How Did I Get Invited Onto The Sheng Siong Show?
For those who live under a rock and don't know about the Sheng Siong show, here's a simple breakdown of how it works. During certain periods of the year, when you spend a large enough sum of money you will be given a chance to write your name and contact number on that particular receipt and throw it into a box of dreams. The names in the dream box will then be randomly chosen, where the Mediacorp staff will then call you up and ask you if you want to participate in the live show to win some money.
So what happened was that my Mum was on a durian buying spree back in June. As you know it was durian season and everything was going cheaply. And when things are cheap you know what Singaporeans do... they buy. And boy did my Mum buy a lot of durians. We were eating durians after almost every dinner every day. But back to the topic, after purchasing some durians one fine day, my Mum suddenly had the epiphany to submit her particulars into the sacred box of names.
And a few days after submitting her name, she was notified on her chance to participate in the show. At first when the staff rang her up she was skeptical and thought it was a scam. She actually hung up on them a few times before the staff assured her that they were legitimately from Mediacorp and she was officially being invited onto the show. She was asked to bring along her partner and participate in the 'Snakes & Ladders' section of the show.
Yes, you didn't read it wrongly, she was asked to bring along her PARTNER to the show. So how did I come into the picture?
Well evidently, her partner (my dad) rejected her offer and said that he was too old for that shit. She even asked my elder brother as he was at home then and he said that he wasn't free during that day. After being rejected twice by them, she then asked me if I wanted to join her on the show when I came home. And my answer?
Fuck Yeah.
I wasn't even aware of what game we were going to play there but I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to earn some additional money. And the second reason why I was so confident was because I didn't know that the show was recorded LIVE. I thought these segments were all pre-recorded so we just have to go there, jump a few times and if we NG we can simply retake the scene.
And once I was informed about the show being live and all, I was having second thoughts about going onto the show. I mean it's one thing to go onto a game show, but it was a totally different thing to be on national television LIVE. But a promise is a promise so I had to shake off my nerves and prepare to be jump my heart out live on Singapore television.
In the post title I mentioned that we broke the winnings record of the game we played and that was by no means completely dumb luck. It was 50% due to the hard work and research we did before going onto the show. I mean if I was going to embarrass myself live on TV, I might as well be bringing home the highest amount of dough available to us. You know what they say...
Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories
Up till this date, I have no idea why my Mum called the game 'Snakes and Ladder' because when I went to YouTube this shit, it wasn't even remotely close to being a snakes and ladder game. This was the exact video I watched to figure out what the hell I was getting myself into.
An excerpt of the game segment
So here's how the general breakdown of how the 'Dice & Jump' game works:
- Player A will be asked to roll the dice
- Host will announce the number
- Player B will jump the announced number of times
- Host will announce:
- If the particular blog had any special effect (move forward/move back)
- If no effect, he will announce the Prize money earned
- Repeat Steps 1-4 until finishing the entire course
- The total duration of the game is 45 seconds
Feel free to skip ahead to the next section as I will be going through the nitty-gritty stuff of how I plan to game the system
After learning the rules of the game, I was moving to the next step of figuring out how to game the system if that is possible. And possible it was.
As you can see from the board above, landing on the white spaces will give you the prize money written while landing on the chinese characters will land you $1,000 each. So the ideal scenario would be to land on all the chinese characters and you can go home possibly 10k richer. However, my Mum then informed me that the max amount people gotten from this game was $4,800.
This was certainly possible as the mean of a dice roll was 3-4, which meant that if everything went according to the mean of rolling 3 then 4, you will end up with $4,700. But of course things don't always go by the average when you roll the dice because the dice rolling part was all up to luck. So how would it be possible to game the system? You just gotta go fast and slow at the same time.
From watching a couple of videos of the 'Sheng Siong' Show, I saw that people were always throwing high numbers which led to them completing the board rather quickly and not enjoying the perks of landing on the chinese characters. So the way to go would be to have multiple small numbers, thus increasing the number of times you can roll the dice and the jumper needs to go HAM when it's his turn to jump.
Game Day
It was soon July and the fated day has arrived where we will be going to participate on the show. We arrived at the studio slightly late and other participants were already there. We were then brought into the resting area near the studio where we were briefed on the day's schedule. Here's a breakdown of the schedule if memory serves me right:
- 3.30pm - Report
- 4.00pm - Dress up
- 4.30pm - Rehearsal
- 5.30pm - Dinner
- 6.30pm - Makeup
- 9.00pm - Live Show
Yes, you may be curious how we look in our costumes but the lack of photos is due to the restriction on photo taking within the studio. Mediacorp is rather strict to not letting anyone leak anything from the studio because when we were in the rest area, there was drama being filmed nearby and I guess they don't want some random aunty leaking their latest blockbuster to the public. So enjoy how I look in the costume courtesy of the ZZ Crew.
The dress code was completely ridiculous as we had to jump around in that bright yellow safety vest. And that said, we were also wearing the mic on our faces which made it rather uncomfortable with a cap on and all. During our rehearsal, we weren't able to achieve as great results as we thought and only came out with $3,400. My Mum threw rather high numbers and were only landed on the board 4/5 times instead of 5/6 that we should be aiming for.
After downing some Char Siew rice and resting for a while, we were then ushered to the makeup room to make us look as pale as possible. This was also when my mum bumped into Kym Ng and struck up a conversation with her. The gist was the conversation was my Mum insisting that Kym used to live nearby and have a black car or something. But Kym was like umMMMmmmmmm my car is white?
So awkward conversation aside, we were all set for the Live Show. And I thought I was totally ready because we went through with the rehearsal and all. But the 2.5 hours wait was starting to make not just me but all the participants feel like we were on the edge. There were multiple games being played that night and 4 groups of people were selected to play in this game. And the sequence of events was team A, team B, me and my Mum then team D. So even after A entered the studio to play their game, we were still pacing around the resting area trying to calm ourselves down.
Game Time
Now it was finally our turn to enter the studio and wow were the lights even brighter than this afternoon during the rehearsal. After getting briefed by the floor director, we went ahead to our places to play the game. And instead of me typing out how the event transpired, how about you watch this amazing video instead. Just note that there will be tons of screaming and laughing as my friends recorded this for me.
The general gist is that we were able to roll the dice 7 times in total and we landed on the chinese characters 5 times in total! I was pleasantly surprised that we won $5,600 and completely crushed their record. All in all, it was an amazing experience and definitely not an embarrassing one xd
And now the question on everyone's mind is...
What Did You Do With The Winnings?
Not gonna lie, I was pretty excited to have an additional $2,800 to spend on stuff. I was already googling how I could upgrade my desktop and make it go from being a 2k PC to becoming a true 5k PC. However, my Mum had other thoughts and actually donated the bulk of the winnings to her brothers.
You see, her brother was a proud owner of a noodle factory and COVID-19 has hit his business like a truck. Even with the government support and help, business was really going down because people weren't returning to offices in the CBDs and were cooking more at home in general. This meant a reduction of business within hawker centers and thus a reduction in the amount of noodles being ordered from them on a daily basis.
I really respected her decision and it was a proud son moment because my Mum were putting others ahead of herself. I guess I should strive to become a better human being like my Mum and always be looking out for other people - especially those that are close to you. And for the remainder of the winnings, it's still in my Mum's bank account and I won't be asking for any of it. Because I know that she will be putting it to good use, for the betterment of the people around her. And also because she has recently been talking about renovating our drainage system so we won't have flash floods whenever it rains 😂
And so that's it, the most happening event of 2021 for me. Getting invited on a game show, researching how we can game the system, breaking the winnings record for the game and ended up donating the money to a good cause. I truly don't think anything can top this for me this year unless Ethereum goes to $8,000.
That being said, I hope you had a good time laughing at me embarrassing myself live on television. Remember to always keep smiling, breathe and slowly push on. Stay safe and game on!
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