It was late, SportsCenter wasn't on due to an excess of college football, and daisy_knotwise and I were looking for some brain candy on the TV Guide when I spotted 1 vs. 100, which I'd never actually seen a full episode of, and suggested that we watch that. It's actually fairly interesting, although it relies on having contestants who seem to have escaped from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

The game has a series of multiple choice questions with three possible answers. If you answer a question correctly, you stay in the game, whether you're a member of the "Mob", which starts with 100 members, or the singular contestant. The contestant wins money for each member of the Mob that they eliminate and is allowed to leave with the money they've won at various points in the game. If the contestant is the last person standing, they win $1 million. If the contestant misses a question, the remaining members of the Mob split the accumulated prize money. Mob members who answer all questions correctly are retained to the next game and the Mob is recharged to 100 with new players.

The contestant gets three "helps". They can "Trust the Mob" and accept the consensus answer. They can "Poll the Mob" and see how many Mob members picked a particular answer. They can "Ask the Mob" in which case one member with the correct answer and one member with the incorrect answer will be picked randomly and the contestant can ask them why they picked that answer. (The Mob answers are usually pretty uninformative, which is somehow not surprising, since they're playing for the same pool of money.)

Of the questions we saw in the two games, there was only one that I couldn't immediately answer and -- as it happened -- I picked the right answer, although I would have definitely asked for help on it. (Which of these three band members was not married to Heather Lockyear? Ack! Not my cuppa...)

The first game ended with 25 Mob members left standing; the second with only 7. However, the 7 still there were pretty good, including professional poker player Annie Duke. There were a number of other celebrities in the Mob, including David Eckstein, Wink Martindale, and Bob Eubanks.

My suspicion is that the folks who select the contestants make sure to select the brighter ones into the Mob. I didn't see the Mob make any money, but there may be some lovely parting gifts I suppose. :)

And it's an interesting game.