Jeopardy is a trademark of Sony Pictures Studios and, obviously, no attempt is made here to infringe on that trademark or to make commercial gain from the use of that trademark.
It took me eight years to try again for Jeopardy. The crew had returned to Toronto once in the interim, but I wasn't able to make it. And given how few Canadians were getting on, it'd clearly be forever before I'd get a chance again.
That left only one option: heading down to Los Angeles for the monthly tryouts. In May 2003 I called and booked myself on for the June tryout. And, what the heck, Laura, too, since we were combining the tryout with a long-overdue holiday in California. Hey … if she was there anyway, what did it hurt?
When you call, they're friendly, but also keen to warn you not to come down solely for the tryout, implying heavily that most people fail. I was cool with that. If I flamed out, I could drown my disappointment in California wines.
In the interim, we'd decided to sell our house and buy a bigger one in a better neighbourhood. So, instead of spending my time learning, I was packing boxes and doing all sorts of minor but long-neglected repairs to the house. My great plan to re-read and study all the games I'd done since 1996, games that I'd started doing in the first place to ready myself for Jeopardy … well, that came to naught.
I did, of course, fine-tune some weak spots. Those damn Romantic poets. Atomic theory. Old Testament stuff. But for the most part, I watched the show and began to worry.
The theory holds that the qualifying test is drawn from the two highest-point-value rungs of the game, the $1600 and $2000 question. To pass, I'd need 35 of 50 questions. That meant two thirds of the questions I was seeing on the game. It was just barely happening.
Moreover, we'd actually bought a new house and decided to put ours on the market while we were away, so we wouldn't be in the way. The days before the flight to LA were a whirlwind of last-minute cleaning and fixing … and panicking.
As we fly to LA, I read through a few fact books. This, in fact, was cramming, and although it is true that several hours on a plane won't make up for a lifetime of missed opportunities to acquire knowledge, it did make me feel better.
By the time we'd reached the hotel, there was a frantic call from the real estate agent. We'd already had two offers. This was a good omen.
The next morning, instead of focussing on the day's Jeopardy audition, Laura and I were trading faxes back and forth with our agent as the offers competed with each other. In the end, we took an offer that was $10,000 over our asking price. We were ecstatic.
It was now 10:30. My audition was at 2 pm, but there was an earlier audition at 11 am. For some reason, I had a sudden premonition. "You have to go now." I'm not superstitious, but it did occur to me that the longer I waited, the more nervous I'd get. So I headed downstairs, just after things had gotten going, and asked if I could move my appointment up.
I found a place to sit and started filling out the forms. One of the things they want is a set of anecdotes, which you discuss with Alex on the show. I was ready for this and scribbled them all down as a video of the Crew Crew answered some FAQs and gave us our marching orders.
The questions themselves appear on a giant TV screen and a tape of Johnny Gilbert's voice reads them.
The very first one asked for the name of a Cabinet-level figure. I wrote down the answer quickly, but realized later that the question was actually asking for the first name. I did this at least twice in the test. At one point, I wrote down the name of a speed skater, only to be told later they wanted a figure skater.
Nevertheless, midway through I realized I was acing it. Happily for me, there was lots of literature on the test. There were a handful I was unsure of, and in the end, there were only two I know I missed. Assuming there were no others I misread, I had a score of 46.
As it happens, the Jeopardy folks are quite coy now about what score passes. Rumour is that they have different scores for affirmative action reasons and that there was some legal trouble over this. Don't know ...
Either way, I passed, as did 22 people in our group of about 100. This was an unusually high number, apparently. Mostly, the people were good folks, and I think I recognized a few of them on the show later. There was something almost Canadian about how modest they all were about passing.
Most of them were from California, which was good news for me. Rumour holds that the least likely contestant to get on is a white, male, middle-aged writer from California. Only three of the people were passed were women but at least I'm not Californian!
Then comes the mock game. I'd heard that they not really "testing" your ability to play here, so much as they're testing your grace under fire and your ability to follow the rules. Buzz in. Be called on. Answer in the form of a question. Wait for a response. Pick a new question. They like smiling. They like enthusiasm. They like loud, clear voices. I've also heard that you should dress as you would dress for the show.
I had fun with my mock game and with the interview they do with you afterward. I was in a great mood. As I explained, "This is the luckiest day of my life—this morning I sold my house for $10,000 more than the asking price and now I've qualified for Jeopardy!"
They like to ask what you'd do with the money. I said I'd go to Australia and visit some the people who played our game online every week.
I realized later that this was a mistake. I mentioned the trivia business in at least two of my anecdotes, too. Later that summer, I met some NTN employees at Game Show Congress 2003, plus some Jeopardy contestants. It turns out that, after five-time-champ Michael Dupree wrote a book about how to get on the show, Jeopardy starting to frown on anyone profiting from a Jeopardy connection.
So, heavily advertising my business probably led to my being scratched off the list. (But if any Sony types are reading along, if I ever do get on the show, I'll not breathe a word of it without your say-so. Promise!)
As I left, I asked if I needed to be sequestered, since Laura was taking the afternoon test. It turns out that they have at least two tests, which they change annually. This is why you can only audition again after 12 months have gone by.
So I shared the good news with Laura. I was literally jumping up and down. Then she went in. And she passed, too! We figure Laura got a score somewhere in the mid-30s. The two of us had a huge, expensive supper and celebrated. We even ordered room service and raided the mini-bar.
We went to Hollywood, Santa Monica and San Diego, then headed home to wait. Our new home, that is. We moved in and waited. And waited. You are only in the Jeopardy queue for 12 months from your audition date, but they only tape from September to March, so a lot of people audition in the late spring or early summer so that they are there for the full summer.
I was under the impression that if either of us got the call, it'd be in the autumn. As the snow fell and Christmas came and went, I began to get pessimistic. A couple places on this site teased Alex Trebek a bit. Had they found that and counted it against me? Was I too enthusiastic in the audition? Why aren't they calling Laura, either? Do they even have Canadians on anymore? I began to dwell on the stupidity of trumpeting my trivia business in the anecdote form.
I began to think about statistics. In 1996, about three times as many people passed the test as they needed. With an increased number of goofy tournaments (high school kids, little kids, Power Players, ad frigging infinitum), that meant even fewer places for prospective contestants like me.
I visited the Jeopardy message boards. Some people tried out a half dozen times before getting on. Some had tried a dozen times and never got on. I was 38 years old. My brain cells were been killed by old age and alcohol. Things didn't look good!
On January 12, Jeopardy finally called. Laura was desperate to meet a deadline for a FedEx package to go out that evening. I was screening her calls. The conversation went like this.
�Is Laura Brine Pakwet there?�
Mispronouncing two of Laura's names meant this was probably a telemarketing call. I put on my "Don't bother us, pond scum" voice. "She's very busy at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?"
�This is Jeopardy calling. We�d like to have her on. Can she call us back?�
Stunned silence. "Oh! That's different then. Just a moment please."
I fetched Laura and watched her jaw drop as she answered the phone. They asked a dizzying number of questions. After she hung up, we had a micro-celebration as she got the crucial FedEx package ready. Even so, when the deliveryperson arrived, it wasn't ready. She was the first person we told. She understood.
After this came the fun of telling everyone. It took a few tries to get people to understand that Laura wasn't "in jeopardy," she will be "on Jeopardy," and yes, we do mean the actual TV show.
Then it began to sink in. Laura, being Laura, was immediately swept with guilt that she was going on instead of me, since it'd been my dream for at least eight years and she'd auditioned simply because she was there anyway. But the way I saw her, being female (and cute) her odds of going on were better than mine, and if I'd scotched it anyway, at least one of us would be on.
From that point on, I started coaching her. Strictly speaking, Jeopardy can cover any fact in the known universe. Practically speaking, there is a Jeopardy range of knowledge that accounts for most of the content on the show. Watching the show gives you a sense of where they might be likely to go.
From watching the show, I knew that Season 20 was emphasizing sports and the Bible. Most of the gimmicky "Bob Goes to the Bakery" type categories had been dumped. There were also more female-friendly questions involving food and arts & crafts.
The changing category landscape was good news for us. Sports would be a lost cause, but I did give her my old games on the Bible. Being Canadian, her other weakness was American geography, politics and history, so Laura found a set of US-states flashcards, which had a map of each state and its various data points (capitals, nicknames and so on). I also gave her games on the US cabinet departments (which I wrote especially so that she could use it), as well as on US presidents, vice-presidents, first ladies and, of course, all of America's many wars.
Even so, raw memorization is no substitute for a lifetime of learning things in proper context. But it does help. Check out this essay on memory and learning for more tips.
Another study aid is that Jeopardy often doubles up the question. In other words, it'll wrap an interesting fact in an easy clue. A hypothetical example might be, "What comet discoverer urged Isaac Newton to publish Principia Mathematica?" In this case, "comet explorer" is a dead giveaway to Edmond Halley.
In some cases, the doubling up overwhelmingly points to just one likely person: "Norwegian playwright" is Ibsen; "Danish astronomer" is Brahe; "Czech tennis player" is Navratolova; "Welsh poet" is Dylan Thomas and so on. Getting a handle on these can be a huge head start, as this doubling clue often appears at the beginning.
Finally, although Season 20 was better written than Season 19, sometimes the interesting fact is too well buried in overly cute writing, so much so that it's hard to tell what they're looking for. Look for the noun that follows the word "this." That'll usually be it.
Most days, she spent an hour or two picking at things, either in the areas in which she was weak or in areas where she could make quick gains with a little work. She found general books on cultural literacy especially helpful. We saw results pretty quickly. Normally, when Laura and I played along to the show, I would beat her most nights. In the two weeks before the taping, the balance of brainpower had shifted.
As it turned out, hers was one of the year's few shows without any religious questions. But the history studying helped and she showed surprisingly strongly in the Colonial America category, where she got three of the five questions. One nobody got and the other was Laura's Daily Double, which asked about Peyton Randolph, first president of the Continental Congress. When it came up, Laura floundered, trying to remember the House of Burgess's name.
�I could tell you which president died 31 days after being inaugurated,� joked Laura. �Why couldn�t they ask that?� (It�s William Henry Harrison, by the way.)
It was weeks later that I let her know that Randolph was mentioned in passing in one of the files I'd given her. She was angry with herself at first, but then again, given the huge binder of study material she had, nobody could memorize it all. You have to prioritize.
Still, for a Canadian girl to dominate a Colonial America category is pretty impressive. Ironically, her "hometown howdy" mentioned that she would be bluffing her way through American history. These are recorded beforehand and made available to the local stations to promote that local people are on. Oddly, few stations run them (Ottawa's didn't) and there was no media interest in her appearance.
We also watched the shows and analyzed them. It is amazing how poorly people bet on Final Jeopardy. Elementary game theory (a form of math)suggests how the leading player at Final Jeopardy must bet if she wants to guarantee a win, which dictates how the second place and third place players should bet, since they can't win unless other people got in wrong. We went through different scenarios and the math behind them.
(There is currently an odd trend toward players in the lead betting so that there can be a tie. The mathematics here are labyrinthine and, in my mind, unsound, particularly since you are bringing back a good challenger the next day, who is practiced with the buzzer, rather than two complete rookies.)
One of the hardest things to do is "know you'll know it." A couple of times on her show, Laura buzzed without the actual answer in her head. She used the extra time to reread the question and then spit out the answer.
To that end, we had spent a lot of time testing her instincts. That's the advantage of the pause button on the remote. We'd record shows and Laura would play with the VCR remote in place of the buzzer. Whenever she hit pause, she had to answer. She learned a lot from doing that.
We also looked at the mental game. From my time coaching Reach for the Top, a high school quiz bowl, I knew that state of mind and calm were as important as knowledge, memory and recall.
I told the Reach kids that the key to winning is to forget the score and treat every question as the beginning of a brand-new game. That's easier said than done in Reach, but somewhat easier in Jeopardy. Because the game moves so quickly, and because all the clues are worth different amounts, you easily lose track of the score when actually playing.
We noticed how players who fell behind, or missed a question they should have gotten, started to panic and miss the next few questions. At a live trivia event we went to, I simply could not remember the name "Louis Pasteur." I was sputtering "French chemist … milk guy … germs and stuff." After that, a brain cramp became known as a Pasteur question: it was only deadly if it killed your confidence.
The nice thing about Jeopardy is that, although it races by at lightning speed when you're actually playing, two thirds of the raw points are in the second round. Plus, thanks to Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy there is almost always room to catch up. I have seen players with insurmountable leads get caught with only a dozen questions still on the board.
If you're ever on, never give up. Sometimes, the top two players are so close in score that they must bet everything to guard against one another; if they both flub the question, that distant third-place can turn into a win.
If you do find yourself absolutely panicked, stop and take a deep breath, even if it means zoning out for a question. A poor emotional frame of mind only worsens your play, which worsens your stress. It's also a good idea to breathe and relax as much as you can before the tape starts rolling.
Conversely, getting on a roll in the game can put you "in the zone." With your confidence high and your rhythm working, you can rack up a large number of consecutive hits and devastate your opponents. (See below!). I see this all the time in Reach. You are so sure of yourself in a category that you manage a Jedi-like relationship with the buzzer, whereas players anxious about a category will allow a microsecond of doubt to get in their thumb's way.
Even so, memory recall is a fragile thing, and it easily gets stomped by emotional stress. Winners stay cool under pressure. Laura has significant public speaking experience, but even she was shaking a little when she was playing in front of 15 million people.
In her game, the returning champ started the game with something like 10 in a row right, which would have freaked me out completely, but to my great pride, Laura held on and got a second wind. She stayed above zero and got to play Final Jeopardy, unlike freaked-out contestants who sink far in the negatives and have to leave early.
Even so, she ended up in a distant third. So, what happened?
Even though Laura knew almost all the answers (and most contestants do), she was killed on the buzzers in the actual game. Once Alex finishes reading the clue, someone backstage "arms" the board. The players (but not the home audience) see a flash of light around the board. Whomever rings in first at this point gets asks to answer.
However, if you ring in too soon, you are penalized with a 0.20 second "lock out." That's long enough to kill you, because someone else will usually buzz in the meantime.
There is a picture of the podium at http://www.pisspoor.com/buzzer.html. Basically, the buzzer is a 4.5" long cylinder with a cross-sectional diameter of 1.5" thick. The buzzer is connected to electronic equipment by a cord long enough that you can hold the buzzer behind your back, if you're so inclined. The button mechanism on the buzzer is rather springy and spongy, which means you can rest your thumb on it without triggering it accidentally.
However, any substantial pressure at all will set it off. That means you don't have to press the button all the way the down. Laura had trouble ringing in (and couldn't get in at all until after the first break). The crew came over and suggested she only partially depress the button, but that she do so repeatedly. (Repeated pressing is important, to overcome possible lockouts.
So the received wisdom is this. Read the question quickly. Get the answer. Look at the question's last word. When you hear Alex finish that last word, ring in then. Never wait for the lights and never let Alex "read the question to you." Read it yourself and use the time it takes him to think of the answer and, if you can, reread the question again. Never wait for the lights.
After all, Eddie Timanus became a five-time champ and he was blind. He couldn't even see the lights.
You want your thumb hammering the buzzer microseconds after the armer's thumb lands on his device. This way, you're not waiting for your nervous system to react on seeing the lights.
Here is what Michael Dupree says about the lights: "The contestant coordinators will tell you all about those lights and about how you should wait for them to come on before ringing. If you do that you will not win. I have never heard of a TOC competitor who relied on those lights (and I have talked to 20 of them). You must time it off Alex's voice alone."
Knowing all this, we bought the PlayStation version of Jeopardy and we started playing, both to get her used to the buzzers and to get her used to the pressure of waiting for the lights while competing with somebody. Since I was a stronger player on paper than Laura, we took enormous comfort from the fact that she was beating me regularly to the buzzer.
When Laura went on, though, that buzzer advice backfired. There is, in fact, a slight beat of a delay, about three-tenths to one-half second, by some estimates, between Alex finishing the question and the lights flashing. Maybe the arming guy is getting older and his reflexes are slowing. Whatever the reason, Laura was killed in the gully between Alex's last word and the lights.
After the first break, the contestant coordinator told her that she was buzzing in too soon, not too late, and she was being locked out every time. Thinking that she wasn't buzzing in fast enough, she'd even started buzzing in before Alex was finished reading the question.
Before the show, you have a chance to practice with the buzzers. You're lined up three at a time, and once you ring in three times, you're replaced. This is less helpful than it sounds, because a contestant coordinator, not Alex, reads the questions.
But the biggest difference was that, in the rehearsal, Laura wasn't standing on a box. Jeopardy likes the three contestants to look as if they are more or less the same height. It helps the camera pan. Since Laura was playing with two very tall men, she was given a box to stand on. But that extra elevation meant that she couldn't easily rest her hand on the podium.
At the risk of mashing sour grapes, this is more important than it sounds. Right now, lift your fist in the air and press your thumb against your index finger knuckle. Your fist lowers, not just because of your thumbs momentum, but also because you're unconsciously moving your hand downward as well. It's a natural reflex and the lost swing reduces your buzzer speed just enough to make a difference.
Our plan had been for Laura to experiment with timing in the first round. But by the time she had built a rhythm, it was too late. In her game, she was blown out of the water in the first round, but was competitive in the second.
Ultimately, however, the lights and the box probably didn't matter that much. Laura was up against a player who was both very smart and extremely fast. An eventual three-time winner, Al Davis of Washington had a habit of demolishing the opposition with runaway scores. (A runaway score is more than double any opponent's going into Final Jeopardy, which makes the final question academic, since you cannot be caught.)
With a slower, dumber champ, she might have been able to dope out exactly how long that beat of a delay was and anticipate it. Then again, if there'd been nobody else on the podium at all, it'd have been a landslide. You play the cards you're dealt.
It's also to Laura's credit that she didn't take one piece of advice I gave her. Most people pick a category, start at the top and work down. The show's producers strongly encourage you to do that. I suggested, however, that she go hunting for the Daily Doubles by jumping around the lower rungs of the boards. Not only would this keep the DD's out of other players' hands, but it would also keep them off balance.
Some people go further. Two-game-winner Karl Koryat advises: "When contestants are selecting a category, they're allowed to abbreviate the category name to speed up play. … Now, with some categories, you can use this rule to confuse your opponents. I had a category called 'Crossword Clues M,' in which every correct response began with the letter 'M,' but when I chose the category I would say only, 'Crossword Clues for (dollar amount).' Unless they looked at the top of the category and read the full name of the category, my opponents were at a crippling disadvantage, and I smoked them."
I thought the combination of leaping around the board and abbreviating the category names would be a devastating one-two punch, but Laura was told this makes bad TV for the home viewer, so she played along. Good for her.
We flew down to Los Angeles on February 9 for her taping the next day. Jeopardy tapes a week's worth of shows on Tuesday and another week's worth on Wednesday. It came be quite gruelling, and you may notice that champs tend to fall late in the week. They are simply exhausted.
There is lots of info from her perspective elsewhere on the site. For me, I bid her goodbye after breakfast, hung around the hotel, then cabbed in at 11 am.
We were herded through the set to prevent us from bringing in cameras or from accidentally finding out the answers. Some of us were friends and family of that day's contestants, while others were fans of the show who'd always wanted to watch a taping. The fan sit stage right and the friends sit stage left, with the contestants who haven't played yet. They are out of sight of the players and you are told most sternly not to communicate with the players, even if they're sitting across from you in the stands.
As it happens, I was sitting next to the wife of Al Davis.
Johnny Gilbert warms up the audience and plays a video of the Crew Clue talking about the show. I missed most of it, as I was looking around the studio and startled to see Laura up first.
Part of me didn't like her going up first, without a chance to watch the game being taped and glean extra information about, for example, the pace of Alex's reading and the armer's arming. Then again, had she seen Al Davis demolish his way through a game or two, it might have hurt her confidence.
Also, there is always the chance that you can fly down to LA and not even get on. Each day, they need 10 new contestants for five shows, but they call in about a dozen in case some get stage fright or don't show. Typically, if you don't go on Tuesday, you go on Wednesday. I also found out that if you don't get on Wednesday, they fly you back on their dime for the next taping, which is the only time they pay any expenses. It also explains why some weeks you see a lot of people from the West Coast and the Southwest … they're taping on Wednesday and people from those areas are cheaper to fly back.
Laura's only contact with Alex was what you see on the show. Before the show, the contestants practice their stories for Alex, and the contestant coordinators coach you and help you find the best ones. They also walk you through the voluminous wads of contracts and releases you have to sign.
Laura's story was about her birth announcement being printed accidentally in the "Livestock for Sale" section of the local paper. He also commented on the pronunciation of our last name, which is somewhat unorthodox, in that many French Canadians pronounce it Pa-kay, and we use Pa-ket. The show makes sure Johnny Gilbert pronounces your name right and Alex is a stickler for how things are pronounced. (We've been great amused by his--entirely correct--take on "Peru" and "Nicaragua.")
He also takes questions from the audience during the commercials. For some reason, they shoot blank tape in the time local stations use to run ads. So he goes out and takes the same questions about his clothes and routine. You are, however, warned quite sternly not to ask about his salary.
This being said, he was in a good mood and was even able to joke about the car accident he'd had a few weeks earlier, in which he fell asleep at the wheel. He also joked around in those rare occasions when they stop tape, either for technical difficulties or to double check that somebody's wrong answer is in fact wrong. The judges have lots of books and, one assumes, super-high-speed access to Google.
During the stop-tapes and in the short intervals before shows, for some reason Alex will occasionally affect a German accent. He did that when Laura was on and, apparently, it means he's in a good mood. I think it would have been because his daughter was on set that day, doing a class project on the show. The whole Clue Crew were there, too. Some people have caught Alex on days when his mood is sour, and apparently, he can be quite distant and cold.
Interestingly, the questions he reads are not computerized. He has a huge sheet of paper on which the entire round of questions is written as a grid. Alex scratches off the boxes as he reads the questions then tears off the page when the round is done.
The other interesting thing is that the screen on which the questions are displayed to the players is quite small. On TV, you see a grid of what looks like five tiny TV screens under each category. The questions actually appear on those little screens, so make sure you bring your glasses. (Happily, you're somewhat closer to the game board than it looks on TV, and the video clues are played on a larger screen off to the side.)
From Laura's perspective, playing on the set was a lot like playing at home. She didn't find the lights that hot or distracting, and she quickly forgot the audience was watching in the wings. Moreover, the game seems to be over in a blink when you're actually up there. Buzzer frustration aside, Laura actually had a fair bit of fun. Especially when she managed to buzz in and get one right, and it was a real rush to get several right in a row!
Sitting in the audience, I think Laura did better than I would have. I found her questions either rather difficult or just outside the realm of things I know. I definitely would not have known the Final Jeopardy.
When the taping is done, you're thanked, given more forms to sign, consoled, and shooed off the set. Laura and I stayed to watch Al Davis win again, then left.
At first, Laura was devastated. Oddly, it was mostly about the money rather than her performance. Jeopardy does not pay any of your costs to come down. Aside from a special rate at the Radisson Culver City, and some swag afterward, you get nothing whatsoever from the show except prize money and either $2000 for second place or $1000 for third (minus taxes). She hoped to win enough for some house repairs and a holiday, and instead, we were at a net loss.
Still, it was $1000 toward a California vacation, so we hung out in the sun, went to Venice and prowled around LA a little. We also ran into other contestants in the hotel lobby. There was a quick-bonding community and Laura's wished she hadn't been knocked out so early in the day, so that she could go to the commissary and spend more time with them.
Jeopardy also warns you not to reveal the results and not to profit from the show. Not telling anyone about the results was very strange, but doable. However, she'd had a contract in place to write an article for Ottawa City, which we reprint. And we'd seen plenty of other people getting writing gigs based on their experience. So we ran the legal gauntlet and they were quite accommodating. Helped defray the expenses a bit, too.
When the show finally aired, on May 17, we drove down to Toronto to watch the show with Laura's family. Added bonus: they own a truly massive high-definition TV.
Even though I'd literally watched the show as it was taped, it was a huge thrill to watch it on TV and to see Laura actually there on the screen, just like the thousands of other contestants I'd seen over the years.
And when the show finally aired, all the things that Laura was embarrassed about never occurred to anybody. Nobody thought it was terrible that she couldn't master the buzzers or that she couldn't remember who Peyton Randolph is. Instead, she got congratulatory calls and e-mails. Everybody is impressed and amazed that a Canadian, an Ottawa girl yet, had the gumption to go down to LA, try out and get on, something that lots of people want to do, but which few actually manage.
In other words, when you go on, you have nothing to fear but the fear of making a fool of yourself.
Shortly after we got home from the taping, somebody won seven games in a row, setting new Jeopardy records in the process. He blogged the experience, and I took some comfort from the fact that he beat up himself over the question he missed. In today's Jeopardy, everybody loses eventually, and nobody is ever happy about it.
To help assure her some more, at a pub game I run, the week before the show I surprised Laura by including five of the questions from her show in the game: one that she got, one that she knew but couldn't ring in fast enough for, one that nobody got, the Daily Double she missed and the Final Jeopardy she got. I showed her afterward that she knew three of the five, and of the teams that were playing, only one team managed to get as many. It was morale-boosting, and also very funny, as far as practical jokes go, since nobody knew what I was up to until they saw the show themselves.
With the passage of time, she looks back on it fondly now. It was, after all, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As for me, I'm due in LA later this summer. And I'm trying out again. Now that Laura has run the minefield ahead of me, I plan on grabbing the flag myself and seeing how far I can take it.