A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
By Chris Wadsworth
Chance Frye loves competition. The Ashburn native played football for Stone Bridge High School. After he graduated in 2015, he played college ball for two years at the University of Virginia-Wise.
Now the 27-year-old lives in Vienna, where he’s an accountant by day and a high school football coach by night.
This love of competition also extends to television game shows. Frye has been a fan of them since he was a little kid, and he admits to regularly watching the Game Show Network on cable. That’s how Frye recently found himself on the stage and winning big on America’s longest-running game show, “The Price is Right.”
The adventure began when Frye and his buddy, Julian Albizo, headed off to Los Angeles to attend the Rose Bowl. It’s helpful if you know that Frye is the type of guy who plans things in great detail. Besides the Rose Bowl, they had tickets to an L.A. Kings hockey game and some other sporting events. But their schedule wasn’t quite full.
“We had an open day on Wednesday,” Frye said. “And I looked at what type of things were available and saw ‘The Price is Right,’ and I said, ‘We are going to get those tickets.’”
They got what are called priority tickets, which guaranteed them a spot in the studio audience. But as regular viewers know, there’s no guarantee you will be called on stage. It’s the luck of the draw, and only a handful of audience members are chosen to play “The Price is Right.”
It was Jan. 3 – and luck was with Chance Frye that day. He was the second to last person called – toward the end of the show.
“I couldn’t really hear my name,” Frye said. “So, they have someone up front holding up a poster with your name on it. I saw my name and immediately jumped up and ran down there.”
On TV, Frye can be seen high-fiving other audience members on his way to the contestants’ row. That’s where Frye and three other contestants had to guess the price of an all-inclusive trip to Cancun, Mexico, without guessing too much – what’s known as “going over” in the show’s parlance.
“When you’re up there, it’s a bit different from what you see on TV,” Frye said. “On TV, they are showing you slides and images, but you don’t see those in the studio, so you’re trying to listen to the guy over the loudspeaker and put the details together.”
Frye bid $6,200, and the actual retail price of the trip was $6,400. A couple of contestants had “gone over,” and Frye’s guess was the closest. He won the trip to Cancun and headed onto the stage with host Drew Carey to play an even bigger game.
“Hilarious to have someone named ‘Chance’ on ‘The Price is Right,’” Carey quipped.
If you’ve watched the show, you might guess what Frye heard next – four of the most famous words in the show’s history. Yep, the prize he was playing for was “a brand-new car.”
It was a red 2024 Lexus ES350.
“My first reaction was – I don’t know what a Lexus costs. I was trying to crunch numbers in my brain and they’re going over the specs on the loudspeaker and Drew Carey is trying to explain the game,” Frye recalled. “At that point, you kind of just black out and try to roll with it.”
The game Frye had to play was the “Range Game.” It’s an oldie, but a goodie – appearing on the show for decades. Basically, a range of possible prices for the Lexus is shown and the contestant has to stop the arrow when they think it lines up with the price of the car. The guess has to be within $150 of the actual price to win.
“I let it go a little bit and then clicked ‘Stop,’ and I ended up clicking pretty much right in the middle of the range,” he said of the moment the green light lit up showing the value of the car was $46,730.
Frye had now won a car and a trip to Cancun, if you’re keeping track. His pal, Albizo, sitting in the audience, sure was – and he was losing his mind.
“It all felt like a fever dream. It was totally unreal,” Albizo said. “I was laughing at first, but once he started to win I could tell that he was really focused. I started to think he could win the whole thing. I felt like his coach — giving him a fist bump from the audience and being all dialed in and serious. I was like, ‘You got this.’”
From this point, contestants spin the Big Wheel in what’s called the Showcase Showdown. The wheel is covered in numbers representing 5 cents to $1. The contestants have up to two spins, and the one who gets closest to $1 without going over moves on to the final Showcase event.
Frye says the famous wheel is heavier than it looks. “You’ve got to give it a little bit of effort,” he said. “One woman had to spin it five or six times because she could not get it to go all the way around, but they cut that from the show.”
Of the three contestants standing at the wheel, Frye was the third to spin. The first contestant got 50 cents and stopped there. The next contestant got 55 cents and also stopped. If you know anything about “The Price is Right,” you know that our local boy was in a pretty good spot.
“At that point, I just had to beat 55. I gave it a little spin and I got a 70,” he said with a laugh. “I feel like the people in front of me kind of did it for me because they had low numbers that I just had to beat.”
Frye was now headed to the Showcase – the show’s grand finale, where the two Showcase Showdown winners of the day face off. They are presented with two showcases rich with prizes and have to guess the value.
The first showcase was $3,000 plus three exotic, all-expense paid trips – to Finland, Singapore and the Galapagos Islands. Frye’s opponent was in the lead position and chose to pass the showcase onto Frye. He bid $45,000.
The next showcase included a Volvo and household appliances such as a new stove and a washer and dryer. The other contestant bid $52,000 on that showcase.
When the actual values were revealed, both men were far below the actual retail prices – but Frye was closer, and he won his entire showcase. Altogether, he had hauled in a total of $113,490 in prizes over the course of his appearance — which he says took maybe 45 minutes in real time.
“I ran into the middle of the stage,” he said. “Julian runs up from the crowd and we just jumped around. It was kind of like a football game. The crowd erupted around us – it was like scoring a touchdown.”
Backstage, reality set in. The show said it was too expensive to ship Frey’s Lexus to Virginia, so instead he received a check for the value of the car. He also has to pay taxes on everything he won. Taxes on $113,490 is a hefty amount for anyone – and Frye chose to forfeit two of the trips to cut down on his tax burden.
Finland and Mexico were cut, but he and Albizo are already planning trips to Singapore and the Galapagos Islands.
When the show was taped, Frye had no idea when it was going to air. It turns out it was part of a primetime edition of the show called “The Price is Right at Night.” Frye says the prizes were even bigger and better on this version of the show – one more stroke of luck for him.
Frye finally got word that the show would air May 23. He had been sworn to secrecy, so – other than a few family members – no one knew anything about his “Price is Right” appearance.
On the night the show aired, Frye’s mom, Leslie McMahon, threw a barbecue at her home in Ashburn’s Village of Waxpool neighborhood and invited a couple dozen family friends over. But other than Frye himself, most of the guests were perplexed when McMahon insisted that everyone come inside at 8 p.m. to watch a TV game show. That was not a normal part of their barbecues.
“They were like, ‘Why are we watching “The Price is Right”?’ It was hysterical,” McMahon said. “Then someone saw Chance sitting in the audience and they started screaming.”
For Frye, going to Los Angeles, having that free Wednesday, snagging the priority tickets to the show – it was a series of lucky decisions that added up to a memory he will never forget.
“It was just an awesome experience,” he said. “I always said if I ever made it on a game show, that I had to do well. And everything aligned just the way I had always imagined. It was surreal – and it was a blast.”