Read Online Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! by Bob Harris - Free Book Online

remarks.
    Pure coincidence, of course, and my luck couldn’t last. After all, boardfuls of clues are created long in advance and chosen at random with no knowledge of players. There was no way good fortune like this could hold out. But all you need to know about the Double Jeopardy round is that it included this entire category:
     
     
     
    SMALL MIDWESTERN COLLEGES
     
    Suddenly all those years of cheap motels and gas-station food were paying off. This hardly seemed fair. My finger kept moving—I was barely even paying attention to it anymore—and my light just kept coming on.
     
     
     
    At the end of Double Jeopardy, I had more than twice as much money than either of the other players. Thus, I had a “lock game,” in which Final Jeopardy is rendered entirely moot. I had won in a runaway.
    This lacked suspense, of course, and was less-than-perfect TV. It’s a situation I’m sure the producers do everything they can to avoid. However, after a long day of intense concentration, undulating blood pressure, and things going in and out of my nose, it was also an enormous relief.
    I found myself wondering how good this Matt fellow, this Clark Kent look-alike of a returning champion, had been in the previous game. For all I knew at the time, maybe luck with categories was a large part of the game. Maybe Matt’s first game had included categories like
     
     
     

     
     
     
    It was possible. So I’d have to work harder before the next taping. It was the only way I could imagine controlling the outcome.
     
     
     
    Years later—tonight, actually, shortly before writing this very sentence—I tracked down Matt by phone. I’ve always wondered about the guy who spooked me so much.
    We chatted for over an hour. Great guy. Manages a winery up near Santa Barbara. The movie Sideways was filmed in his neighborhood. Happy, good marriage, enjoying life. Proud of his Pinot Noirs. Next time I’m up his way, I hope to crack a bottle with him.
    Matt’s proudest moment on Jeopardy! ? In the game before ours, he did extremely well in a category called SHEEPISH COUNTRIES:
    “So, of course, this was all about countries that have lots of sheep,” he explained. “You immediately think of New Zealand, maybe Scotland. But I’ve always been a geography buff. I didn’t quite run the category, but for $1,000, the clue asked for a country in the Commonwealth of Independent States which has twice the number of sheep as people…”
    Matt paused on the phone line, as if he half-expected me to blurt out the answer. This might have been a very long pause indeed.
    “…and I said, ‘What is Kazakhstan?’”
    Here’s a humbling thought: Matt was confidently blurting out “What is Kazakhstan?” just five minutes before I began my L’Oréal-induced conniption in the green room.
     
     
     
    Looking back at the buzzer-play in my first game, we find another key bit of Jeopardy! strategy, a bit of Zen that even the best players struggle to achieve: do not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to ring in. Ever.
    Do not. Touch. The. Buzzer.
    Unless you are very sure of the correct response.
    Here’s why: if you and I and your best friend are playing each other on a $1000 clue, and you get it wrong, you’ve just given us both a $1000 advantage. This is already twice as bad as simply letting one of us respond correctly. Worse, there’s now an excellent chance that one of us will now do exactly that, especially since we have a few extra seconds to think, and you’ve eliminated one of the possible responses.
    In this case, guessing wrong will put you $1000 behind one opponent, and $2000 behind the other. Total loss: $3000.
    On the other hand, if your brain turns to grape jelly and oozes out of your skull entirely, bounces with a loud “plop!” off your podium, and finally makes a large purple stain on the studio floor, the worst possible loss is only $1000.
    No big deal. You just scoop your brain back up and play the next clue. And