This one screams for my input:
(BTW, I'm willing to bet that $otc will be back. It's just too solid a format to let lay by the wayside forever. It's true that it will likely never get back to NBC daytime but it WILL BE BACK.)
The $ale of the Century Tournament of Champions (in my revival of the show)
Sixteen players compete, with priority going to players who've won the Lot, followed by players who've won five or more games, followed by top money winners. Why put number of games over total winnings? Simple: for consistency. It's harder to win multiple games in a row than it is to put together a big stack of winnings, IMHO.
For my $otc tournament rules, I would adapt the rules from the Aussie $ale of the New Century for four players. Otherwise, the standard game (a better way to describe the format, IMHO, is to think of it as three rounds of a preprogrammed number of questions, say 10, with an IB in the middle and a FG at the end of each round, concluded by the Speed Round). At the end of the second round, the low scorer is waxed; the player on the low end at the of the third round suffers a similar fate, with the two remaining players to battle it out in the Speed Round. The winner advances to the championship game (on Friday) and goes to the Showroom and either A) gets a pick off of the Winner's Board or B) buys a prize in the manner Travis Eberle describes above...except that for my ToC, there are only cars, ranging from $25,000 up to $90,000+ (depending on what the prize coordinators can score) and priced as Travis describes above ($50 for the low end cars and $150 for the most expensive car).
The eventual winner of the tournament wins a MONSTEROUS Cash Mega-Jackpot equal to the total of all the Cash Jackpots won during the regular season. (GADZOOKS! Talk about your $ale of the Century!)
"Game Show Man" Joe Van Ginkel