The Ultimate Price is Right Strategy Guide: Flip Flop

Flip Flop

Rules

A prize is shown as is a four digit price. That price is wrong. The contestant must decide whether to reverse the order of the first two digits ("flip"), reverse the order of the last two digits ("flop"), or reverse the order of the first two digits and reverse the order of the last two digits ("flip flop.") If they decide correctly, they win the prize.

Random fact

Someone once managed to cheat at this game (or was just totally idiotic) by pressing the button that reveals the price before doing anything else. Not coincidentally, the button to reveal the price has since been moved. You can see it here:

Win-loss record

• Overall (seasons 29-46): 205-227 (47.45%)
• Seasons 29-39: 86-134 (39.09%)
• Seasons 40-46: 119-93 (56.13%)
• Probability of winning by random chance: 1/3 (33.33%)

Number of times it was correct to...

Choice   Overall        S29-39      S40-46   

 Flip  134 (31.02%)  52 (23.64%)  82 (38.68%)

 Flop  167 (38.66%)  62 (28.18%) 105 (49.53%)

 Both  131 (30.32%) 106 (48.18%)  25 (11.79%)

("S" stands for "seasons".)

Strategy

You can see why I split the stats into seasons 29-39 & seasons 40-46. Contestants never want to flip & flop, and that was dragging the win percentage of this game way down. So in season 40, the producers must have decided this is a game they generally want to be won and made it so it's quite infrequent that flip & flop is the correct answer. Thus, my strategy is to either flip or flop, depending on what you think the correct first two numbers of the prize are. Note they haven't offered a prize in this game worth less than $5,000 since season 42, so if flipping or not flipping would result in a price less than $5,000, then choose the other option. And in any event, don't flip & flop unless you're somehow absolutely certain.