Carousel

You can see me on Jeopardy! on Tuesday, July 10. I’m publishing a series of posts reflecting on my experience.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

I had roughly a month between when I found out I was going on Jeopardy! and when I taped my appearance. I decided almost immediately that I would take a week off work just before my taping; as Harry put it, “you don’t want to be telling this story later in life and say, ‘I would have prepared more, but <random crap that seemed important at the time>'”. A week seemed like the right amount of time to do some real studying without totally disappearing from my day job.

I also started watching the show again. As luck would have it, I reengaged with Jeopardy! during a spate of special tournaments: the Teen Tournament, followed by the College Championship, followed by the Teachers’ Tournament. The last of those wasn’t bad, but the first two were just too easy to provide useful preparatory material. So I focused instead on developing the right habits around the game mechanics; I practiced buzzing with a thick retractable pen and tried to respond only when I was fairly confident in the answer. (As a casual viewer, I throw out random answers all the time, and it doesn’t matter. Playing for real meant that I had to be much more disciplined.) I didn’t have to practice answering in the form of a question; I’d been doing that on instinct since I was a kid and had even done it accidentally in a quiz bowl match or two.

In some sense, I found that scheduling the vacation time had backfired. As with my audition, I struggled to focus on studying much in the evenings after work, and the fact that I knew I would have ten uninterrupted days to cram just before the taping made it harder. One thing I did immediately, however, was to start investigating what wisdom the great champions of the past had to offer.

One of the first pieces of advice I came across was from Karl Coryat, a two-time champion in 1996 whose post on preparing for Jeopardy! was full of useful tidbits. One of the most interesting points raised by Coryat is the notion of recurring clue phrases, often in the form of a nationality plus an occupation, that tend to give away the correct response. “Finnish composer” almost always means Jean Sibelius, “Scottish poet” usually points to Robert Burns, and so on. Coryat also makes good points about the “scope” of the show; if you watch long enough, you start to build an intuition for what they will and won’t expect you to know, and that helps you to guess intelligently when you play.

Meanwhile, Noah suggested (and lent me) three books as part of my preparation:

• Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, by Bob Harris
• Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions, by Chuck Forrest and Mark Lowenthal
• Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, by Ken Jennings (which I didn’t actually read until after my appearance)

Noah told me that, while Jennings’s book would be very interesting, Harris’s book had more concrete tactical tips for succeeding on the show, so I started there. Much like this series of blog posts, Prisoner of Trebekistan is half Jeopardy! guidebook, half memoir on what in Harris’s background pushed him toward competing on the show and what doing so meant to him. The most striking thing about Harris is how deliberately and extensively he prepared. This wasn’t someone who’d been a voracious reader of trivia his whole life and simply put that knowledge to use on the show; that’s Jennings. Bob Harris found out he was going on Jeopardy! and decided to dedicate himself to winning. He rearranged his living room to make it more like the Jeopardy! studio, complete with unnaturally bright headlights. He began compiling reams of notebooks containing all kinds of obscure facts. He studied the latest research on the mechanisms of human memory and constructed elaborate mnemonics — stories, images, and the like — to help him memorize factoids (including, by the way, the backgrounds of all the UN secretaries-general).

Harris also provides some valuable gameplay tips. Things like, “your instinct will be to go for your best categories first, but you should save them for later, so that if you come across a Daily Double, you’ll have more money to wager.” Harris is particularly passionate about the notion of “playing ahead”: when you see a UN SECRETARIES-GENERAL category, spend every free moment thinking of all the names that could potentially come up as correct responses. Harris didn’t even bother to listen to his fellow contestants’ conversations with Alex; he just played ahead through the interview segment. I resolved to make liberal use of this technique, but the truth is that it was nearly impossible to find the presence of mind when the time came. (More on this in a future post.)

Another thing that becomes clear when you read Harris’s story (and Jennings’s, for that matter) is that even great champions need a little help from Lady Luck. This happens a few times in his tale, but the clincher is that he has a sister who suffers from a rare and mysterious autoimmune disease and has taken a tour through countless diagnoses over the decades — so naturally, Harris was exultant when AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES appeared on the Jeopardy! game board. He took four of five clues in the category.

By the time he was prepping for the Tournament of Champions, Harris had turned his whole life into a Jeopardy! champion-making machine. He went so far as to modify his diet to be composed exclusively of food that would be available in the studio’s green room — which, as far as I remember, was granola bars, donuts, yogurt, water, and orange juice. He lived like this for six months.

Meanwhile, I was exiting Presidents’ Day weekend, and with exactly two weeks until my taping, the biggest thing I’d done beyond the occasional Wikipedia binge was sign the legal paperwork and send Maggie and Robert an email with a new crop of [similarly dull] one-liners.

It was time to get serious.