YMMV / High Rollers

---

• Awesome Music: The '70s versions have a brassy big-band theme by Stan Worth that gave the show a cool Vegas feel. The 1987 version used a very upbeat and catchy theme by Michel Camilo for Score Productions (originally composed for Merrill Heatter's unsold pilot Lucky Numbers).
• Funny Moments: On the July 4, 1975 episode, a chandelier whacked Ruta Lee in the head just as she came onstage. Alex actually considered stopping tape, but declined when Ruta insisted that she was fine. Alex went to commercial break all the same.
  Alex: (after coming back from commercial) Don't worry about a thing, Ruta. Your hair looks fine, and the double vision will clear up within the half-hour.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A late 1970s ad for Los Angeles NBC station KNBC-TV 4 promoting Card Sharks and High Rollers included the headline "A New Daily Double Starts Tomorrow". Needless to say, this would not be the last time Alex Trebek would be associated with the words "Daily Double".
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Applies to the quiz booklet included in the original 1975 Home Game issued by E.S. Lowe (a subsidiary of Milton Bradley). A good chunk of the questions were completely incoherent or made absolutely no sense, and once enough people complained, the remaining unsold copies were pulled from the shelves and a new version, with a completely rewritten quiz book (most questions were true-false or multiple-choice) written by competent writers, was released. The dice portion of the game was left intact from the show's rules at the time (numbers on a standard gameboard with prizes hidden beneath each number, rather than the more famous rules of numbers scattered randomly on a 3-by-3 board with prizes underneath each column).
  • No Problem with Licensed Games: The 1988 Parker Brothers box game was incredibly faithful to the Martindale version (even including some of the minigames) and had a Q&A booklet that made sense from the get go.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The maingame was overhauled on April 26, 1976 to "Face Lifters" — the removed numbers now revealed parts of a famous face, with a correct identification winning the game and any prizes remaining on the board. The show, trying to win over viewers it had no chance of winning over, was canned seven weeks later.
  • The minigames in the Martindale era, which ground gameplay nearly to a halt. One match could easily spread three episodes.
  • In the late 2000s or so, Merrill Heatter attempted to revamp the show as Dice Fever, hosted by Aussie Deal or No Deal host Andrew O'Keefe. The biggest major difference was that there was no quiz element whatsoever.

---