Texas man pays $72 for a 4.5-pound steak at Big Texan Steak Ranch. He has 50 minutes left when he finds out why only 12% of people win

You may be familiar with food challenges that ask you to complete a task like finishing a large meal or finishing a normal meal in a short amount of time. Steak challenges are particularly popular, and the Big Texan Steak Ranch is the home of a famous steak-eating challenge.

The Big Texan Steak Ranch has a challenge where you’re given an hour to finish a 72-ounce steak (which is four and a half pounds), a shrimp cocktail, a baked potato that might be made with bacon grease if they use Texas Roadhouse’s recipe, salad, and a roll. You can cut the steak before the clock starts, and you don’t have to eat the fat from the steak to complete the challenge.

Dora (@_dora_olvera) happened to be at Big Texan Steak Ranch when a man decided to try the challenge, and she got to see him find out why the challenge has a 12% success rate.

The challenge is designed for failure

Big Texan Steak Ranch gives you an hour to eat almost five pounds of meat, which is much more than this woman got in her LongHorn Steakhouse to-go order, plus sides. For professional eaters, this can be possible, and that could also be true for some hungry diners who aren’t professional eaters.

However, the low success rate means that the majority of people who try this challenge will fail, which Dora shows in her two TikToks that total less than a minute of runtime. In the second video, the man leaves the table to throw up in a trash can with 11 minutes left on the clock, but the first video shows that he was already struggling just 10 minutes into the challenge.

Fatigue is the main reason steak challenges are failed

When you have something as large as a 72-ounce steak, you’ll run into two main types of fatigue. The first one is jaw fatigue. No matter how tender that steak is, you’ll have to still do a lot of chewing because of its size.

The second one is flavor fatigue. This is when you have so much of one flavor profile that you struggle to keep eating, and in the case of a steak challenge, that’s usually the sodium and saltiness. You might end up drinking more water to contend with the salt, and that also fills your stomach.

Then, you have the fact that steak isn’t going to digest that quickly in your stomach, so you’ll feel that fullness hit pretty quickly. On top of that, you have the sides to contend with, and those are rather heavy side dishes with the starches and butter for the roll and potato.

When it’s all put together, you have a meal that isn’t meant to be completed in an hour, and that means that most people aren’t getting their $72 refunded for a successful finish.

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