nah man , this is classic pupey <| sep |> The sense I got was that it was staged , or with heavy guidelines from the production . Spoilers for early S 3 and early S 4 below . Honestly it ' s mostly two things 1 Seasoned broadcasters being peppered into the cast every season . And by peppered in I mean that like half of the cast broadcasts professionally . 2 Heavy editing , esp . winner ' s edit . The show was broadcast about 67 episodes behind its filming . Things look much more sneaky and perfect bc they edit all of the twists to have more interesting timing . All of those events do actually happen , though . I really doubt it ' s staged , because a lot of things don ' t go the way production would want them to go . For example , the producers clearly love Kyunghoon cos they keep dragging him back after his S 3 ep . 2 elimination . They want him on the show because he ' s chaotic , but if it was staged , why eliminate him that early in the first place ? Then you have stuff like Jungmoon ' s awful behaviour in S 4 , that ' s not the kind of shit you can convince someone to act out . She completely destroyed her public image with that . Just my $ 0 . 02 , I know that a lot of Korean varietyreality is scripted to various extents , but there have never been rumours about The Genius being staged . The only thing that fans had some beef with was that producers might have had the opportunity to pick out death matches based on who got chosen to play them , but the producers started clearly predetermining and then randomizing death matches in S 3 and S 4 in response to that criticism . Show seems relatively transparent to me .