Back in 1997 or so, Jeopardy announced a weekend (Saturday and Sunday) of open tryouts at the Merv Griffin Hotel and Casino (of course) in Atlantic City. Since that was only an hour or two away from my home in Maryland, a friend and I decided to make the road trip. We figured we could drive up to Jersey on Friday night, hang out and blow a few bucks at the tables, stay over, then do the tryout Saturday morning and drive back afterwards.
The “tryout” was really just a cattle call. My friend and I registered (name, address, etc.) and were herded into a ballroom with about 200 other people. The purpose of registering was to make sure that nobody came back and tried again the same day (there were four tryout times each day). Everyone got a photocopied sheet with 10 typewritten trivia questions on it, and we were informed we had 20 minutes to complete them. Everyone who got 7 or more of them right would be eligible for the next round of tryouts.
The questions were pretty difficult – far harder than 95% of actual Jeopardy questions. They were pretty similar to the tougher, more obscure questions in a Trivial Pursuit game. I had assumed I would get 7 out of 10 easily, since I usually got better than 9 out of 10 right watching Jeapordy from my couch. However, after 20 minutes of puzzling it out, my friend and I found that we’d gotten the same six questions right and were so stumped by the other four that we’d left them blank. We were informed, along with the other losers, that we were ineligible to try again that day, but could come back tomorrow.
Walking down to lunch frustrated, we came up with a great idea. “Let’s stick around and try again tomorrow. We can hang out in Atlantic City for another day. Sure, the questions were tough, but part of that may just have been chance. Maybe tomorrow’s questions will line up better with our collective knowledge base.”
So we did. We came back the next day, went through the same registration rigamarole, and were once again herded into the ballroom and handed a photocopied question sheet.
With the same exact ten questions on it.
The word you’re looking for is “AAARRRGGGHH.” Or perhaps “duh.” A simple trip to the library or five minutes on the internet would have yielded the missing answers, but we never suspected the questions would be the same. We outsmarted ourselves.
So I was never on Jeopardy. All I had to show for my weekend in Atlantic City was about $200 worth of craps losses and the fact that the Gallipoli Peninsula and gastrocnemius muscles are still burned into my memory, nine years later.