I’m with you on the not holding your breath thing. I had my tryout in January '05, and have been keenly watching the show for the last year plus. Not only are they looking for “diversity”–more than just middle-aged white guys–but I seemed to notice at the beginning of the current season that they were picking more pretty people, too. Don’t know if it’s conscious or not; maybe they just got more pretty people trying out in the wake of all the publicity they got from Jennings’s run. But to my eyes there were more good-looking people on the show than in previous seasons. (And not just in my eyes, either; there was quite a bit of “hubba hubba” talk on the Jeopardy! boards about certain contestants last year.) Nothing surprising about that for a TV show, but it’s a little unusual for Jeopardy!, which has traditionally been a television refuge for the chess club-looking type people.
And **Mama Tiger **is right: ringing in on everything is not a good strategy. I was under that impression when I first started playing along after my tryout; my results quickly disabused me of that notion. Buzzing in and getting the clue wrong can really do major damage to your score. It’s much better to let a clue or two slide to your opponents than to drop your own score with wrong answers.
Look at it this way: there’s $54,000 in clue values on the board in the two rounds ($18,000 in round one, $27,000 in round two). If each player gets a third of the total money available–not counting Daily Double bets–everyone will have $18,000 going into Final Jeopardy. Meaning each player can potentially finish with $36,000, if you bet it all and get the FJ question right. The vast majority of Jeopardy! games are won with quite a bit less than $36K. In other words, you don’t need all the money on the board to win; just get the money you know, and use the clues you don’t know to catch your breath (instead of guessing and getting it wrong).
The figures in the next to last paragraph of my previous post are wrong. It’s $18,000 in the first round, $36,000 (double the first) in the second. ($27,000 is half the full total–a measuring stick I use to gauge how well I’ve done when playing along in a game.) Sorry for the confusion.
The only time I managed to get in to take the test was in 2001, in D.C. It was a 50 question test with a taped Johnny Gilbert reading categories and questions. I think 9 of us out of about a hundred passed. They didn’t call me.
As I mentioned on the other thread, I think that the thing about the electronic test is that if you pass you’re almost certainly going to get a seat at the tryout, whereas if you just sign up for the in-person tryout there’s a good chance you won’t be called because of limited seating.
One of the people I did the audition questions with stuttered. He said that he had passed the test twice before (I did my test at their studios, right on the set) but had never gotten called. He was a nice guy, but I suspect he never will get called.
Maybe they get filmed jumping up and down shouting “Big Money?” I don’t remember seeing any Doper say he or she was on Wheel. 21 Jeopardy contestants from our user base is quite a lot, and I bet lots of others could be on if they were near an audition.
IIRC, once you’re on Jeopardy you could never be on again, and you have to wait a year before trying out for Wheel.
Something tells me most of us here wouldn’t want to admit it – all it takes to be on Wheel is the ability to jump up and down and shriek a lot. Jeopardy, now, you’re going for glory!
And Voyager, they no longer give out prizes for 2nd and 3rd place; I think it’s 2 or 3K for second and 1K for third. Personally, I ended up almost being happier I lost and won the trip to Ireland than had I won one game and a limited amount of cash – I probably would never have spent the cash on traveling like that, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful trip.
I guess a more important question for the folks here who’ve been on the show already is: Did you get Final Jeopardy right? (I did; that was my personal standard for success – I told myself I’d be happy with my performance no matter what else I do as long as I make it to FJ and get it right, so I was able to feel very proud of myself in spite of losing!)
I’m much happier I got the trip. It was to a resort outside of Carmel, which is a place we both like. We were members of the Monterey Aquarium, so we were able to go in just to rest when we went there. It came with a round of golf, which we don’t play, but we told them our neighbor, who loves to gold, was an uncle, and he got to go. Plus, we got $100 a day for food, so we went through their entire menu, and they made something special for us the last night.
As for your question, neither of us got it. (And my opponent was on his fifth game when I played.) The third person wound up negative - I don’t think she got one answer right, which was a shame. The question was a very obscure one about a TV show I had never seen. I bet correctly though - if I had gotten it and Fred had not, I would have won.
I think the producers liked our show because we cleared the board for both Jep and Double Jep, and I became theoretically able to win when I got the very last question on the board.
Do you even catch yourself thinking about whether you could be on a game show without looking like an idiot? I do, out of years of wondering that before I did it. It kind of takes away something from watching the game. The thing I was most worried about, actually, was tripping on that step when going on stage.
In my game, the guy who won couldn’t be caught by Final Jeopardy, and I was in last place. I was able to salvage second place and a cool personal victory by being the only one to get the Final Jeopardy question right.
nice work reloy! i keep meaning to try this…is it too late?
well, its not the same, but I got a 7 out of 10 on the whatsyourpopsecret.com movie trivia. Somehow i got two John Travolta questions wrong…boo hoo. has anyone else done this. its cool because they score you based on number correct and time to get them right.
Make it 22–September 1989. Leading going into FJ, booted the question, ended up 3rd.
Anyone know if you can try out again if you’ve already been on? Especially if it’s been 16 years?
My family was up in the audience about to die because none of them had any clue about the FJ answer. As luck would have it, I’d just seen the answer on a brief news report a few days earlier, about how Disney wanted to build an American History theme park in Manassas. (Which got shot down shortly thereafter, for many excellent reasons.) So the FJ answer asked for the state, and all three of us got it right: “What is Virginia?”
I’ll never forget that moment of total relief when I got the answer right. I knew at that point that unless the other two got it wrong, I’d be out, but I also was pretty sure that Amy, going for her 5th day, would get it right since she was from the DC area. So at that point I settled for meeting my personal goal – which was still an incredibly good feeling.
Really, just making it onto the show is 95% of the battle; how you actually do on it pales by comparison.
