What's interesting about your example (which I realize was wholly arbitrary, but the concept applies to the actual game) is that the difference between your "big jump" and the one before it is only about $350. 99 times out of 100 the "big jump" happens because the previous price was only a couple hundred bucks away from crossing a new threshold of $1,000.
Not saying your theory is wrong, but it would be interesting to see it applied to actual data, and then (ESPECIALLY if the theory proves out) checked to see if the "big jump" in each case really is all that big.
I'd like to see it applied to actual data as well...don't have the resources to do so...but I would say that out of the last 10 times I've seen the game, this strategy would have worked for the contestant in at least 7 plays.
I'd posit that the average amount of that "big jump" is in the range of about $1,500 (e.g. $20,8xx to $22,3xx)
With this knowledge, we are finally primed for world domination.
While I would never base trying to prove or disprove a theory based on one playing, on the 7/2/14 ep (looking it up on g-r.net) you had exactly that situation: a jump of about $1,500 (from $17,810 to $19,334) and the contestant stopped at the next price ($20,575). Problem was he stopped two prices short--and the gap between the next two prices was about $1,300 (and the gap before that was about $1,100). So that's three pretty "big jumps" in one board setup (assuming $1,100 is the smallest typical jump).
Yes, it would be tedious to do, but you can go back to g-r's summaries to see if indeed that was a one-off and the theory still flies, or whether that's a pattern and the contestants kind of have to be lucky.
