It sounds like a joke: When coming up with its newest game show offering, ABC turned to Shaquille O’Neal and Donald Rumsfeld for inspiration. Yet the new show, titled “Lucky 13,” works, serving as a unique hybrid between a quiz show and a tutorial in game theory.
The basketball Hall of Famer hosts the show along with actress Gina Rodriguez. But the ghost of the former secretary of defense lingers over the show’s premise. In order to win any money, contestants must correctly assess what they don’t know, which echoes Rumsfeld’s famous soliloquy about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”
Contestant Grades Own Performance
An episode of Lucky 13 starts simply enough, with a contestant picked at random from a group of 13 and then being given a series of 13 true/false questions. The queries run the gamut of general knowledge, from celebrity gossip to geography to more obscure trivia (e.g., the number of dimples on a golf ball).
The show’s twist comes when the contestant gets asked to assess his own performance — i.e., the number of questions he believes he answered correctly — after being asked the questions but before seeing the answers. If the contestant correctly guesses his performance within a range, he wins money ranging from $5,000 (if the contestant got one to three questions correct) to $1 million if he got all 13 questions correct. But if the contestant’s actual number of correct answers falls outside the range he predicted, either high or low, the contestant
