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In the winter of 1983, ice cream truck driver Michael Larson had a lot of free time on his hands. As it turned out, the kids in his hometown of Lebanon, Ohio weren't willing to trudge through ten inches of snow for a Mister Softee cone. With little reason to get out of bed in the morning, Larson turned to the hard stuff: TV game shows.

One of these shows was "Press Your Luck," wherein three players answer trivia questions to earn "spins" on a board. The board was loaded with cash and prizes but also the dreaded "whammies." When a player hit a whammy, he or she lost their turn along with any money they might have earned. Contestants were more likely to hit a whammy the more they chose to spin – hence "Press Your Luck."

But after watching the show day after day, Larson developed a theory: The "Press Your Luck" board operated by a series of patterns, which meant that if a player were to memorize the patterns, he or she could avoid the whammies and thus win as much money as they wanted. By taping the show and watching the board sequences, one frame at a time, Larson memorized the board's six patterns. If only he could make it on the show and correctly answer that first trivia question, he could take "Press Your Luck" for all it was worth. Bye-bye, Mister Softee.

In the spring of 1984, Larson borrowed the airfare to fly out to Los Angeles and try out for the show.

"He really impressed us," executive producer Bill Caruthers told TV Guide in 1994. "Here was this out-of-work ice cream guy who told us he loved the show so much he flew out on his own to try to get on."

A couple of days later, the out-of-work ice cream guy was standing between two fellow contestants and bantering with host Peter Tomarken. Larson didn't actually get to test his pattern theory until early in the game's second round, after winning control of the board. But after his tenth spin in a row, Larson had more than quadrupled his closest competition, wreaking havoc in the director's booth. After all, if Larson didn't hit a whammy, the show couldn't call for a commercial break.

"Something was very wrong," Michael Brockman, then head of daytime programming at CBS, told TV Guide. "Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you."

The bedlam continued as Larson kept spinning and winning, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Still, he did begin exhibiting signs of fatigue: sweat glistened on his forehead and it was taking longer for him to find the board's sweet spots.

"It was like everyone was waiting for me to lose it," Larson told TV Guide in 1994. "But I came there to win at least $100,000, and I kept on going."

Finally, after 45 spins adding up to $102,851 in cash and prizes (his scoreboard, which could only display six characters, was forced to bump out the dollar sign), Larson passed control of the board. After a few more minutes of play, he wound up with $110,237 in cash and prizes, including a trip to Kauai, a trip to the Bahamas and a sailboat.

"How does it feel," Tomarken said during the post-game interview, "to be the part owner of CBS?"

Tomarken was only half-kidding: Wise to the fact that Larson had memorized the board's patterns, Michael Brockman consulted with the network's lawyers to see if Larson could be disqualified. But Larson – who threatened to sue if he wasn't paid in full – won the argument, saying what he had done was no more than effective preparation. Still, because he had shattered the CBS game show winnings cap of $25,000, he was not allowed to return to the show.

Producers finally agreed to air Larson's unprecedented run as part of a two-part series in June of 1984 that earned ratings twice as high as any usual episode. When the syndication rights to "Press Your Luck" were sold to the USA Channel, CBS stipulated that the Larson episodes not be aired. That stipulation changed when the show was bought by the Game Show Network, which called attention to those episodes with the 2003 airing of "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal," a two-hour documentary featuring interviews with Tomarken and the other contestants.

This is the eleventh in our series "From the Vault: Financial Analyses of the Sometimes Rich and Famous," an ongoing ReZoom.com Finance feature that spotlights celebrities and their money. To learn about the gambling troubles of Michael Jordan, click here.