Carnival games are rigged. Here’s how to beat them

It’s state fair season, which means it’s likely you’re going to find yourself in a position where you want to show off and win a giant stuffed animal. This pursuit is fine, chase your bliss — but at least watch this video first to prepare yourself.

YouTuber Mark Rober did a breakdown of the carnival games you’re most likely to find at any fairground, and explained why the odds are stacked so much against you. Some of these are obvious, like the metal milk bottles or narrow ring-toss rings, but there are probably several you didn’t think about.

This is a game people try over and over and over again, because it feels familiar to us. Everyone wants to show off their basketball skills to their friends, but with two simple tweaks the game is made incredibly difficult.

A typically three is shot from 24 feet back on a 10-foot rim. The carnival has their rim set up at 11 feet, and makes you stand 28 feet back. It’s less about needing to shoot the ball higher and further, and more about playing against your muscle memory to make you miss — which is why you’ve probably come up short in the past.

This one is even trickier because of the stipulations. This game always requires the ball to bounce on the table in order to score, so you can’t just drain shots. This is because the tables are angled enough to slow down the speed of the ball after the bounce and once again, you guessed it, wreck your muscle memory.

These are a mixed bag of the relatively fair and the fraudulent. We talked about the milk bottle toss, but the only trick here is to not focus too much on power and sacrifice your accuracy. The metal bottles mean you have a small sweet spot you need to hit and in order to win, you need to hit the bottles right here.

The pitch speed game on the other hand? Don’t try it. The carnival Rober went to was clocking pitches 15 miles per hour under their actual speed and it will be almost impossible for you to prove it at the fair.

One of your safest bets is the basket toss game. One in 10 people won according to the video, and its technique is pretty easy to master. You just need to toss the Wiffle ball so it clips the front lip of the basket.

This reduces the ball’s kinetic energy, and gives it a greater chance of staying in the basket.

You should watch the full video because it breaks down the games you should NEVER play, but the only other advice is that if you have a friend who’s a professional athlete: Bring them. Rober brought along Mets draft pick Matt Winaker, and the two absolutely cleaned up on the baseball games.