Did Deal or No Deal Island Set a Game-Show Record?

What is a game show and what is a reality show? It’s a distinction that doesn’t actually matter, except when it comes to records. David Genat won $5.8 million, the “biggest prize in game show history,” according to People, in the Deal or No Deal Island finale on March 25. NBC itself says Genat won “the biggest prize in primetime history.” But wait, isn’t that less than the winner of Beast Games, Jeffrey Randal Allen, who just won the Prime Video series’s $10 million prize pot on February 13?

Deal or No Deal Island is a season-long twist on the classic game show. So if you consider it reality TV, there’s more competition for biggest prize. In the final game of Deal or No Deal, Genat’s case pick wasn’t random. It was based off math he’d been keeping track of all season. “If you sit down and watch 12 case rounds, and that No. 1 was the high-value case in this episode, you can start statistically noticing the odds,” Genat explained to Vulture on March 26. “If you roll a dice, how many times are you gonna roll six? It’s a tricky thing to do when you’re trying to run numbers in your head.” So he avoided the cases that contained high values in previous rounds, making his win the culmination of a season-long arc. That sounds like a reality-competition win, not quite a “game show” win, if you ask us. And that puts him squarely in second place behind Allen’s Beast Games total. Mr. Beast wins again.

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