24. There is also a used letter board to help contestants keep track of which consonants and vowels have already been called.
“You never see that at home, but our players see it,” Pat said in the same video. “So every time a letter is called, the letter comes off, the light goes out, and they know to never call again — except when they call again. I’m making fun of the players, but believe me, I understand the pressure they’re under.”
25. If you like Toss Up puzzles, thank Pat. As he explained, Wheel of Fortune faced the following challenges:
“How can I get more content without spending more time?” Pat said to Maggie. “So I came up with a toss-up puzzle, and it worked really well. Then our producer added a triple toss-up. And then we added the idea of $10,000 if you get all three, because it’s not my money. What would I care?”
26. In January 2015, reporter Christopher Ingraham published an analysis in the Washington Post examining 1,546 final bonus puzzles from 2007 to that year. Based on his research, he wrote that the letters most likely to appear in these puzzles at the time were H, G, P, and O (considering that contestants had already been given the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E). However, Ingraham found that players chose these letters less often than they chose C, D, M, and A. Even though, according to his analysis, the latter character set was less frequent at the time.
