World Series of Slots, eh? I have an idea for World Series of Pinball, which I'll admit is downright goofy, but GSN just might be crazy enough to spring for it!
As for a couple of other "proposals" in this thread: There was on TV in the early 1960s a celebrity game show based on bridge! It was called Championship Bridge and was played between teams of professional bridge players.
The show aired on ABC on Sunday afternoons and was hosted by newscaster Alex Drier, and none other than the famous bridge columnist Charles Goren was on hand to analyze the play. The two celebrity teams played four hands of bridge (each team member getting one deal during the half-hour show), and scoring was in accordance with standard rubber bridge rules of that time. The team getting the highest score during the program won the game and $500, with the other team receiving a consolation prize of $250. There were also bonus cash awards for bidding and making slam contracts ($500 for a small slam; $1,000 for a grand slam.)
A lasting legacy of that program were the special decks of cards that had to be developed for it by the U.S. Playing Card Company. They had to be small enough for the players to hold in their hands, but the markings on the cards had to be large enough to show up on home TV screens (and you know what they were like in the early 1960s!). But the USPCC came through, and you can still buy those special cards they developed today wherever playing cards are sold. (Just ask for "Bicycle Jumbo Index" playing cards!)
And would you believe there was a game show called All-Star Bingo in the late 1960s? It aired in regional syndication in connection with local supermarket promotions, and you played it at home with game cards you got at your local supermarket. (The Albers/Colonial Stores distributed them in the Greater Cincinnati area.)
On the actual program, two teams of celebrities competed in a question-and-answer game for score points, and every time either team scored, a set of random-number generators was activated to select five Bingo numbers for the home players -- one each under the letters B, I, N, G, and O. Getting five of the selected numbers in a row on your home card won you a cash prize for that line (from $5 to $500), and if the winning team for that program matched the team mentioned on your game card, your prize was doubled.
(And a very similar game lives on today on America Online as Slingo!)
Michael Brandenburg
(Now for the Jeopardy question of the day: The answer is "Jason Smathers." And what's the question? "Who pilfered my AOL screen name and sold it to a whole lot of spammers??")
