Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (10 page)

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 meanwhile,
you
get the extra few seconds to think, so if an opponent screws up, you can pick up the rebound.

It’s easier said than done. Way easier. Players whack themselves with their own buzzers all the time. But you win
Jeopardy!
the same way you win a game of Russian roulette: keep your finger off the damn trigger unless you know exactly what’s in the chamber. There’s a reason Jane and I decided it’s properly called the Jeopardy Weapon.

And this leads us to the next step in the Eightfold Path:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

3. Put your head where you can use it later.

4. Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.

On a set of
Jeopardy!
boards, there are sixty potential clues to be revealed. Three will be Daily Doubles, so the maximum number of buzzer chances, ever, is fifty-seven. Because of time limits, however, players sometimes don’t complete the entire board. In my first game, there were two clues left on the board in each round. Therefore, there were fifty-three opportunities to ring in.

I just checked the tape. Of those fifty-three chances, I only attempted to ring in thirty-five times. I allowed the other eighteen clues—more than one-third of the game, including most of the high-dollar clues, whose answers of course I did not know—to simply float on by.

And I won in a runaway. Final Jeopardy didn’t even matter.

I was not being modest when I told you that I didn’t know that much.

You don’t win by knowing everything. Often, you won’t know squat. All you can do is admit it and make yourself comfortable with ignorance until you have a chance to change your situation.

Jeopardy!
is often not so much a test of knowledge as it is a test of self-knowledge.

Thus, the next step on the Eightfold Path:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

3. Put your head where you can use it later.

4. Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.

5. Admit you don’t know squat as often as possible.

However, when I
did
attempt to answer, my light came on. Almost always, in fact: twenty-eight times, by my count.

Eighty percent of the thirty-five times my finger moved, my light came on. The other 20 percent of those clues were split about evenly between the other two players. Another way to look at it: when my body decided to tell my index finger to move, I won on the buzzer
eight times more often
than either opponent, both of whom were often looking directly at a Go Light telling them exactly when to ring in.

State-dependent retrieval, properly harnessed, can sometimes help you achieve unlikely goals.

Carried too far, on the other hand, it can also drive people around you completely nuts.

If practicing in an image-rich environment might help, what about filling the apartment with bright stage lights? What about moving the furniture to look more like the
Jeopardy!
set while studying? What about wearing the same clothes every single day? Einstein had a famously limited wardrobe, after all, and for exactly the same reason. Why not?

I’m getting ahead of the story again. But not by much now.

The Final Jeopardy category—
p-TING!
—was hardly a huge surprise:

HALLOWEEN

All righty, then. The mental note about broadcast dates is hereby underlined.

We wrote down our wagers during the commercial. While other breaks are timed to the advertising segments, the break before Final Jeopardy is allowed to stretch out for a few extra minutes. The players have some calculations to do, and the producers don’t want anyone to lose because of a math error. Knowing this, I dawdled a bit over the arithmetic, buying time to let my neurons cool while considering an unusual option. I share this in a confessional tone.

I had $500 more than twice the second-place player’s score. So all I had to do was bet less than $500, and the game was won. Instead, I bet $500 exactly. I was actually playing for a worst-case tie. In non-tournament tie games, both winners return, so in the worst case, my next game would include only one new opponent, in addition to one I could definitely beat on the buzzer.

In a full five-game run, I would normally have eight future opponents. But any one of them could be an Ivy League Serial Killer, an inhuman knowledge machine with a degree from Harvard, someone my Jedi buzzer tricks couldn’t possibly overwhelm. Why not cut that number down to seven, while I could? For all I knew, the monster was lurking in the very next green room.

I mention this strategy for two reasons. First, it is a move I have never heard anyone else suggest, much less try. Perhaps it was brilliant. More likely, it was both cocky and somehow stunningly stupid. I don’t know which. You decide. Second, notice that the first game wasn’t even over, and I was already becoming focused, quite clearly, on going
undefeated.

Kind of a leap, isn’t it? You may begin to wonder if the gentle narrator you have come to trust may, intoxicated with his good fortune, start to show occasional flashes of a man becoming slightly unhinged.

Do not discount this possibility.

The Final clue was fairly simple, even in the unlikely event you’ve never seen the show to which it referred:

MYTHICAL HALLOWEEN BEING IN THE TITLE OF THE OFT-REPEATED ANIMATED TV SPECIAL THAT DEBUTED OCTOBER 27, 1966

I knew the correct response because when I was a child, watching television, I was a child watching television.

If you knew it instantly, great. But if not, I’d bet money that you’d still get it in thirty seconds.

Obvious things may be worth noticing.

There are actually three hints here. Two involve scanning fairly large databases: mythical Halloween beings (goblins, ghouls, ghosts—and that’s just under
G
) and 1960s-era cartoons (
Alvin and the Chipmunks, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mighty Mouse
—and those are just the ones starring rodents). Wander too far down either blind alley, though, and you’re not coming out.

But the third hint is huge and simple: how many Halloween TV specials get repeated every year? I can only think of one:
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
And sure enough, the title names a mythical Halloween character.

The writers almost always structure Final Jeopardy clues in this you-can-get-there fashion. The worst mistake you can make is not having the patience to read closely, trapping yourself in a dead end as a result. If you ever get on the show:
take your time.
The thirty seconds won’t start until Alex has read the clue out loud, so you have an extra seven or eight seconds on top. The whole clue is only fifteen or twenty words. Go
slowly,
and you may find the vital hint before the Think Music even starts.

Electronic pen hits glass.
Clackity-click-whap-clackity.
Done.

Once my response was written down, I had about twenty-five seconds to stand in silence, listening to the rest of the familiar thirty-second musical countdown. I wanted to dance, if you must know.

I thought of my mom back in the small white house in Ohio, and how happy she would be when she saw the game. I thought of my dad, who is still alive in my head, and what he would say if the timeline ever collapsed and we all got to sit together in that living room and watch this very show.

I hoped my sister Connie would be proud. Over the years, despite mystifying health problems, she had married happily, raised two kids, and made the best of discomfort whenever possible. She had given me more reason to be proud of her than I could ever provide in return.

Annika never crossed my mind.

Since I responded correctly, my tie-game second-choice gambit went unnoticed by the universe. Alex came over to shake my hand, and we stood at center stage while random products that
some contestants also receive!
zipped across TV screens thousands of miles away and several weeks in the future.

Sue Bee brand honey! and Scalpicin hair treatment! and the
Jeopardy!
electronic game! later, finally, it was over. While Alex disappeared back into the mists of celebrity, I wobbled off the stage, back into the darkness, and tried to readjust my eyes, ears, and self-esteem.

Susanne Thurber patted me on the back and gently guided me toward a series of forms I needed to fill out. I was walking gingerly, trying to convince myself of what had just happened. Patients leaving surgery are often more sure of their footing.

There was a slip of paper with a large number on it and a place for me to sign. The number was simply impossible to believe. It was enough money to pay rent for an entire year. It was twice what I had paid for rumbling old Max, larger even than the college debt I had worked for eight years to pay off.

I stuffed my copy of the slip into my thrift-store sports jacket, grabbed a free Goodie Bag including a
Jeopardy!
home game—which I still own, almost ten years later, somewhere in a dusty pile in an apartment I don’t quite live in—and wobbled out into the Sony lot.

I was proud. I was relieved. I was tired.

I wanted more.

CHAPTER
7

HOW EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

Also, Twenty-One Interesting Uses for Rubber

U
nfortunately, I still didn’t have much in the way of actual memory skills.

I often wonder, even now, if I have much of a memory at all. Example: I finished the chapter about taking the
Jeopardy!
test about a week ago. And I still don’t remember what year it was the first time I failed.

I’ve been thinking of going through a large stack of old notebooks and tax receipts, trying to pin down the year. This is no inconvenience. Sometime between six months and six years ago, I again moved in with a delightful and talented woman—for the fifth (or fourth, or possibly sixth) time—and, as you know, all of my stuff is still in boxes and garbage bags, as it has been since you picked up this book.

I’ve mentioned this woman several times now, of course. Jane, who named Squeema, wink-wink.

The bags and boxes were supposed to be unpacked long ago. But they’re still all sort of shoved into the corner of the guest bedroom, which was supposed to have become an office. Instead, it’s just storage.

It wouldn’t take more than a few days to unpack. I don’t have much. I don’t like to own stuff. There’s a whole explanation for that. The one I usually tell myself involves frugality and charity and even a self-flattering touch of asceticism. But of course that’s complete baloney, and you deserve better.