This guy won $30,000 on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ — here’s how much he got to keep
After taxes, the total winnings became $6,000 in cash and two vacations
As the most popular syndicated show on TV, with tens of millions of viewers everyday, competition to get on “Wheel of Fortune” is fierce: Millions of people apply to get on the game show every year. Of those, according to the show’s website, only 10,000 are selected to audition. Out of that pool, a mere 600 end up on the show, and of those, just 200 make it to the final round. Matt McMahan was one of them.
If getting on the show is hard, winning is harder still — requiring not just puzzle-solving acumen and the ability to think on one’s feet, but also strategy and luck. Making big bucks on the show is extremely difficult. McMahan won more than $30,000. That buys a lot of vowels.
While McMahan and his partner, Adam Hart, were regular Wheel viewers, he never gave serious thought to competing. One day, however, the two caught a “Teacher’s Week” rerun — a themed episode where all the players are teachers. While McMahan worked as an actor for several years — including in the most recent revival of Les Misérables — he currently teaches second grade in the Bronx as part of Teach for America. When Wheel announced it was seeking contestants for another Teacher’s Week, Hart urged him to apply.
“I knew he would get on if he tried,” Hart said. “He’s enthusiastic about teaching, he works in a low-income school, he’s gorgeous, and he’s been on Broadway. TV would love him.”
Auditioning for the show
Getting on is a multistep process, the first of which involves making an introductory video. McMahan filmed one on his phone, which Hart — another former musical theater actor — “stage mom-ed”: “We did multiple takes; I kept telling him to smile, to show more enthusiasm.”
A month after he sent the video in, a representative from the show invited him to the next step: a tryout in Brooklyn, where applicants took turns playing a version of the game and were given 25 fill-in-the-blank word games, of which they had to solve 15 within a set time.
“They want to know that you understand the puzzles, that you can speak clearly and loudly and follow directions, and that you won’t freak out,” McMahan said. The show did not return requests for comment.
While McMahan met his fill-in-the-blank quota, he was not, unlike other aspiring contestants, asked to stay for additional tests, leading him to believe he didn’t make the cut. “Based on my acting experience, if you’re not asked to stay after an audition and others are, you didn’t get it,” he said.
Thinking his tryout would just be an amusing story, he eventually forgot about it until — appropriately — the final day of the school year, when he was contacted and told to pack his bags. The show tapes in Los Angeles, and gives out-of-town contestants $1,000 to use toward their flights and accommodations.
The show, which has aired more than 6,000 episodes since 1975, shoots as many as six episodes a day on the days it films, meaning there’s a lag between when one is filmed and when it airs. McMahan’s was taped on July 14 and aired Sept. 12 as the show’s 34th season premiere; other contestants can wait as long as six months to see their episode.
On the day of his taping, McMahan and his fellow competitors were shuttled to the studio to await their turn in the spotlight. To kill time, he did more practice puzzles.
And then, it was time to meet host Pat Sajak — “very nice” — hostess Vanna White — “oh Vanna, so lovely” — and to spin the “very very heavy” wheel. In the audience was his mother, Misty McMahan, who flew in from Denver, and his grandmother, Virginia “Ginger” Brown, visiting from Dallas.
How he trained for the show
Because his school’s summer vacation coincided with his learning he would be on the show, McMahan was able to dedicate himself full-time to preparation. His practice involved playing the “Wheel of Fortune” app and What’s the Saying — a word game where players decode idioms — and working his way through hangman puzzles created by his mother and Hart. And of course he watched the show, teaching himself to recognize patterns — for example, where consonants might repeat. “I wasn’t guessing to figure out the puzzle, I was guessing for multiples of letters,” he said. “The more letters you have, the easier to solve.”
While Wheel is a puzzle game, there’s also an element of strategy that the “more letters” tactic plays into, as the player with the highest score at the end of the competition is the one who moves onto the final round. “If the round is just about money, then you want to make as much as you can,” McMahan explained. “The rounds with prizes, on the other hand, you want to solve as quickly as possible. Once you get one you don’t want to risk landing on bankruptcy.”
Even the best solver can be destroyed by a bad spin of the wheel, but McMahan proved lucky on this score. After making what he described as a rookie mistake — asking for a letter that had previously been called, which meant he forfeit his turn (despite a board displaying which letters have been selected, not visible to TV audiences) — he regained control of the wheel within a minute: one contestant spun and landed on “Bankrupt,” the next on “Lose a Turn.” He landed on lucrative spots, which led to outsize payouts for common letters, at one point earning $4,000 for guessing T in the puzzle “HEARTWARMING HANDWRITTEN LETTER.” By the end, he was more than $30,000 ahead of his nearest competitor (the third was stuck at $0).
His dominance was so total that he confessed feeling bad about it to a competitor. “Don’t,” he recalled her responding. “Take them for all they’re worth.”
The victor’s spoils
What he took them for, in the end, was $31,700 in cash and prizes — $16,400 in cash and two vacations valued at $15,300: a trip to Chile and a cruise down the Danube River. All game show winnings — cash, prizes, trips, etc. — are taxed like regular income. The show allowed him to find less expensive versions of his two trips, so he was able to pay taxes on vacations worth $10,800 instead of the original $15,300. In the end, he estimates he’ll only walk away with about $6,000 in cash.
That game show prizes come with strings attached may come as a surprise to contestants who expect their winnings free and clear, but McMahan said he and Hart never debated foregoing the vacations, especially since his cash winnings would cover the taxes they owed on them. “We would have loved the extra $2,000, but given that it’s just the two of us and we share living expenses, experiences are worth more than money right now,” he said.
Still, the success has them recommending Wheel as an unconventional income opportunity to friends, and even considering the rest of the game show landscape.
“Ginger,” Hart said, referring to McMahan’s grandmother, “keeps texting me about getting on The $100,000 Pyramid.”
