My wife and I are having a friendly disagreement about the current ToC on Jeopardy.
Do the contestants get to keep the money they win, or is it only used for advancing onto the semi finals?
I think that they do get to keep their money, even the 2nd and 3rd place people. My only reasoning for this is the fact that after the game is over the totals on the 2nd and 3rd place screens don’t zero out, or change to $2000 and $1000.
Can anyone tell me who’s right?
Also as an aside, both my wife and I think it would be nice when the ToC contestants get announced at the beginning of the show they should say how many days they were champion and how much they actually won.
No; players eliminated in the quarterfinals get a flat $5,000 and those eliminated in the semifinals receive $10,000. I can’t find anything on the official “Jeopardy!” website that lists the prizes, but here are some pages from the J-Archive for the last ToC held in May 2010:
They do this because you can qualify for later rounds of the ToC even if you don’t win your qualifier by having a high enough score. Some people who came in second (and maybe even some that came in third in particularly high scoring games) might still make it to the next round. So your score matters, even if you didn’t win.