Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (2 page)

I am not winning.

For almost an entire game, I have been choosing the wrong millisecond. And twelve seconds later, I have chosen the wrong millisecond again. So far, twenty-five clues into this Double Jeopardy round, I have won on the buzzer and then responded correctly exactly four times.

I am wondering, amid a hundred other racing thoughts, how I ever got here.

Whoever leads at the end of the Double Jeopardy round is usually the victor. But I am thousands of dollars behind. To have any real chance, I need to start winning quite suddenly, every twelve seconds. I will most likely need to beat both of these players on the buzzer and answer correctly at least four more times.

One problem: there are only five clues remaining.

The next clue begins. As Alex’s voice echoes softly inside my head, my eyes race through the words on the game board, hoping to gain perhaps one extra second. In a moment, I know the response. There is no sense of relief.

I take a breath, focus only on pacing and rhythm, and start sorting small fractions of time.

To my right, I feel a breath slightly held. To my left, a barely glimpsed thumb again readies.

A second passes. And then another. Alex approaches the end of the clue.

The right millisecond approaches.

I just have to find it.

If you’re interested in what a player might try in that position, that’s part of what this book is about.

If you’re curious how anybody remembers the capital of Bhutan, great composers of Finland, or the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, that’s another big chunk of what follows.

You might also wonder how winning and losing and studying so hard might affect a player’s life, or if friendships evolve, or what Alex is like, or how having a bunch of new stuff in your head might feel. There’s a lot of all that in here, too.

We will bounce between all these categories, sometimes quite suddenly. But just keep playing. We’ll get the whole board cleared off by the end.

And if part of you doubts that you’d ever belong in a game like this, I understand.

That, in fact, is what everything else in the book is about.

CHAPTER
2

A COMPLETE INABILITY TO LEARN FROM FAILURE

Also, Incompetence, Ignorance, and Clumsiness

I
don’t remember what year it was the first time I failed the
Jeopardy!
test.

That might tell you a lot right there.

I also don’t remember how many times I failed it. I’m pretty sure it was five, over the course of several years, beginning well over a decade ago. It might have only been four. Maybe six. I actually lost count.

I didn’t go to Harvard or Berkeley or any school you’d probably recognize. I’ve read a good bit on my own about history and politics, but I have no advanced education in literature, the visual arts, or a hundred other subjects. For much of my life, the most sophisticated works I’ve been able to appreciate have been narrated by Morgan Freeman. I’ve never done anything distinguished enough to merit the sound of his voice.

I did once get a degree in electrical engineering, but
Jeopardy!
is about playing the giant game board, not giving it service under warranty. In a pinch, my college years might have been handy if you could rig your buzzer for “stun,” replace the light pens with Tasers, or reboot Alex every time you start losing. Unfortunately, none of the wiring is all that accessible. Alex barely comes within reach.

I was never even much of an engineer. What formal training I did receive was made useless by time itself. The “advanced” computer language I studied as a sophomore was obsolete by the time I was a senior. Soon after my graduation, technology had accelerated so much that I might as well have studied Plowing With Oxen, Posing Naked On Ceremonial Pottery, or Things To Do With An Armored Codpiece. My academic relevance ended with Pong.

What I
do
have going for me is a diverse and stimulating range of failures.

The following is true, I swear: I once bought the book
Speed Reading Made Easy.
And I never finished it.

Let that sink in.

However, one afternoon when I was hanging pictures and couldn’t find a hammer, I actually used the book’s spine to drive a nail in the wall.

So at least it wasn’t a complete waste.

I took the
Jeopardy!
test, all five or four or possibly six times, in the audience bleachers of the actual
Jeopardy!
studio. A hundred hopefuls would assemble at the Sony parking garage, chatter nervously about nothing, and follow an escort past an array of Sony-owned props, potted plants, and glamorous showbiz detritus.

At last, we would reach the hallowed
Jeopardy!
hall. This was pretty cool in itself, at least the first few times. The distant, darkened stage would seem ready to shimmer at any moment, honored ground where only a few might tread.

The contestant podiums, right across the room, were still mainly in our imaginations. But perhaps, we all hoped, not for long. Perhaps someday we would stand beside legends like Michael Daunt (at the time, the International Tournament champion) or Frank Spangenberg (the highest-scoring five-time champ in history) or Chuck Forrest (inventor of the “Forrest Bounce” board strategy, about which you will soon read more) or Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (neither of whom would pick up a buzzer for another ten years, but since we were dreaming impossible things, they belong just as well as the others).

Perhaps someday we, too, would stand in brilliant light and recall unbelievably small details from the database of everything that happened to anyone, anywhere, ever. So we hundred hopefuls would lean forward, earnest and focused, read the clues off the monitors, and pencil our way through a Johnny Gilbert–narrated SAT.

The test itself was simple yet tough: fifty clues, each obscure enough to appear in the difficult bottom rows of the game board, announced with relentless rhythm in a total of perhaps fifteen minutes.

If that seems fast, the total time of an actual sixty-clue Jeopardy game (leaving aside the thirty-second fever dream of—
p-TING!
—Final Jeopardy): just under thirteen minutes. Sixty twelve-second cycles slowed only slightly by three Daily Doubles. As the game flies along, your total time-to-think period, as Alex reads each clue aloud: usually between two and seven seconds, followed by the wait-wait-
now
spasm of thumby buzzer-whacking. Twelve seconds, again. Twelve seconds,
again.

Fast as the
Jeopardy!
test seemed, we were actually going much more slowly than in a real game.

Pencils down. A hundred exhales. Quiet. Then: nervous chatter.
Did-you-get-its
and
aaagh-I-should-have-known-thats
shared between competitive strangers made friendly by stress.

Most of the clues, predictably, were from the wide variety of categories completely outside my experience. For me, things like British Literature, Ancient History, and Norse Mythology might as well have been titled Books You’ve Never Heard Of, Answers You Can’t Pronounce, and More Proof You Don’t Belong Here, Bob.

I couldn’t have gotten more than half of the responses right.

At the end of each of my five (or four or possibly six) lame flails, one of the contestant handlers would thank everyone for coming and reassure us that we shouldn’t feel bad if we didn’t pass. After all, they would always insist, it’s
impossible
to study for
Jeopardy!

Then someone would read the list of the names of people who had passed the test, one by one. And then stop. Sooner than I’d hoped.

I would rise, put on either my sunglasses or a warm jacket, depending on the season, shuffle back to where Max was parked in the Sony garage, climb in, drive home, and sit through the show’s six-month total-failure-quarantine period. And then I’d try again. Eventually, I gave up.

I didn’t even succeed at
that.

The final time I drove down for the
Jeopardy!
test, I realized I was wasting my time.

The show had never (and has never, I believe) specified how many correct responses were necessary to pass—to this day I’m not certain if it’s even a fixed number—but by my last trip, the widely rumored threshold was precisely thirty-five. I heard this very gossip, in fact, in the Sony parking garage, chatting with other hopefuls while waiting for the escorted march.

Sure enough, for the fifth (±one) time, I was certain of only about twenty-five of the fifty responses. Beyond those, a handful of my guesses looked pretty decent. But I would still need perhaps a half-dozen Hail Mary lobs to land. The chances seemed remote. They still do.

As I turned in my paper and No. 2 pencil, it dawned on me that there were stalkers who gave up more easily.

I wondered why I kept trying.

The money was a nice incentive, of course.
Jeopardy!
hands out huge crunchy bales of cash to people whose brains unspool on command. Plus, the Pavlovian reward loop—respond correctly, get a jolt of pride—was already rewarding.

Maybe it was sheer stubbornness, or trying to feel worthy of educational chances I hadn’t made the most of, or a lifetime of using my brain as a kind of preemptive self-defense. Maybe I was still trying to prove something to my parents, but one of them was dead, and the other would give me a warm buttered pretzel if I had just knocked over a hardware store.

Perhaps it was animal instinct. In any band of primates, males compete to display their alpha-ness for the females in the troop. Maybe this was all some elaborate reproductive ruse. If so, though, it was certainly among the least efficient in history.

I realized, finally: I didn’t even know why I was there.

As the names of the non-failures were read aloud, I knew I was going home for good. So this was the end of my
Jeopardy!
career.

And then the contestant coordinator, Susanne Thurber, a woman of firm countenance around nervous strangers but (I would learn) sweet and funny and eager to dish about Broadway shows when sitting backstage in the green room of Radio City Music Hall, took one more breath, nearing the end of her list…and called my name.

My journey into Trebekistan had begun.

In almost a decade since, I’ve been on
Jeopardy!
thirteen times.

I’ve won over $150,000 in cash and prizes and defeated two Tournament of Champions winners. The show has put me up in fancy hotels on both coasts, flown me across the country twice—once for a million-dollar “Masters” tournament—given me two sports cars, and even invited me to the ceremony where Alex got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Given how things started, I barely find this plausible myself sometimes.

Along the way, thanks to doing my
Jeopardy!
homework, I’ve also picked up over $200,000 on other quiz shows and even helped a friend pay off his house by answering his $250,000 question on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Then again, I’ve also
not
won on
Jeopardy!
with a certain inescapable rhythm—perhaps as frequently as anyone who has ever played. Nobody I can find keeps exact data on incompetence, but I’d be one of the first names in the grid.

This is fine by me. Since tournament contestants often bond like plane-crashed rugby players in the Andes, a loose fraternity of unbelievably smart and curious people has gradually developed. Win or lose, being a small part of this group is easily as great a prize as anything the show hands out.

Besides, as a lifelong Cleveland sports fan, I’ve learned to appreciate sudden, utter doom. Failure and defeat are, after all, the largest part of human endeavor. We might as well do it with gusto. Fumbling away the ball on the last play is painful; fumbling it away
as you’re crossing the goal line
will one day become funny as hell.

Someday Ken Jennings’s record of seventy-four straight victories will fall. Brad Rutter has already passed him as the all-time money winner. Somebody else will break Brad’s record next. Possibly someone who reads this book.

It could even be you.

You will almost certainly
not,
however, screw up more frequently than I have. That’s one achievement, at least, that you and Ken and Brad will probably never touch.

In the coming pages, you’ll see me lose (and occasionally win) against some of the best players in the show’s twenty-year history. I lose in Los Angeles. I lose in New York. I lose by massive amounts. I lose by one dollar. I lose in ways I see coming. I lose in ways I never imagined.

I win sometimes, too, just to keep you guessing. (And thank goodness. This book would be a real drag otherwise.) Winning is just as much fun as you’d think. So I hope you’ll feel like you’re sharing in the wins when they happen, even if our losses might often be so much more memorable.