[quote name=\'Mr. Armadillo\' post=\'196120\' date=\'Sep 5 2008, 11:31 AM\']
You get on stage, and you're handed $500. You can either keep the $500 or trade it in to (essentially) increase your chances of winning the game. Of course, seeing as how this is The Price is Right and not Let's Make a Deal, there's some pricing knowledge thrown in as well.[/quote]
I think those of us who see the change as an improvement are looking at it exactly this way. The way we see it, you're not getting $500 for losing the game, you're getting $500 in order to play the game, and you may or may not decide you want to give it up later to improve your chances of winning.
It is very much a LMAD model. Monty did stuff like that all the time. The enormous difference is that on TPIR, we've become accustomed to judging a performance based on whether a game was "won" or "lost". On LMAD, you might win the top prize or you might get zonked, but there was a lot of middle ground where you'd go home with something else. Letting a Dealer go home with $500 because he didn't want to gamble on the bigger prize was no big...deal. But I can certainly see why people would object to letting that happen on a TPIR game.