You just said she played it great, which is what they rewarded her for.
I would think he is saying "great" insofar as she managed to win the biggest prize for herself when winning the car should not have seemed more of a loss than winning the piggy bank. It would have been horrible television for Drew to have been, "Congratulations, you won the car, but, oh, you could have won $62,700" when it has never, ever, ever been a better thing to win the Piggy Bank in Any Number.
In the normal one away your aim is for good pricing skills of one item, here you have to be good at figuring out the car and the small prize to win the cash.
While one might argue the added difficulty of figuring out the price of the car and the laptop to determine which numbers were in the Piggy Bank
could justify a higher reward for doing so (when you make the Piggy Bank the most desirable prize), there's two problems: First, by design, the Piggy Bank is always the leftover digits after selecting the car and the three-digit prize. While I am sure that in this setup they were carefully selective about which three digits made it into the Piggy Bank, at the end of the day, it's three digits placed in whatever order the producers felt would be the best that day, and it's an item simply impossible to price on its own. This leads into problem number two: If you are playing to win the Piggy Bank, an item whose amount you have no information whatsoever to identify its prize in and of itself because it's just cash, you're playing a reverse version of the game (by trying to identify the car's and laptop's prices) and then
actively trying not to complete those prices, which is simply not how Any Number has ever been played.
I know there are those who will try to argue it's a new spin on the oldest of games, that changing things up like this keeps it "fresh", "exciting", whatever adjective you want to choose, but it simply just doesn't work because you're completely breaking what's been done for 50-plus years and done that way with a purpose. The car has always been the best reward because it's the one most difficult to price, with four digits to guess instead of just three. Further, the board is structed in such a way that the best prize is at the top and the worst is at the bottom, and you can't get away from this visual representation even if you suddenly make the Piggy Bank worth thousands.
Because I can't just make an argument of saying, "It's been done the same way for 50-plus years, and that's why you can't change it" since that will never be accepted around here, let me explain what, I suppose, you could have done if you wanted to play Any Number for cash and not have it look as badly as this did.
Forget the car but keep the three-digit prize, and after the three-digit prize plug, reveal you have a chance to win a boatload of cash (however you want to phrase it). Instead of the Piggy Bank being on the bottom line, move its graphic up to the top line, and for the bottom line, put in a tube of Aspercreme or whatever you want that's in dollars and cents. At least then you've solidified that the Piggy Bank's cash is king in this playing, and you don't have two cash prizes by replacing the ordinary Piggy Bank with something else. Most importantly, both the three-digit prize and the grocery item have prices.
So, you want to fill in the top line with the mystery money you can win. I still hate how you're playing to identify something you can't price, but at least you can use the other two items' prices to help you with what not to pick and we're still going for the top line now.
Depending on how easy or difficult you want to make it, perhaps you don't give the first digit free in the jackpot but let the contestant know, "The first digit in the Piggy Bank appears twice, and when you call it for the first time, we'll light it up first in the Piggy Bank". They have that "digits available" display at the top of the board now, so there's no excuse for not knowing which digits are still in play. Alternatively, you could offer the contestant any free digit in the Piggy Bank or do something to emphasize the repeated digit will repeat once it's revealed the first time. I think if you're playing for a pile of cash, it's OK to make it a bit more difficult; but don't confuse anybody with the repeated digit.
That, I think, would have been a far better way to approach this if they really felt they needed to play Any Number for cash (but it was the worst of the "mo' money syndrome" I've ever seen them do in the post-Barker era). What they did didn't work because losing was winning, and that just made for a horrible presentation.
