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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!.