The Ultimate Price is Right Strategy Guide: Hot Seat

Hot Seat

Rules

Five small prizes are shown. The contestant sits in a chair that automatically moves from item to item. For each item, the contestant must press the blue button in front of them if they think the actual price is lower than the shown price or the red button in front of them if they think the actual price is higher than the shown price. The contestant must finish this segment of the game in 35 seconds. Then the chair with the contestant is moved to an item; if there is at least one item they got right, they are moved to one of those items. The actual price is revealed. If the contestant was right with their higher or lower choice, they win $500*. Then they are moved to another item; again, if they have at least one of the remaining items right, they are moved to an item they got correct. The contestant must decide whether to take their money and leave or continue on. If they choose to continue but were wrong on the item in question, they lose their money. But if they're right, they move up the next rung on the money ladder. The money ladder goes $500/$2,500/$5,000/$10,000/$20,000*. The game ends when the contestant decides to quit, they play on but got all the items remaining wrong, or they got all five items right.

* Sometimes these numbers are increased for special weeks on the show, such as Big Money Week.

Random fact

Hot Seat is the second newest game on the show, having debuted in season 45. Thus, I'll be including season 47 stats in this article.

Win-loss record

• Actual (seasons 45-47): 4-41 (8.89%)
  (Note: it only counts as a win if the contestant wins the top money prize. Thus, bailouts count as losses.)
• What it would be by random chance: 1/32 (3.13%)

Number of prizes where the correct guess was...

• Higher: 107 (47.56%)
• Lower: 118 (52.44%)

For each prize, how often was it higher or lower?

 Prize    Higher  Lower

1 (left)    21     24

   2        15     30

   3        27     18

   4        22     23

5 (right)   23     22

How often were different combinations of higher and lower correct?

• All 5 prizes were higher: 0 playings (0%)
• 4 prizes were higher, 1 lower: 1 playing (2.22%)
• 3 prizes were higher, 2 lower: 18 playings (40.00%)
• 2 prizes were higher, 3 lower: 24 playings (53.33%)
• 1 prize was higher, 4 lower: 2 playings (4.44%)
• All 5 prizes were lower: 0 playings (0%)

Strategy

Part 1: Guessing higher/lower. This is tricky because you don't really have much time to think. You have 35 seconds for all 5 items, which is 7 seconds per item, but that doesn't include the time it takes to travel between items. Thus, you need to go with your gut on each prize. If you can, try to make it so you guessed higher 3 times and lower twice or higher twice and lower 3 times, as those are by far the two most common combinations. But you can't go back to a previous prize and you're under time pressure, so don't spend too much brain power keeping track of that.

Part 2: The reveal. What's interesting about this part is they take you through all the items you got right first, but they never state that they take you through the correct items randomly. My hunch--and I have no data to back this up, so this is strictly a hunch--is that they go from easiest to hardest. In order words, the first item they take you to will be obviously correct. Then with each item, it's less and less obvious that it's correct. Thus, if they take you to an item that was hard for you to guess right, then they're probably getting closer to the end of the items you got right. So you can try to think through how hard each item was to get right to decide if you want to continue or not.

As for bailing out, the numbers say you should always go on as long as your guess was even in the slightest bit educated. The money amounts always at least double, so anything greater than a 50% chance of being right means you should continue. However, be careful with that. For many people, the difference between $0 and $10,000 is MUCH greater than the difference between $10,000 and $20,000--the former could mean paying off long overdue bills and getting a savings fund started while the latter would be icing on the cake you use to travel. So keep that in mind as you're playing.