Reminds me of a time in university when I was actually repairing our old TV at the back while my roommates were watching.
Final Jeopardy was on… the category … Fictional Characters. For shits and giggles, I yelled out “Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn!”
After the commercial break, the clue was asking about two boys who…yada yada.
Damn if the correct “question” wasn’t “Who are Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?”
My roommates were as shocked as I was, except it was kind of an educated guess, I suppose.
The show usually has an American literature bias, especially for Mark Twain, and the category title can be read to imply a duo or more.
Still, greatest post- Jeopardy living room victory lap ever!
Jeopardy isn’t too bad in terms of difficulty for me. I don’t know if I can run the boards, but I usually can get at least half of the questions, but there usually is some “black hole in my knowledge” category that prevents me from doing better. (Usually, history categories.) Where I really felt intellectually humbled was drinking at a University of Chicago pub on their trivia nights and listenening in (my wife went there.). I’ve witnessed maybe a half dozen or so of them, and I’m lucky if I got more than one question a night correct (if even that. I’m pretty sure there’ve been nights I completely blanked on all of them.) This is in stark contrast to other bar trivia nights I’ve been to where I’ve only competed twice and finished second in a team of three, and second in a team of two with my wife (we just happened upon it and decided to participate against teams of up to six, I believe.)
Here’s the master list of Dopers who’ve appeared on Jeopardy!
As for myself, I think my brain decided after I appeared on the show in 1991 that it had reached its zenith and wouldn’t be needed as much henceforth. It’s been slowly shutting down since then. I can no longer dredge up facts, esecially names, with lightning speed anymore, and would not do at all well on Jeopardy! today.
It doesn’t exactly make me depressed; I try to be philosophical about it. Just another indignity of aging.
While in college I would watch Jeopardy, but the show was broadcast at a different day than it was in my home town (I don’t know why); when I would go to my girlfriend’s house and watch with her family, I was watching the same show I had seen the day before.
This happened a few Fridays in a row, so her family thought I was a damn genius as I ran the whole board and crushed every category.
My cousin won the first Tournament of Champions (of the reboot) but died soon after. Watching Jeopardy makes me think of him and it’s bittersweet., but mostly happy. He was just so talented.
I don’t despair over those contestants knowing more than I do. Usually I know the same answers (at least in many of the categories), my problem is that I can’t pull them out of my flypaper brain in a nanosecond like they can. And it’s always been that way, even when I participated in a high school version of that game almost 50 years ago (that obscure river in Italy, was it the Po or the Arno? I got that wrong in high school).
This is one reason I always did well in written tests, because there you have a little time to think. A show like Jeopardy seems to reward a certain kind of brain, one with instant access to a large range of its long-term memory. That’s a skill that most of us don’t really need in daily life.
I’ve just (yesterday) gone through the second round of testing for the show. This makes the second time I’ve taken a dip in the contestant pool. We’ll see if anything comes of it this time.
I’ve been in the contestant pool twice as well. Never gotten the call. I can only speculate that they have their quota of nondescript middle-aged white guys filled, otherwise they would have snatched me right up!
I’ve very, very good at Jeopardy!. My fiancée is just okay. In an average game I’d guess I’ll get 40-45 answers (questions, whatever) right, and she’ll get half that.
She is, nonetheless, AT WORST as smart as me, and probably smarter. She has a master’s degree in things related to math I can barely pronounce and is a quick-witted, smart type. So why am I better at Jeopardy?
As much as Jeopardy! favours a smart person, it favours people with particular characteristics;
For obvious reasons, it favours people who have a shallow understanding of many subjects, as opposed to a profound understanding of a limited number of subjects. The former describes me pretty well. As Sparky812 points out, for a person with deep knowledge of a subject, Jeopardy! questions on that subject are preposterously easy, almost superficial; I feel that way specifically about the subject “Baseball,” on which I’d bet every single thing I owned on a Daily Double. If you’re like me and know just enough about a lot of things, you have a big advantage over someone like my fiancée who has no interest in remembering Academy Award Best Picture winners but knows more about math than I know about anything.
The game favours people who have watched it a lot. Jeopardy! clues are repetitive and are written in such a manner that if you do not really know the answer, you can usually make a pretty educated guess based on the subject and the clue, which generally has two ways to get the answer. For instance, in the subject “State Capitals,” a typical clue might be “This capital, settled after the Civil War, is the largest state capital by population.” If you happen to know the largest capital city is Phoenix, great. But even if you don’t, the clue really narrows it down; you know the city is fairly newish, so that eliminates almost all the state capitals right there, and you know it’s big. So what could it be? Ain’t likely to be Juneau or Boise. Even if you find yourself a bit stuck you have an excellent chance of just guessing it if you read the clue.
Because of (2) the game favours the bold. Extremely aggressive play, unless you are sure the category is one in which you know nothing, is the way to go, because if you have a general understanding of the category and you don’t panic, you can work out way more clues than you miss.
If you watch the game a lot, they re-use a lot of answers and questions, or close to it.
Well, Jeopardy! does drive me to despair, but mostly because of the damn commercials. I’d try to time my sessions at the gym to correspond with Jeopardy! because playing made the tedium grow more distant, but the commercials they run in that time slot are not the high dollar prime time commercials that at least have reasonable production values. My brain couldn’t toggle from intellectual challenge to utter banal stupidity that fast. And I seem to recall that there was one commercial with some kind of brainless tie-in to Jeopardy! itself, but they never changed the clue from week to week.
Oh, in the spirit of the OP, I generally do fairly well except for some of the popular culture categories where I haven’t caught up, but I’d never actually compete on the show because at least once during each competition I come up with some question that is just mind-wrenchingly embarrassingly wrong.
A couple of other things … I wonder if any of you have ever had it happen whereby the show was on, maybe in a bar or someone’s living room, and you decided to take a chance and show everyone around you how smart you were and thus blurted out what you felt was the correct answer, only to have it be the wrong answer? I’ve done that before and wanted to crawl into a hole. (They really should consider taking the program off the air.:o)
I noticed that the host never fails to shake the winner’s hand first (just one more way the show creates humiliation for people.:mad:).
How long ago did you start? The Sunday puzzle in particular has been dumbed down in recent years, as has the Acrostic. ETA: No offense meant! It’s just that I never used to get but a corner of the Sunday puzzle and now I can usually finish it and I haven’t gotten too much smarter.
This would be my problem too – any abrupt question causes everything to leave my head and I am only 5% sure of what I come up with. This is also why I vastly prefer email to a phone call with someone wanting *an**answerrightnow!! *I also had to write down formulae and notes on tests before reading any of the questions or panic would ensue and I wouldn’t trust myself!
Not necessarily, they might just be easier for you because you are practiced at them.
I like the crossword analogy because once you learn the vocabulary and the unique letter combinations coupled with the tricks, puns, etc… you get much, much better at crosswords.
Both games are a great example of the duality of intelligence and wisdom.
I watch and go between saying “How the hell did they know that?” to saying “How the hell DIDN’T they know that?” I wish they would find a way to eliminate the buzzer, it seems to me that half the game is timing when to push that button.
The auditions are great. I’ve been to five of them (once Marley was there with me).
And an audition it is - they are looking for people who might make good television. They already know you and everyone else in that room are good at trivia games. The auditions are top heavy with middle-aged pudgy white men.
Last time I wore a bowtie. I have since grown a handlebar moustache - if I have another chance I just might be a little more distinctive than the average bear.
