How is Alex Trebec able to read the answers so damn fast?
I mean, he’s reading the answer even before the big board has revealed it. It doesn’t matter where the answer is on the board, or if the contestants follow a consistant pattern. Some contestants move all over the board, but Alex is all over it.
He has little cards on the podium in front of him arranged by category and amount.
Might be more basic than that. One of the producers might automatically punch that question up on Alex’s display as soon as it is selected.
Alex Trebec is an alien. (Literally, he’s a Canadian legally living and working in the US.)
Everyone knows that aliens can see the future.
On Rock and Roll Jeopardy, the guy has a black permanent pen, and he has a chart (most likely similar to the board placement). I’m assumming it’s something like that.
Huh?
Imagine a podium with a miniature Jeopardy board on it. Instead of the dollar amounts in each space, the question is written out. All Alex (or Jeff, for R-N-R Jeopardy) has to do is look at the appropriate square and ask the question.
I, too, have seen Alex and Jeff write on their “podium” after questions. If looks like they put an “X” if nobody gets it correct, and an “o” (or circles) the ones they got right.
Here’s an educated WAG: they edit out the pauses.
Doing so keeps the game moving along, and does not violate the “purity” of the show – dead air is dead air, and no one gets an advantage since they can’t ring-in until after Alex is through reading.
Well I’ll be damned!!!
I, too, have seen the big marker he uses but always thought the podium was too small to house all the answers. It makes more sense than cards or a monitor.
(btw, it’s answers, not questions 
)
Thanks–
Chris
When I watched Jeopardy! being taped many years ago, Alex Trebeck reads off the answers very quickly. They may edit out pauses, but I think he’s done the show so many times that he has the whole setup wired.
I would imagine that a few times the producers have to go back and redub Alex reading the answer if he flubbed it a little the first time.
What I want to know is whether he actually knows as much as he appears to (he always seems to know some obscure connection to a contestant’s wrong answer), or whether that extra bit of trivia is also hiding on his podium.
Actually, he’s a 'merican now. Became one in 1998.
Maybe he didn’t like the ribbing that Canadians got in the 1995 movie “Canadian Bacon”:
TV Announcer: “The Canadians. They walk among us. William Shatner. Michael J. Fox. Monty Hall. Mike Meyers. Alex Trebek. All of them Canadians. All of them here.”
It is to be doubted.
He’s a dumbass with a sweet job, thanks to the Retarded Canadian Act of 1492.
A. What you are if you think that Alex Trebeck could reason his way out of an open phone booth?
Q. What is an idiot?
You are correct!! ::Alex wanders away from podium and starts licking the wall::
Logic or not, I do admire Alex’s pronunciation skills. I’m sure he practices all the foreign words beforehand, but still to just role out French, Italian, Russian, whatever in the middle of an english sentence without stumbling is pretty cool.
That’s his friggin’ job! If he couldn’t do it, they would get someone who could. If I was getting paid as handsomely as Alex is, I would make sure that I could produce “War and Peace” with my hand and armpit, in Russian.
That Vanna, though, she can turn any letter, even w, effortlessly.
btw, 
I hate Trebec. He acts waaaaay too smug about the answers. Right, Alex, it’s a whole different ball game when the ANSWERS ARE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.
I think it’s a little outrageous that you can easily win over $20,000 on Wheel of Fortune, but if you have intelligence and make it onto Jeopardy, you’re damn lucky to make $10,000.
Forget the Tournament of Champions…
Forget Celebrity Jeopardy…
I want to see Game Show Host Jeopardy. Alex vs. Regis & Pat Sajak. I doubt anyone’s score would hit 4 digits.
I’d actually prefer Chuck Woolery(sp) to Regis, but they’d probably go with the host of the more popular show.
Incredibly, I have the official and definitive answer to this, and, annoying as Alex can be in his know-it-all mode (and a sweet job it must be, BTW), the Alex-doesn’t-know-his-own-phone-number comments are mistaken. When I tried out for Jeopardy a couple months ago in Chicago, there was an open period before the actual testing got underway in which we potential candidates were free to ask any Jeopardy-related question we had. In addition to questions that related to the contestant process, people also asked about specific contestants who had appeared on the show (like “Blind Eddie”), the formation of the game board, and the ever-inflappable Alex. One of the questions was whether Alex had to pass the contestant exam to keep his job every year (ha ha), and, surprisingly, the answer was that, while the specific proposition obviously does not merit an answer (my comment, not theirs), Alex does in fact take the tests (there are two) every year, presumably for his own entertainment and also to provide feedback to the developers of the test. So far, they say, he has always passed. (Passing requires getting 35 out of the total 50 questions correct.) Further discussion elicited the very clear and specific statement that Alex knows the “answers” (i.e. the desired contestant response) in advance, but that any extra commentary he makes (“Oh, you were in the right part of the country but the wrong province;” “No, that was a quote from a book by Newt Gingrinch, you were thinking of ‘The Straight Dope’, which is by Cecil Adams”) comes entirely from his own knowledge and is not provided to him or scripted in any way. They said that Alex does indeed have a strong, broad range of general knowledge just like any good Jeopardy contestant, and that any extra trivia he tosses in is strictly his own. If you want to say they were lying about it to put on a good front [shrug], I can’t prove they weren’t, but they had no reason to lie, and were quite forthcoming and candid in their responses to all the questions raised. I was willing to take them at their word on this one, and I am quite the skeptic myself. One would also have to wonder why the show’s writers would waste (or, for that matter, be permitted to waste) the time and effort of developing additional triva for each question when they have no idea what answers the contestants will give, which ones will be answered correctly on the first try and which will be missed by all contestants, etc. It would also waste a heckuva lot of game time if Alex paused after every wrong answer to pick from a list of scripted comments.
Didn’t think to ask how he views the questions (although obviously it is from something in front of him which doesn’t have to be “uncovered”, not the game board the contestants are looking at), but there are no pauses between the clue slection and the reading of the question that are edited out; the game is taped entirely in real time and such editing only occurs during lulls (contestants have unlimited time to decide about their final wagers, for one thing, and if you talked about your stamp collection for five mintues solid during the contestant chat, I’d think they’d edit you a bit) or unexpected delays (e.g. a pause in the game to check a contested answer).
“I’ll take Jeopardy trivia for $1000, please.”
cygnus, who hopes to someday take home a lovely parting gift, or at least a door prize.
My sentiments exactly!!