Guessing games

A young man on "Deal or no Deal" turned down an offer of £24000 and decided to guess instead. He had two boxes, one with £5 in it, the other with about £50000 in it. Guess what: he picked the wrong-un and went home with £5. Did he cry or try to throttle Noel Edmunds? No he did not. He said those immortal words that are said every week, if not every day, on "Deal or no Deal", "Well, I'm only here once".
I'm only here once to demonstrate that I am a complete idiot by guessing which box had £50000 in it and failing to find it.
So why did he guess instead of pocketing the £24000? Because he thought he was "on a role". He had just got rid of three blue numbers (all low in £'s) and thought he must be on a role and therefore the next box he picked would bound to be the big one.
You can't be on a role in a guessing game. You can be on a role in a game where you're using your brain to calculate how things will be.
Another TV game show that is often entertaining is "4 Rooms" where four dealers (in antiques, art.... everything that is saleable) make people, who come there with something to sell, an offer. Sometimes you wonder if the things brought in are of any value at all and then they turn out to be worth a lot: a stuffed tortoise brought a bit of cash for someone, a picture of Marilyn Monroe, drawn by Marilyn Monroe brought a bit of dough from one of the dealers. A stuffed polar bear came too and the four dealers stood beneath it and wondered at the size of the thing.
You wonder sometimes how some of these articles are brought to the studio. In a lorry? Part of a wall with Banksy's graffitee on it.
A guy turned up with 7000 photos of famous stars of old: film stars mostly I think. It's not as if they were by a particularly well-known photographer which might have given them some value - but just a pile of old photos?? So I was amazed when one of the dealers bought them for about £45000. I wasn't the only one who was surprised: the other three dealers would have offered, they said, £500, £600, £700 for them.
Perhaps he thought "well I'm only here once". But I think he saw something special amoung them because there was glint in his eyes, that dealer's glint you've always got to look out for when you're buying or selling something. The glint that says: "I know something that you don't know". As Raymond Chandler put it about a crook: "he had the innocent eyes of a used car salesman".