Password (game Show) - Contestants

Contestants

On the CBS daytime version, contestants played two matches, win or lose, with each game awarding $100 to the winner. For most of the CBS nighttime version's first year, the same two players stayed for the entire show, playing as many matches as time allowed. However, after three contestants managed to break the $1,000 mark (which made CBS nervous in the early post-quiz show scandal days), this practice was changed in November 1962 to having two new contestants play each game (generally, three pairs of contestants competed in the course of each show), with winning contestants receiving $250 and losers receiving $50.

For only two shows in July 1965, the nighttime version experimented with a "championship match" format, in which the winners of games 1 and 2 would return to compete against each other in the final game. Also in 1965, the show adopted an annual "Tournament of Champions" where contestants on the daytime version who won both their games were invited back to compete for more money.

Early on the ABC version, winning contestants could stay until either defeated or win a maximum of 10 games, thus retiring them as undefeated champions. Later on, the limit was dropped, and champions stayed on the show until defeated. From 1973–1974, the first contestant to win a two-out-of-three match played the Lightning Round.

Every three months, the four top winners during that period would return for a quarterly contest. The winner would earn $1,000 and the right to compete in the annual Tournament of Champions. The winner of the annual contest won $5,000 and faced the previous year's champion in a best-of-seven match for $10,000. Lewis Retrim, from Boston, won the Tournament of Champions three years in a row.