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I appeared on Jeopardy! on July 10 and 11. Check out my series of posts about my adventure:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

A full textual record of each game is also available:
July 10 | July 11

It’s been two weeks since my Jeopardy! run ended. After months of buildup and a hectic week of viewing parties, late-night blogging, and an unprecedented (and probably unsurpassable) volume of Facebook traffic, life has returned to normal, and my most exciting days are once again when a really good episode of Frasier comes on TV.

In many ways, I am still in the honeymoon period; it is still the case, for example, that people I know are learning for the first time about my Jeopardy! win, and that when a friend introduces me to someone new, they frequently can’t resist mentioning it. These things will, of course, fade in time, so I’ve been wondering: what have I taken away from this experience that will endure?

First, it is that the greatest opportunities in life often come when we neither expect them nor are focused on securing them. I can honestly say that I never took the tryout process very seriously, and I never once considered that I might actually go on Jeopardy! until I received that fateful February phone call. I don’t feel like I went and got myself a spot on the show; I feel like it came to me.

Furthermore, once the opportunity does arise (no matter how), you have to capitalize on it. I would have regretted it for the rest of my life if I didn’t spend the preparation time that I did, even though nothing I studied came up on the show (the closest was the question about which amendment was repealed by the 21st, but I would have known that anyway). Certainly the buzzer practice was critical; if anything, I should have spent more time on this, considering that this weakness was my undoing in the second game. I even think that the way I publicized my appearance was an example of this opportunism; I frankly had to work hard to convince myself to rave about it to as many people as I did, but I think in retrospect that it was worth the discomfort. If anything so amazing, affirming, and barely-deserved happens to me again, I hope that I will find the courage to be similarly shameless.

I’ve also been fascinated to see what a unifying and connecting force an experience like this can be. Jody commented that it was nice how the attendees at the viewing parties represented such a broad cross-section of all the people I’ve gotten to know in the Bay Area; I think this might have been the only occasion (other than my wedding, one day) to give me such little fear about mixing social groups so cavalierly. I heard from so many people that I hadn’t talked to in a long time, some of whom randomly saw me on the show and didn’t even know I was appearing. (My favorite was the excited email from Michael, the generous and dynamic co-owner of Vaso Azzurro in downtown Mountain View.) I even heard from total strangers; for example, I got a congratulatory Facebook message from the mom of a random kid I knew in middle school and hadn’t thought about, much less seen, in perhaps fifteen years. I’ve really loved how Jeopardy! has created a much-needed excuse to set aside the daily grind and reconnect with people.

Indeed, there are a lot of people who played a part in making this fantasy a reality, and I want to thank them all (of course, with apologies to anyone I’ve foolishly forgotten):

• My parents, for…well, everything, but more directly for cheering me on at the taping and doing a ton of work to help with my viewing parties
• Santhosh, for also helping with the parties, for reviewing every blog post before it went live, and for tolerating his insufferable know-it-all of a brother for twenty-one years and counting
• Chrix and Harry, for flying down to attend the taping (it was their idea; I never asked), and for their support throughout this experience
• Noah, for lending me the books I used to prepare
• Everyone who attended the two practice sessions, which proved truly invaluable
• Every teacher who taught me something that gave me the confidence to compete, but especially Mr. Ricard, Mrs. Gwinn, and Mrs. Turley, who nurtured my love of competitive trivia
• Taylor, for making backup recordings in DC, even though his wedding was only a week and a half away
• Melissa, for baking a cake to honor the occasion :-)
• Everyone who took time out of their busy days to watch my appearances — it really meant so much to me that so many people were so eager to share in this experience
• The producers of Jeopardy!, for giving me the opportunity to fulfill my life’s dream

Last, but not least, my Jeopardy! adventure has reminded me how much I love to know, how incredibly energizing raw curiosity can be. I talked about this in an earlier post, but I mention it again because it is an important reminder that, without proper attention, even aspects of your identity that you consider deeply fundamental can fade into the background, like the multitude of invisible stars over a city skyline. We could all use the occasional trip away from the distracting glow of the lights to look up and see the night as it was meant to be seen, as we know it truly is.

And then, of course, there is the ultimate question: how in the hell am I going to top that?

I appeared on Jeopardy! on July 10 and 11. Check out my series of posts reflecting on my experience:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

Note: you can find a full archive of the July 11 game, including stats, here.

I come off stage, still grinning, having formed absolutely no memory of the chitchat I made with Alex while the credits were rolling. Robert congratulates me, leads me back to the green room, and tells me to get changed. I grab the next shirt from my suitcase and walk through the door labeled JEOPARDY! RETURNING CHAMPION.

Somewhat anticlimactically, it is just a small gray room with a full-length mirror, not unlike a fitting room at JCPenney, except without the pincushion or the bench on which to throw your discarded garments. Having glimpsed this sight that perhaps only a few thousand others on the planet have seen, I change my shirt and leave.

The rest of the contestants in the room congratulate me on my win, and we talk about things I have no chance of remembering. At some point, Robert picks up the next two cards. “Lynn and AJ, you’re up!” In what seems like no time at all, Lisa touches up my makeup, I get miked up again, and we’re headed back out there.

As in the last game, the first thing we do on stage is record our Hometown Howdies. I have to do a new one, this time introducing myself as “returning champion Prabhu Balasubramanian.” It has a nice ring to it.

A few minutes before the next show starts, Robert approaches me at the champion’s podium and asks, “Alex mispronounced your last name, right?”

“Did he?”

“He said Balasubra-MANE-ee-an. But it’s MAHN-ee-an, right?’

“Oh. Yeah.” (Even that isn’t how you say it — the syllables in question should be pronounced rather more like the English word money — but I’ve always felt that beggars can’t be choosers in such matters.)

“Would you like me to talk to him about it?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Sure.”

Before I know it, the music is swelling, and Johnny Gilbert is saying, “…whose one-day cash winnings total $9,199!” Alex walks out and, to my complete surprise, anchors the entire opening banter of the episode on the pronunciation of my last name. I can’t WAIT for everyone to see this! It feels a little like destiny.

And now it’s game time again. I get off to a great start; I begin with “‘F’-Stops” and, for the third time today, win four of the five clues in a category. After a brief and counterproductive stop in “Internationalities”, where I needlessly flub an easy clue on Australian-rules football, we go to “Fast Food”, and I take three of five. In the moment, I’m ecstatic that I’m doing so well in this category despite being vegetarian; I’ve never even set foot in a Hardee’s and have no idea how I knew that it’s a sister restaurant of Carl’s Jr., other than that things are just going my way.

Then things start to go the other way. AJ, who is clearly the stronger of my two opponents, takes us to “Abbreviated Bands”, where he takes three clues in quick succession, beating me on the buzzer for two of them. You can clearly see my frustration on camera at the idea there could be any doubt that I know exactly what NKOTBSB stands for. Heading into the first commercial, AJ and I are tied at $3400, with Lynn on the board at $200.

In the contestant interviews, Lynn and AJ both tell stories that leave them looking pretty strange. Alex actually tells AJ straight up, “you may be weird.” I appear on camera as though I’m listening to and enjoying these conversations, but the truth is that adrenaline keeps me from really hearing any of it. My own interview goes much better than the last; I am pretty pleased with myself for saying on national television that I can “bust out” the tango, and I don’t mind in the slightest that it flirts dangerously with falsehood. (In a moment that’s edited out of the final broadcast, Alex asks me if I have a favorite dance, and I respond quickly, “I love the waltz.” I think that says a lot more about me than my flirtation with the tango, and I can’t help wishing they’d left it in.)

We get back to the action. Some time in the Jeopardy! round — I wish I could remember when, and perhaps it was actually before the break — there’s a snafu. Alex reads the clue, and then he calls on AJ — only AJ didn’t actually buzz in. His buzzer was apparently stuck from the last clue! They stop taping; Maggie comes on stage and asks us to turn around so we’re not facing the board, explaining that when something goes wrong, they want to be extra careful that, if something weird happens on the board to expose game information, we won’t see it. I suspect that they also don’t want us playing ahead during this unplanned break in the action. After what seems like an eternity, John Lauderdale comes over and tells us we’re ready to get started again. They apparently had to reboot the computer powering AJ’s podium. Go figure.

The way they handle this situation is fascinating. It turns out that the show’s writers prepare six clues for every category: the five they place on the board, plus an alternate in case something goes wrong. The clue that had originally appeared is discarded, and a new clue is placed in its spot which doesn’t necessarily match the intended difficulty level for that dollar amount. Alex and others refer to this as “replaying the clue.” Again, I don’t remember which clue this happened with, and I’m not sure how I’d find out.

In any event, the second half of the Jeopardy! round does not go well. I take only three of fifteen clues (fortunately, two of them are worth $1000), and I lose the buzzer four times (three times to AJ) in “Baby, You’re a Rich Man or Woman”, an easy category about billionaires. I’m miraculously hanging onto a $1000 lead when the board is clear, but only because AJ misses a $2000 Daily Double on George Balanchine near the end of the round.

Double Jeopardy! starts off…acceptably. I take four clues total in “The 50 States” and “Movie Title References”, after which I still lead by $600. I feel frustrated about losing out on a $2000 clue about The Vow; in the moment, I can’t think of anything but The Proposal, which I know is wrong.

Then things get weird again.

AJ calls for “I Love ‘L.A.’” for $400. It’s a fairly obvious clue about Louis Armstrong, so I buzz in, and Alex calls my name. I have a momentary lapse of confidence in which I’m not sure how “Louis” is supposed to be pronounced (idiotic, I know), so I make a split-second decision to just use his last name, which is normally standard practice when identifying people as responses on the show.

…Except in this category, where each correct response must have the initials “L.A.”. Alex forgets this too. He says “Yes!”, the producers offstage yell out, I know exactly what I’ve screwed up, and we stop taping for the second time in this game.

Maggie comes on stage again, and we turn our backs to the board, knowing this drill by now. An eternity passes while the show’s producers decide how to handle this irregular situation. Finally, Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman comes over to the contestant podiums and confirms why my response was invalid. He explains that Alex’s ruling will be reversed, but he also says that, because this situation makes it obvious what the correct answer was, Lynn and AJ are not permitted to ring in on this question when play resumes. (The reason they couldn’t simply replay it this time is that it was important to penalize me by $400 for my mistake.) So the reason my opponents stare blankly after my incorrect response is not because they don’t know the correct one, but because it would be unfair for either of them to take the money.

When Alex re-records a new ruling to replace the erroneous one, he comments, “you and I both forgot the category.” In the final cut that airs on television, the first four words of this sentence have been edited out.

Things go downhill from here. I attempt nothing in the rest of the category, and in the next category, “The Hard Stuff”, I lose the buzzer on four clues (the fifth is a Daily Double, which nets Lynn $2000). So, with two categories left, AJ has nearly double my score.

In fact, I manage only one clue the rest of the game — happily, it’s the “jumbo shrimp” response in the “Oxymorons” category. Going into Final, AJ has an even $19000, while I have $10400, and Lynn (who has closed the gap significantly) is on the board with $7200.

The Final Jeopardy! category is “Inaugural Addresses”. I am thoroughly on edge during the break. Because I don’t have at least two-thirds of AJ’s score, I cannot implement my wagering strategy from the previous game. In a nervous haze, I arrive at a wager of $7000, based on the usual assumption that AJ will wager enough to cover double my score plus a dollar. (I haven’t read the analysis yet, but I am fairly sure in retrospect that this wager makes no sense, since I have nothing substantial to lose by risking everything.)

The clue is easy; all you have to know is that George Washington was inaugurated in 1789, and that Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861. You also have to know how to add 1789 and 72, a task I struggle mightily with under the stress of wanting to salvage my losing effort.

A few moments later, my Jeopardy! run comes to an end. Everyone gets the right answer; had I wagered everything, I would have lost to AJ by a dollar.

In the postgame chitchat with Alex, AJ comments that he had to add 72 to 1791. Alex (a Canadian by birth) quickly corrects him, pointing out that Washington became president in 1789, to which AJ responds with something along the lines of, “well, it was close enough that I knew it had to be Lincoln.”

As I leave the stage, it hits me that I will never again play this game under the bright lights again. A wave of sadness washes over me.

But as I sit down with Sarah from the Clue Crew for my Winner’s Circle interview, I still have a big smile on my face. And you know why?

Because I am a Jeopardy! champion.

I appeared on Jeopardy! yesterday and won! I’ll continue to blog about my experience until it’s over. Check out the series so far:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Stephanie, Jennifer, and I walk out onto the stage. I walk to the middle podium and write my name as I’d been instructed during the practice session. Stage manager John Lauderdale has us test our buzzers (as he will during every break in the action). A final “good luck” from Maggie, and it’s lights, camera, action!

The theme music plays, and the voice of Jeopardy! announcer Johnny Gilbert booms over the loudspeaker as he introduces the contestants. Johnny does a pretty good job with my name, even after lamenting in practice, “can I just say Smith?” Alex Trebek walks onto the set for the first time — now it’s real.

Stephanie starts us off with “At the Beach”, where I take two of five clues, including an annoying one about beach balls whose answer only becomes obvious after both my opponents guess incorrectly. Stephanie finds the Daily Double in the $1000 spot but wagers conservatively, so that we’re tied at $1000 coming out of the category. I feel like I’m at least holding my own.

Then I start to really get into it. “Illinois State Symbols” turns out to be a pretty easy category even if you don’t know the first thing about Illinois state symbols, and I take the first four clues in quick succession before a triple stumper about the state tree. Every clue is contested, but I keep winning the buzzer, one clue after another.

I feel fantastic at this point. I’m playing in rhythm, and everything just feels right. My enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by “Facts About Authors”, where I don’t even attempt four of five clues, and on the $800 clue I make an ill-advised guess — but I still feel settled and centered and ready to compete. In fact, though it’s strange to say this about a mental game, I feel I’m not really thinking and don’t even feel very mentally focused; I am playing on instinct. Perhaps my nerves are too on edge to do it any other way.

Going into the first commercial break, we’ve played 15 clues; I’ve gotten 6, made no attempt on 6, guessed wrong once, and (perhaps most importantly) have only been outbuzzed once, on the very first clue of the game. I have $2200, and my closest opponent, Stephanie, has $1000. I don’t think I could have imagined this going better.

During the break, Lisa touches up my makeup, and a production assistant brings out a bottle of water for me whose cap is labeled “2”, since I’m at the second podium. I can’t muster the presence of mind to “play ahead” (like Bob Harris) or to prep for the contestant interview, so I follow instructions and chit-chat with the Jeopardy! crew. Maggie comes on stage and gives Jennifer, who is at -$2400, some gentle encouragement.

And we’re back on camera. I barely listen to Jennifer’s conversation with Alex — my head is really buzzing now — and, to be honest, I am only sort of present in my own interview. I don’t even hear Alex mispronounce my last name. I stumble through explaining a cheesy and frivolous but thought-provoking class, inspired by the Voyager Golden Record, which I’d taught last year at Stanford’s Splash event. Alex makes a neither-here-nor-there quip about how we could talk to aliens using sign language; it is absent from the final cut that airs on television. I probably should have picked a simpler story that didn’t require so much explanation to articulate why it wasn’t silly. In any event, I am mostly just glad when it’s over and we can get back to playing.

The rest of the Jeopardy! round doesn’t go nearly as well. It starts off fine — I get two of five clues in “No. 1 in the NFL Draft,” where I expected to have no chance, and the back-and-forth with Stephanie in this category is incredibly fun. Ultimately, however, we play 14 clues, and I only get 3. I lose the buzzer to Stephanie 5 times (including the especially galling “what is the pick-and-roll?”), and I make another wrong guess, this time because I fail to realize that Black Monday isn’t the same as Black Thursday.

By the end of the round, Stephanie and I have switched places — she leads with $5400, and I have only $3000. Jennifer is deep in the hole at -$3000, the second day in a row where a contestant has been in such a position coming out of the first round.

Double Jeopardy! starts off just as badly as the Jeopardy! round ended. I flub a $400 clue in “Oscar-Winning Directors of the 1980s” and don’t even attempt the rest of the category (to be fair, my opponents struggle with it too). The next category, “Australian History”, is very tough; I sneak $800 but don’t attempt the rest. Stephanie abandons both these categories without bothering to uncover the $2000 clue.

Then we hit “Scientific Theories”, and I’m on a roll again, for the first time since the opening minutes of the game. I quickly run through the first three clues and then land on a Daily Double at $1600. Nice.

At $5800, I’ve just taken a $400 lead over Stephanie. I’ve spent absolutely no time thinking about Daily Double wagering strategy, beyond an instinct that I should make sure to be aggressive. Half my score seems to fit the bill, so I call $3000.

Alex asks me to name “the weakest of the 4 known forces.” In retrospect, this is an easy question, which could easily be reasoned out in a variety of ways; but in the moment, it feels quite tough. My head buzzes for what seems like an eternity. I briefly consider the weak nuclear force but reject it, primarily because I assess that they wouldn’t have included “weak” in both the clue and the correct response. I go with “what is gravity?” and breathe a sigh of relief as I increase my lead.

Regrettably, I don’t run the category (stupid GUTs), and after it’s exhausted, my momentum disappears. In the next two categories I attempt 4 of 10 clues and am outbuzzed by Jennifer on 3 of them (which feels particularly frustrating, because it has unfortunately become clear that she won’t be competitive in this game). In the final category, “Religious Matters”, I stupidly hesitate on a clue about Hinduism, get a clue on the Quran, and then land on the second Daily Double of the round.

I wager $3000, again with no particular logic beyond feeling like I should be aggressive; I have no clue whatsoever and thus erase my gain from the “gravity” get. Analysts will later criticize my wager for being “foolhardy” and too unaware of where we were in the game and where I stood (post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4). They are clearly correct that I wasn’t really thinking at all.

Going into Final Jeopardy!, I trail Stephanie $11800 to $8200. Jennifer sadly hasn’t managed pull herself out of the hole and will be excused with the $1000 guaranteed third-place prize. Alex calls out the category:

ENTREPRENEURS

You may find it incredible, considering that it’s hard to imagine a better category for me, but I don’t get even a little bit excited by this. All I know is that I’m down, and it never occurs to me to alter my wagering strategy based on the new information of the category.

During the last break, we get scratch paper and markers to calculate our wagers. I faithfully execute the strategy I worked out last night and wager $999.

We’re back. The clue appears. The answer is obvious. So obvious that Stephanie will definitely get it. I faintly hear some faraway music of some kind. The music ends, and the lights come up.

As is customary, Alex starts with the player who’s behind. “Who was Steve Jobs?” (it’s funny, I think it only occurred to me to write ‘was’ because his death was so recent) adds $999 to my score, for a total of $9199. Stephanie’s answer appears, and — what? She got it wrong! What did she wager?! $4800??! That means–

That means that I am a Jeopardy! champion. And I’m going to be playing this game again in about fifteen minutes.

I am so floored that all I can do is grin like an idiot.

An idiot who just won Jeopardy!.

I’m appearing on Jeopardy!…today! Check out my growing series of posts reflecting on my experience.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

I wake to the sound of my alarm at 6 AM, acutely aware that I haven’t slept enough. I shower and put on the attire I’ve chosen for my national television debut: a light green dress shirt (sleeves rolled up) and black slacks. I walk out of my hotel room with a suitcase containing two changes of clothes (per the contestant coordinators’ instructions), head downstairs, and have breakfast at the hotel restaurant, suddenly unsure of mundane decisions like how much scrambled eggs I should eat. I see a group of people in the lobby who are clearly dressed for Jeopardy! and waiting for the courtesy shuttle to take them to the studio, but I pass them on my way out, since I’ve borrowed my mom’s car and will be driving myself.

Driving onto the Sony Pictures Studios lot makes me feel like a million bucks. No matter what happens, this will be a good day.

We all arrive and meet as a group just outside the parking garage. Glenn (whom I met at my audition) and Corina greet us, take roll, and lead us into the studio (after a quick stop at a metal detector). We’re immediately hustled into the green room.

“Green room” is one of those phrases that, if my experience is any indication, sounds far more glamorous than it is. The Jeopardy! green room is, frankly, drab and cramped, and far more gray than green. There are some old couches; a long conference table and chairs; a restroom; a doorway to a couple of brightly lit makeup stations; and a door with a star on it, conspicuously labeled JEOPARDY! RETURNING CHAMPION. A coffee table in the middle of the room has some donuts, fruit, and other snacks on it. We all file in and find seats.

I notice immediately that there are a lot of women in the room. Since we’ll be taping a full week of shows in a single day, there are something like twelve people in the room; only three are men. I also notice that I am most likely the youngest person here, which I expected and can only hope doesn’t prove to be a fatal weakness.

We spend the next ninety minutes or so completing our paperwork; coming up with the lame one-liners we’ll use in our Hometown Howdies; getting our makeup done (my magician was Lisa, who made the bags under my eyes disappear!); finalizing our personal anecdotes with Robert for the card that will be printed and given to Alex; and most importantly, getting an overview of all the nitty-gritty of the Jeopardy! gameplay experience from Maggie Speak, the indefatigable contestant producer who led my in-person audition.

Maggie animatedly explains what to do if your buzzer seems to malfunction (play through it and complain at the next break); if you think a ruling on an answer was incorrect (play through it and complain at the next break); if you think you see an error in scoring (…I think you’re getting the idea). She introduces us to our representative from Sullivan Compliance, the third-party auditing firm whose role is to ensure that the game is conducted fairly.

Maggie also gives tips and best practices on how to succeed in the game — things like, if time is running out in the round and you’re behind, you may want to consider going for higher dollar-value clues if you get control of the board, and you may want to hunt for Daily Doubles. She mentions that it tends to be easier to get in a rhythm in a category if you start at the top and work your way down from the easier to the more difficult clues, but she also points out that players do occasionally employ a strategy called the Forrest Bounce (named after the first author of Secrets of the Jeopardy! Champions), in which the player “bounces” from category to category to keep his opponents on their toes. “We think it’s really easiest if you just go down a category you choose,” she says, “but there’s always someone who decides not to.” Then she looks at me and says something along the lines of, “Prabhu has a very serious look on his face; maybe it’s him.” I laugh along with the rest of the room. Then Maggie says, “he’s laughing, but he’s not denying it!” I just met these people, and I’m already the gamesman in the room. Dammit.

The truth is, I do think I’m one of the more serious players in the room. Having prepared just enough not to feel hopeless, I feel like I’m here to compete, not just to have a great time and a fun story. Most of the other contestants seem much more relaxed than I feel. They also generally seem much more naturally outgoing than I am, which leads me to wonder whether personality might be even more of a factor in the show’s selection process than I’d originally thought.

After Maggie’s lesson is complete, and our faces are sufficiently redrawn with stage makeup, it’s finally time for what I’ve been waiting for all morning: the practice game.

We file quietly from the green room into the main studio, which I am seeing for the first time. Goddamn it looks cool. Of course, I have the cliché reaction that every TV studio newcomer ever has had: wow, it looks so much smaller than on TV! We’re directed to approach the contestant podiums, where we’re met by stage manager John Lauderdale, who explains how we’ll write our names and our Final Jeopardy wagers and answers, what cameras we’ll need to look at during the contestant introductions and Hometown Howdies, and other nuts-and-bolts details. Stephanie Fontaine, the returning champion from last week, graciously steps aside from her podium at the far right so that some of us can get a closer look. She’s helpful and very friendly.

Once we all have the lay of the land, all but three leave the stage, and the practice game begins. The questions are deliberately very easy; the point is to get used to the game board (which is thirty-six feet away, with each clue being displayed on a forty-inch television screen), the stage lights (they’re bright, but I never found them distracting, as a couple of folks did), and of course, the timing of the almighty buzzer. Players are cycled in and out as the game proceeds, with everyone getting two turns. I get pulled out of my first turn fairly quickly after winning the buzzer a few times in a row; it’s a nice confidence booster, but I don’t like being singled out again. While sitting on the sidelines we chit-chat and get to know each other; Laura tells me my teeth looked great on camera. I imagine several of us are also silently scoping out our potential opponents.

More than anything, I’m struck by how incredibly fun it is to play Jeopardy!, even when the clues are stupidly easy. By the time the practice game is over and we’re heading back to the green room, I’m grinning ear to ear. I look at Stephanie, and she says to me, “yeah, it’s fun, right?” Already, I cannot stand the thought that my Jeopardy! career will have to end at some point.

Once we’re back in the green room, Robert randomly draws the names of the two contestants who’ll compete against Stephanie in the first game of the day, to be aired on Monday, July 8. Christy and Kelly are up.

It’s an up-and-down match in which Stephanie ultimately prevails, making her a three-time champion who’s won a sizeable sum (over $50K). The rest of us watch from a dedicated section of the studio audience. We’re solemnly instructed not to even make eye contact with our family and friends just a few rows behind us, nor are we permitted to ask anything when Alex comes out during the commercial breaks and takes audience questions. It’s very important for the integrity of the show that the host (who received and read all the clues and responses this morning) and the contestants (who are supposed to have absolutely no knowledge of them) do not communicate at all except in the context of the game. So, as it turns out, every moment I spent talking to Alex Trebek will be seen by over ten million people on television.

We all go back into the green room, congratulating Stephanie when the contestants return. She disappears into the room labeled JEOPARDY! RETURNING CHAMPION and returns wearing a new outfit; I realize now that it’s a dressing room for the only person here who needs to change clothes at all.

Robert randomly picks the next two players. They are Jennifer and Prabhu.

Lisa touches up my makeup, and I use the restroom. Robert shows me the printed card for Alex one last time, which now has three bullets on it:

• Taught a class called “How to Talk to Aliens”
• Danced all night 6 times
• Works at YouTube

I am not really comfortable with the last bullet, especially because I thought I was explicitly prohibited from naming my employer on the air. But I’ve discussed this a couple times this morning with Robert, and he seems insistent on keeping this fact on the card, presumably because it’s perceived as cool and interesting. I remind myself again not to embarrass my employer if Alex decides to bring this up, and I confirm with Robert that he’ll flag the “aliens” story as the preferred one.

My head is buzzing again. I am going to play Jeopardy!, like, right now. Involuntarily, I begin to pace. Robert looks at me and says, “don’t get all serious on me now, Prabhu.”

Oh, I’m getting serious, all right. It’s game time.

Catch me on Jeopardy! this Tuesday! Until then, check out this series of posts reflecting on my experience.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

It’s March 5, the night before my Jeopardy! taping. I’m at my parents’ place in Pasadena watching the show, clicky pen in hand. And I’m killing it. Clue after clue, category after category, I’m rattling off answers like the champion I’ve always wanted to be. Maybe my studying has paid off (unlikely); or maybe the game is just easy and up my alley (more likely — you be the judge). Either way, I can’t help thinking, “if this had been my game, I would have won”, which becomes, “I could actually win this thing.”

Of course, then I remember that I’ve gotten fuzzy on African capitals, and I never really had a chance to study 70s and 80s music, and I could be overconfident on my Shakespeare, and this is freaking Jeopardy!. The feeling of infinite possibility passes.

I sit down to dinner with my parents. We’re talking about Final Jeopardy wagering strategy. My intended approach to this problem is wholly driven by one article I read in Slate a couple of years ago. The central premise of the article is that, if you are in second place but not too far behind (as it turns out, no more than a third behind), you can wager so that you’ll win if both players get it wrong. The assumption behind this analysis is that the leader will always wager so that they’ll have more than double the second-place player’s score — an assumption I buy, because a leader is extremely unlikely to risk losing in the scenario that both players will get it right, regardless of how he feels about the category. This is how I plan to wager if I’m leading.

The article argues that too many second-place players lose unnecessarily because they make stupidly aggressive wagers, and I’m inclined to agree. I resolve to follow this article’s recommendation to the letter, regardless of the category — but before I do, I pick up a pen and notepad and do the algebra that will convince myself of its conclusions. I haven’t solved an inequality like this in years; it’s like riding a bicycle, but I have my mom check my work just in case. I compute the expression for calculating the correct second-place wager before realizing it’s much easier to just calculate the number on the fly than to try and remember a random formula.

With this exercise complete, it’s time to drive to the Doubletree in Culver City, the hotel near the Sony Pictures Studios where Jeopardy! grants contestants a discounted rate (no, they do not cover the cost). I have to be at the studio at 8 AM, and I have no desire to drive from Pasadena to Culver City during rush hour on one of the most important days of my life. I get there, check in, and open my laptop to start frantically reading about The Doors and The Who and The Rolling Stones and all the other rock groups that I’ve heard of but from whose oeuvres I probably couldn’t hum even a few bars. Akshay tells me the Stones did “Start Me Up”, which sounds totally unfamiliar to me; I listen to it on Spotify and exclaim to an empty room, “oh, that song!” Chrix IMs me and tells me to go to bed, which I do around 11 PM.

It takes me a long time to fall asleep.

I’m appearing on Jeopardy! on Tuesday, July 10. I’m writing a series of posts reflecting on my experience.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

If I was going to be competitive on Jeopardy!, I’d need to absorb a lot of information in a short time, covering a range of topics so wide that it was obviously impossible to become even marginally conversant in all of them. I made a list some of the key weaknesses I should try to address: opera, Broadway, Shakespeare, classical music, Western artists and artistic movements, pre-1990 popular music and movies, US presidents, constitutional amendments, British royal history, African capitals, lakes and rivers, the NHL…okay, you get the idea. I had a lot to learn and not enough time to learn it. (A surprising number of people have asked me if the show gives a list of categories you need to study. Absolutely not — that would be far too easy!)

Perhaps more importantly, however, I’d need to find some way to practice the all-important buzzer, which was just as likely to determine the outcome of my game as any knowledge I might gain or lack. Luckily, I had help: Chrix started an email thread with a bunch of folks about running a Jeopardy! practice session. I searched around and found a piece of free software called Game Show Presenter which could approximate the mechanics of the game quite well — the only major difference was that the penalty for early buzzing was two seconds, much longer than in the real show. I ordered USB buzzers from AffordableBuzzers.com (if you click through, you’ll discover that they were far from affordable, but this was no time to worry about that). For the actual game material, Harry generously spent a few hours of his time writing a Python script to crawl j-archive.com and generate TSV files of full games in the format required by the software. Chrix graciously agreed to host at his house; Harry sent a calendar invite for February 22 entitled “I’ll take Disney Princesses for 800, Alex”; and it was time to play.

What an incredibly fun evening! I played for a few hours against a rotating set of opponents while people took turns playing the role of Alex. It became clear, however, that the buzzer had significant potential to be my undoing. In my group of friends, I generally knew more answers than my opponents, but in cases where multiple people knew the answer (as would frequently be the case on the show), I often lost on the buzzer. To be fair, it was hard to get into a rhythm, because it was difficult to achieve consistent timing for the buzzer activation (the host had to press the spacebar after reading the question) — but our session did expose a potential weakness. In any case, we had such a great time that we did it again, a week later, this time at Brian’s house. I’m very grateful to everyone who attended either of these practice sessions and helped me get ready for the big day!

Meanwhile, there was the actual studying, the bulk of which happened during my week off from work. Secrets of the Jeopardy! Champions, which I mentioned in my last post, figured heavily in my study plan; it’s full of compact, comprehensive, just-the-facts overviews of many topics, and almost all of the information is still relevant (though things like African geography have changed a lot). In the first few days, I memorized European and African capitals, British monarchs, state nicknames, the order of the US presidents, and constitutional amendments. (Predictably, given how quickly I studied all of this, I remember far too little of it now — though I did correctly remember that Connecticut is the Nutmeg State at trivia night at St. Stephen’s Green a few weeks ago.) The book also has incredibly useful summaries of all of Shakespeare’s plays, a number of the most popular operas, and Biblical stories. I didn’t need to know all the details; just enough to recognize character names, major plot points, settings, and other basics that would be enough to trigger the right cognitive association in the right direction. Jeopardy! might ask you to name the opera that features “La donna è mobile” but is much less likely to ask you to name any songs from Rigoletto.

As I got deeper into the week, I spent less time in Secrets and more time on Wikipedia. I read about Gilbert & Sullivan, and the American Civil War, and the largest lakes in the world, and so many other topics. Wikipedia was often too detailed for this purpose and frequently does a poor job of organizing and highlighting the most fundamental information, but it was still a very useful resource.

That week was honestly one of the most purely fun weeks I’ve had in recent memory. It was probably the first time since high school that I had the opportunity to relish deeply in the sheer joy of knowing. I found myself fascinated by the random things I learned; for example, why Congress passed the Twelfth Amendment, or how Shakespeare (just like a modern movie producer) wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor largely to serve as a vehicle for the popular character Falstaff, or how both Rent and Miss Saigon are based on Puccini operas. The great thing was that, because there was so much to know, anything I studied was potentially useful, and so I could meander from topic to topic as my heart desired, without any fear that I might be wasting my time. I found myself becoming one of those annoying trivia buffs who is so taken by some piece of knowledge he’s gained that he can’t resist telling people about it. (Apologies to those of you whom I victimized in this way.)

This feeling, this place where you are totally immersed in the enormity and wonder of human knowledge, is what Bob Harris calls “Trebekistan” in his book. I loved the ten days I spent in that place, and I can’t wait to go back again.

But this wasn’t just some flight of fancy. I was studying with a purpose. In the last few days before my taping, I became increasingly anxious about how much I still had left to study, and whether I would remember any of what I’d already learned. I flew to LA on the Sunday before my Tuesday taping, my head buzzing anew with my initial reaction to that fateful call:

Holy shit, I’m going on Jeopardy!.

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.

My Jeopardy! adventure gets underway, at least for all of you, on July 10. I’m publishing a series of posts reflecting on my experience. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

My road to Jeopardy! began unremarkably enough. Back in January 2009, a friend (I think it was Allen) mentioned to me that an online test was happening and suggested that I might want to take it. On the day it was being administered to West Coast participants, I signed up on the website (I still have the confirmation email) and took the test.

The online test is pretty simple: it’s fifty questions long, and you have fifteen seconds to enter each response (to minimize your ability to look up the answers; that amount of time actually seems longer than I remember, but the show’s own website verifies this detail). There’s no need to phrase answers in the form of a question or worry about the various other challenges of a real game (selecting categories, Daily Doubles, etc.). This is just a simple knowledge test, spanning the usual range of categories that the show’s viewers have come to expect. In any event, I took the test, figured I got maybe 44-45 correct out of 50 questions, and, assuming there was no way I’d actually make it onto the show, promptly forgot about it.

That is, until I got an email in July of 2010 (yes, a year and a half later), saying that the show’s contestant search was coming to San Francisco in September of that year, and I was invited to audition. Whoa, I thought — that’s pretty cool! I was given two business days to RSVP, which of course I did immediately. I booked the time slot on my calendar and made plans to leave work early that day two months in the future.

The Jeopardy! team soon responded, letting me know that the audition would take place at the Westin St. Francis, and that it would consist of three components:
1) another fifty-question written test
2) a mock game to assess my game-playing skills
3) a personality interview

I was instructed to come up with five brief tidbits about myself to potentially be used as my interesting anecdote during the on-air interview with Alex Trebek. Here’s what I managed at the time (perhaps each of these deserves its own blog post someday):

• Was once dissuaded from writing a letter to Pat Sajak
• Recently encountered an unusually enterprising elephant
• Once starred in a Celebrity Jeopardy! skit with an invisible man (actually, I told this story in my last post!)
• Recently returned from vacation to discover my car missing…or so I thought
• Once got a part in a play by calling the director an idiot (I’ve told this story too)

As the day approached, I felt some mild pressure to prepare for the audition, but I never had the sense of urgency that, in retrospect, I probably should have. Too many other things were going on — work was busy, I was lazy, and I figured that I didn’t have much chance of getting on the show anyway. I knew that I was at a fundamental disadvantage being so young, and I cursed myself for not having tried out for the Teen Tournament or College Championship. In any case, I did finally muster the focus to spend several hours reading Wikipedia the weekend before the auditions.

On the big day, I took off early from work and headed to the Westin dressed in a suit (because the email said, “come dressed as you might for an actual appearance on the show”). I could tell immediately when I arrived that I was one of the youngest people there — the average age was probably ten or fifteen years older. I would discover over the course of the afternoon that about half had tried out before; that plenty of traditional Jeopardy! professions, like “freelance editor”, were present and accounted for; and that one guy had won $32,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, had won Ben Stein’s titular money, and (unless I’m exaggerating in hindsight) had also won the National Spelling Bee. (No, he wasn’t Indian.)

The audition was run by Contestant Coordinators Maggie Speak and Glenn Kagan (both of whom I would meet again later in my Jeopardy! journey). We filled out some paperwork, had Polaroids taken (Glenn joked about how hard it was to find the film cartridges these days), and then went into the next room. Glenn showed us an appropriately cheesy DVD greeting from Alex himself and then walked us through a sort of crash course in modern Jeopardy! gameplay — things like what to do when you have control of the board, how Daily Doubles work, or what the “Rhyme Time” and “Before and After” categories mean. This was all information that any reasonable expectation would demand that you know before you audition for the show, but I guess they consider it important for the process to feel like a level playing field, so they make a point of starting from the beginning.

Glenn also explained the process of actually getting on the show from there on out. Apparently, we were all now entered into a contestant pool for the next eighteen months; we might get a call at any time during that period offering us a spot on the show, or we might not get such a call. We would only know that we hadn’t been accepted once eighteen months of silence had elapsed, after which we were eligible to take the next online test they offered. (This is but one of a million incarnations of that old show-business mantra: “don’t call us; we’ll call you.”) So I would potentially sit on this until March 2012, after which the next online test would likely be in January 2013. And to think that Maggie told a story of a recent five-time champion who’d tried out six times before being invited to appear!

After Glenn’s overview, we took our fifty-question written test, the mechanics of which were identical to the previous online test, but with clues being projected on a screen and read aloud by Alex’s recorded voice. I did worse this time — I estimated perhaps 42 out of 50 — but had no clue how that might compare to the rest of the room. (I’ve since read claims in various places that 35 is considered a “passing” score, but I didn’t see evidence of an explicit cutoff at my audition.)

With the written test out of the way, it was on to the mock game. There were maybe twenty-five or thirty people in the room, and we would go up three at a time (with everyone present) for a brief gameplay session plus our personality interviews. No one kept score, at least not officially — we just played from an infinitely refreshing game board, where once a category was exhausted, it would immediately be replaced by another. The purpose of the mock game was not to test your knowledge but rather to test your comfort with the gameplay mechanics and with the dreaded buzzer.

It’s worth taking a moment to discuss exactly how the buzzer works on Jeopardy!. The first thing to realize is that the buzzer is incredibly important and often determines the outcome of the game, since at least two contestants will know the answer to most of the clues that come up. Beyond that, the important thing that most people don’t realize is that it’s actually illegal to buzz in before Alex finishes reading the question, and if you do, your buzzer is forcibly locked out for a fraction of a second (a fifth or a quarter, apparently depending who you ask), which can make all the difference between successfully ringing in and watching your opponent do so. An additional wrinkle is that the release of the buzzer lockout isn’t automated based on Alex’s measured cadence; rather, the buzzers are manually enabled by a production assistant who sits, listens for Alex to finish, and then presses a button. When this happens, a set of lights illuminate around the gameboard indicating that it’s safe to ring in (these aren’t visible on TV, and honestly, if you want to have a prayer of competing, you don’t wait to see them in the studio anyway). So when we say that someone is “fast on the buzzer”, it’s actually less about speed and more about timing your release.

In any event, none of this complexity existed in the audition. Our set of buzzers didn’t even lock the other contestants out once someone had successfully rung in. They just each lit up whenever we pressed our buttons. Maggie told us to mash the button as fast as possible (which is how you play the real game) and made a judgment call about who’d rung in first.

My turn came about two-thirds of the way through the group. I ran the “Potent Potables” category in the mock game; “don’t tell my mom!” I quipped jovially to Maggie. (In hindsight, I think it’s not unreasonable to speculate that this particular turn of events may have been the primary reason my audition was successful; it may seem surprising given how many dorks appear on the show, but the contestant coordinators definitely do look for personality and telegenicity, or at least what passes for it in a gaggle of geeks.) The personality interview was more in-depth than on the show — several questions rather than just one or two — and I distinctly remember answering a question from Glenn about how Google makes money on search results.

And just like that, the audition was over. I had dinner with Chrix and Taj in the city, went home, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

That is, until I got a call this past February 2, in month 17 of 18. Robert James, another contestant coordinator, called me in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday, and I have to say that it was one of the longest phone calls of my life. Robert introduced himself as being from Jeopardy! at the very beginning of the call, but he happily left me to speculate wildly as to the reason for his call while he asked me various qualifying questions. “Do you know anyone personally who has appeared on Jeopardy!?” “Do you or anyone in your immediate family work for Sony or any of its subsidiaries?” “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” I answered these questions more carefully than almost any questions I’ve been asked in my life, my heart in my throat as I dreaded screwing it up after coming so close.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, came the clincher:
“Have you ever appeared on television?”
“No.”
“Would you like to?”
“…Absolutely.”

I have no doubt that Robert takes great pleasure in toying with prospective contestants’ emotions this way.

Robert explained to me that my taping date would be on March 6, and that my episode would air the week of July 9. Taping would be at the Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. I should call Lucy the Thursday before my taping to confirm my attendance and give the names of any guests. I would be receiving a full contestant information packet soon with paperwork I’d need to fill out and promptly return by fax.

I got very little done the rest of that day; my head was buzzing. I IMed a group chat I have with some current and former colleagues:

[pb] holy [expletive] guys, I’m going on jeopardy
[hry2000] holy [expletive]
[nundu] YES
[hry2000] that’s the coolest thing i’ve heard in a year
[dave] !!!!!
[nundu] YES
[dave] YES
[nundu] YES
[hry2000] YES
[bshih] !!!
…
[nundu] that is basically the coolest thing ever

I also sent an email to my family. Instead of a breathless exultation, I just sent them the summary of the administrivia Robert had relayed to me, under the subject “Jeopardy! appearance info (!!!)”. My mom’s reply captured perfectly my state of mind:

Awesome Prabhu!!! Your life’s dream!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now you have to actually prepare……

…right. Prepare. To go on TV in front of ten million people and compete in the most prestigious knowledge competition that exists.

I had work to do.

You’ll see me on Jeopardy! on Tuesday, July 10. I’m publishing a series of posts in anticipation of the airing, reflecting on my experience.

In my last post, I talked about all kinds of experiences that led me to Jeopardy!. But one thing I didn’t address is, well, Jeopardy!. Have I been a fan of the show since I was a wee lad, or is it a more recent phenomenon?

Definitely the former. I don’t remember exactly when I first started watching the show, but I do know I was young — maybe five or six years old. A date I can place with more confidence is 1992 (age seven), when I received a gift of MS-DOS games for both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune and quickly became an avid player of the former. (Okay, I admit it: I played Wheel too, even though that show is painfully dumb.) There was, of course, no character in the game who looked anything like me, so I think the avatar I chose was a white dude with red hair. I sometimes played for hours on end; I can still remember the synthesized sound effect signaling that it was time to buzz in, and the way the computer players’ answers would gradually reveal on the screen as though they were being manually typed by a disembodied but relentless opponent. It wasn’t long before I’d played so much Jeopardy! that I started seeing the same questions again (a constant problem with these sorts of games).

I watched the show religiously for much of the 90s, seeing countless players demonstrate their answer-questioning and button-pressing prowess. I think every Jeopardy! contestant has a player or two whom they watched as a kid who really inspired them; for me, it was Eddie Timanus. He first appeared in October 1999 and was a five-time champion (in those days, that was the limit) who later competed in the Tournament of Champions. I once watched Eddie run an entire category on UN secretaries-general (how many of us can even name five different people who have held that office?). And to top it all off, Eddie is completely blind and has been since he was a toddler. Incredibly, the only real affordances they gave him were a Braille card listing the categories and a suspension of the show’s traditional practice of having contestants walk to their podiums (a practice they would later permanently eliminate). Being sightless, he couldn’t read ahead on the game board like his opponents could, and yet he still somehow beat everyone to the buzzer over and over again. I remember being enormously impressed.

For four or five years, I also had a page-a-day Jeopardy! calendar in my room. It became a routine for my mom to go out every year on the day after Christmas and pick this up for me (calendars are steeply discounted after the 25th). I dutifully saved all the pages for years, even though I never looked at them again.

And there were other random Jeopardy!-related experiences that presented themselves on occasion. In TV production class in ninth grade, we made a Celebrity Jeopardy! video (I’d never seen the SNL skits, but they were all the rage in those days) in which one of the contestants was Claude Rains, who played the title role in The Invisible Man, because our group wasn’t large enough to have three contestants plus a host plus camera plus floor director. (Yes, that was my idea, and it was I who read the part from behind the camera, in addition to playing Alex in front of it.) I remember what an achievement it was to find a good copy of the theme song and get it down to a size small enough to fit on a 3.5” floppy disk so I could bring it to school and record it onto our tape.

A less frivolous example is how Mrs. Bell used to create and run Jeopardy! games to help us review for tests. She used to pit the left half of the room against the right half in team matches to see who knew the most about Washington-Adams-Jefferson-Madison-Monroe-Quincy Adams, or the Gilded Age, or the Cold War, or some other exam topic. I could be making this up, but I vaguely remember that she let me play Trebek once, which was pretty sweet.

Truth be told, though, my viewership of the show dwindled in high school and thereafter. UPN started airing reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation every day at 7 PM, which conflicted with Jeopardy!, and I almost always chose Trek. Meanwhile, college was the first time in my life I didn’t have regular access to a television, so of course this particular habit fell away entirely, in favor of TV habits that could easily be fulfilled with an Internet connection (I never looked, but I doubt anyone bothered putting Jeopardy! on Kazaa or BitTorrent). I actually didn’t make watching the show a regular habit again until I started preparing to appear on it earlier this year — though I did have a brief period last year when I tried to use being home in time for Jeopardy! as a motivator to get out of the office at a reasonable hour. (It didn’t prove very effective, which is perhaps a sign of just how far I’d let my enthusiasm for the show get away from me.)

And for almost all of this time, I never seriously investigated trying out of the show. As a kid, I often watched the Teen Tournament or College Championship with a particular yearning to compete for the sizeable prizes given in those easier competitions, but it always seemed unreachable somehow. In those days, there was no website that clearly spelled out the exact procedure for getting on the show; I had no idea whom to ask or where to look for such guidance, and my personality was never of the type to probe on such things if the information was not readily available. In many ways, I really wish I had, particularly given that my abilities, relative to my prospective opponents, have probably never been greater than when I was sixteen. In any event, I missed my chance as a youth, and it wasn’t until 2009 that I began the process of falling into the opportunity to compete on Jeopardy!.

More on that in my next post.

P.S. So, did Trebek inspire that mustache? Sadly, no. I was just a dweeb.

My appearance on Jeopardy! airs in a week. I plan to publish a new post every day between now and then, reflecting on my experience and explaining what it was like to try out for and compete on the show.

I’ve loved knowing things for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, we had the World Book Encyclopedia at home; I used to take volumes off the shelf and read random articles just for the hell of it. When we went to the library, in addition to the usual picture books or children’s fiction, I checked out books on topics like astronomy or dinosaurs (though I don’t think that’s unique). I remember there was a book about the human body called How & Why that I checked out over and over again, and by the time I’d gotten to middle school, I’d checked out Barron’s Algebra the Easy Way multiple times just for fun. (In my defense, the book is structured around a really fun little narrative about people in a mythical land discovering the rules of mathematics for the first time.)

When CD-ROMs became a thing in the mid-90s, one of the most common pieces of software my parents would buy for me was encyclopedias; I remember what a thrill it was that Compton’s, Grolier’s, and Encarta had actual video clips, available at the click of a mouse, of things like the moon landing or the “I Have a Dream” speech or the operation of the four valves of the heart. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, presumably because nothing seemed harder and more satisfying to know about than the inner workings of the human brain. I could go on, but this is all just detail in support of what I’ve already said: I’ve loved knowing things for as long as I can remember.

And I’ve loved knowledge-based competitions almost as long. Probably the first such competition I can remember participating in is the spelling bee. I first did spelling bee in sixth grade, when I lost at the school level to an eighth grader, partly because Mr. Fuller mispronounced ‘leviathan’ (we both misspelled ‘taciturn’, and I lost by one word). I don’t remember caring about winning before that loss, but after that loss, I can’t remember ever not being desperate to win. I won the county in seventh grade (spawning an Orlando Sentinel photo caption some of you may remember: “Champion is spelled ‘Balasubramanian'”) and took third at the district level, which feeds to nationals. I repeated my Orange County victory the next year, only to choke catastrophically at districts, where the winner was, of all people, the kid who’d been my runner-up at county both years. I would compete in spelling bees on a couple of other occasions after that — if anyone cares, I took second place in the National Junior Beta Club Convention’s spelling competition in 1998, because I’d never heard of a ‘stein’ and second-guessed myself — but spelling bees are something of a young man’s game, and the only league that matters (The Scripps National Spelling Bee) doesn’t let you compete after eighth grade anyway.

Alongside this orthographic melodrama, I was laying the foundations for my appearance on Jeopardy!. The earliest trivia competition I can remember participating in was in Mr. Ricard’s gifted social studies class in middle school. We used to play this game called “Newsbeat”, where the class would be split in two, and Mr. Ricard would moderate a trivia competition that used current events-related questions received via some kind of subscription. I vaguely recall that he sometimes used Trivial Pursuit cards for bonuses (perhaps someone reading this can confirm). The rules were broadly Quiz Bowl-esque, except that Mr. Ricard wielded absolute power to subtract points if kids got unruly (which happened often). I loved every time we played this game over those three years. I loved that the competition was strong, and I hated losing. My most vivid memory from these days is the time that I correctly answered that it took Apollo 11 about three days to reach the moon from Earth, felt confused as my classmates gawked in incredulity, and uttered an honest question that I wouldn’t live down for months: “isn’t that common knowledge?” (I probably deserved every snide remark I received for this particular feat of unintended obnoxiousness.)

At some point in middle school, I also spent a weekend afternoon at the Florida Mall competing in the Mini-Masters Game Show, a traveling kids’ trivia competition of whose existence I’ve been able to find scant electronic evidence. Drew had told me about it and invited me to play, but I ended up having to partner with someone random (I don’t remember why), and we didn’t get very far. The only thing I really remember was that my partner correctly identified a song I’d never heard of as being from the repertoire of Michael Jackson; I don’t remember which song, but I’d bet money that it was something obvious like “Thriller” or “Beat It”. It was on that day that I learned an important lesson: as smart as I thought I was, I had obvious weaknesses that even much lesser competitors would find absurd.

My greatest middle school trivia success came together with Ryan, Marc, and Jay-Ming. We represented our Beta Club in the quiz bowl competition and won the state of Florida, earning us all a trip to the same national convention I mentioned earlier. I don’t remember the details, except that we lost in the first round and were thoroughly dejected. Only my runner-up trophy in the spelling competition saved the trip from being a total waste.

I hung up my quiz bowl hat for the first couple years of high school, since the WPHS team generally only took juniors and seniors. But you can bet that I joined the team when I was a junior, and you can bet that I loved every minute of it. Mrs. Gwinn (requiescat in pace) made that an incredibly fun year, and it was one of my first experiences hanging out with older kids. I learned a lot from, and had a blast with, Chris, Kate, Albert, Dan, and others whose names escape me at the moment; they were cool and they had cars and I felt like such a baller just being associated with them. That was the year I learned that Georges Seurat developed pointillism, that Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition, and that the mysterious art of pen-twirling was not so mysterious after all. An otherwise awesome season was ruined by the fact that we lost in the finals; I was particularly frustrated because Mrs. Gwinn took me out in the second half so she could play the seniors, and I knew a number of the answers that they didn’t get.

Senior year, I became the team captain, and Mrs. Gwinn handed the coaching reins over to Kim, who continued the tradition of taking the game seriously but having a great time along the way. We recruited a new crop of juniors to the team, and a number of my classmates joined up or became more active. It was another exciting and fun-filled season, with long drives across town and many a pit stop at Fazoli’s to keep us entertained. I have a random memory of sharing a pizza with Ryan and Vikas in the parking lot of a rival high school, guffawing about who knows what. Strangely, however, I have almost no memory of the actual competition, though Kim tells me that we again lost at districts (I had romantically remembered that we won). However, she and the coach from Dr. Phillips High decided, for the first time in a while, to field a team for Orange County at the Commissioner’s Academic Challenge at Disney World; Andrew, Dan, and I competed along with Buddy and Derek from DP, and we managed to have a decently fun weekend despite losing in the first round (a theme is emerging here). The highlight of the experience was when I got on stage in the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Play It! attraction; I lost on the question going for 32,000 “points” (sadly, on a question about PBS children’s shows), fell back to 1,000, and came away with a hat and some commemorative pins. Man, did I love that dramatic music (though it wasn’t the same without Regis).

And then, just like that, it was over. I never joined quiz bowl in college — indeed, I generally felt too busy with schoolwork to do anything extracurricular — though a few of us did compete in intramurals a couple times. And there was the occasional trivia night at The Rose & Crown in Palo Alto. But by and large, my trivia career ended when I graduated from high school, and my heady days of fierce competition to recall the obscurest facts the fastest were but a memory.

Until I tried out for Jeopardy!, that is.