1960s. You can even use that fact as a pick-up line: "Hey, if they used you as a one bid on The Price is Right, it would be impossible to for anyone to overbid because you're priceless." If you do use that pick-up line, feel free to *not* tell the person you heard it from me. 

Who won? (Seasons 29-46)

• Bidder #1 won 18.19% of the time.
• Bidder #2 won 19.94% of the time.
• Bidder #3 won 22.05% of the time.
• Bidder #4 won 39.82% of the time.

Pricing patterns

• One bid prizes are never less than $500. There has not been a one bid prize worth less than $500 since season 39 (8 years ago). There have been a number of one bids that were exactly $500 since then, but none under.
• I've rarely seen trips used as one bids cost less than $2,000. I don't have an easy way to check this with any exact stats, though, so use with care.

Strategy based on your position in the bidding

Your strategy in contestants' row depends on your position. But your bid should never be less than $500.

Contestant #1: Bid what you think the price is, with a minimum bid of $500.

Contestants #2 and #3: Bid what you think the price is, except:

• Your minimum bid should be $500. This supersedes all points below.
• If you're going to bid less than someone, give yourself at least $100 of wiggle room. For example, if bidder #1 bid $1150 and you think the prize is $1100, bid $1050. (Note: I admit the $100 is more gut feeling and less something stats can back up, but only having a $50 range of prices you can win on just isn't enough.)
• DO NOT overbid someone by $1 in position 2 or 3. All that does is tempt the person after you to do the same to you. I would advise that if you want to bid more than someone else, your bid should be at least $50 over their bid. (Again, that's arbitrary, but a $50 range at least gives contestant #4 something to think about when deciding whom they should bid $1 more than.)
• Similarly, DO NOT bid $1 in position 2 or 3. Not only are you in violation of the $500 minimum bid rule, that just tempts someone to bid $2.

Contestant #4: The fourth contestant should bid $1 more than someone else. Yes, the person you 1-up will be mad at you, but that's the show. Also, it is almost always wrong to bid $1 or similar. There are two reasons:

1. The minimum price of the one bid is $500. You might as well bid $500 and try to hit it right on the nose. But you shouldn't do that either because...
2. More importantly, your chances of winning when you bid $1 (or $500) drop from 33.33% to 25%. Let me explain with an example:

• Anne bids $600
• Bob bids $750
• Charlie bids $900
• David bids $751

What is David's chance of winning? Unless Bob got it exactly right, David has shut him out, which means only 3 contestants (Anne, Charlie, or David) can win the prize. Thus, David's chance is 1/3, or 33.3333...%. Even if everyone has bid too much, everyone just bids again, and David's chance of winning is still 1/3 if he overbids someone by $1. But if:

• Anne bids $600
• Bob bids $750
• Charlie bids $900
• David bids $1 (or $500)

Now, David's chance of winning is 1/4 (25%), as no contestant is shut out. "But Brian," you may be thinking, "those percentages assume that you're picking the winner randomly. Contestants aren't bidding random prices so this doesn't apply!" The stats suggest the opposite. From seasons 41-46, less than 27% of $1 bids from the fourth bidder ended up as winning bids--that's pretty close to the 25% you'd get from random chance. That means that over 73% of the time, $1 bids that were made were wrong--that's almost 3 out of 4. Compare that to the fact that when bidder 4 doesn't bid $1, they won 44.1% of the time--that's more than 50% more often than when they bid $1.

To be fair, I said bidding $1 or $500 is "almost" always wrong. I can think of two rare exceptions:

1. If you are somehow absolutely positive that everyone else has overbid, then go ahead and bid $500. But you'd better be really positive. Prices are almost always higher than you think they are.
2. If one of the first three bidders has bid $1 (or something similarly low), feel free to 1-up them, even if that means bidding $2 or $70. They deserve to lose for having that horrible of a strategy. Technically, you should still bid at least $500 in that case, but as a viewer, I take sadistic pleasure in it when the fourth bidder bids $2 after someone else has bid $1 😈.

Addendum thanks to a poster at golden-road.net: Who should bidder #4 1-up? If bidder 4 isn't sure of the price, they should not 1-up bidder #1. The reason is this: if they don't win now, they want a chance to be bidder #4 again next round. If they 1-up bidder #1, bidder #1 cannot win (unless they got the price exactly right) and thus you've made it so you're guaranteed not to be bidder #4 next round. Thanks to jhc2010 for that insight!