Wrapping It Up

How it ended and where it's going.

(This is the second and final part of my Jeopardy! saga. Part 1 is here.)

After a six-week taping hiatus I returned to Culver City on June 1, my nerves shot from the anticipation. I got in fairly late that night; when you’re the returning champ Sony pays for your flight, and the options were:

• Fly Southwest, arrive around 4:00 p.m., with a stop in Houston; or

• Fly Delta, arrive 9:00 p.m., nonstop.

Arriving earlier would have been nice, but flying Southwest is such a miserable experience nowadays that I took the Delta nonstop.

I got to bed in the hotel around 11:00 and slept pretty well, all things considered. The next morning I was at the Sony lot bright and early. The spot where contestants rendezvous in the mornings is surprisingly dismal: Keke, the delightful security guard, sets up a rectangle of chairs in a corner of the parking garage next to an easel sign reading JEOPARDY CONTESTANTS HERE. Cars come into the garage and drive by, Sony employees going to work. Everyone goes through a metal detector, just in case, and then you all sit and chat nervously, trying to figure out who the returning champ is, who they hope they won’t have to play.

Once most of us had arrived, someone finally asked, “So who is the returning champ?” I grinned and raised my hand. They asked how many games I’d won, and when I said eleven I’m pretty sure I heard someone mutter, “fuck.”

What strikes me now about those parking-garage chats is how nervous everyone was, and what great pals we’d all become later.

We headed to the green room, same rigmarole as before. You’ve (maybe) seen the day’s important events on TV: I won one more game, then lost one by not knowing Leon Uris’s novel Exodus. (I have been called many things online for this gap in my knowledge, up to and including a “covert neo-Nazi.” If you were surprised that I didn’t know it, this would be a great time to keep that to yourself.)

What you didn’t see on TV is what happened the next day. The tape day was a Tuesday, and on Wednesdays there is a pub-quiz trivia night at O’Brien’s, a bar in Santa Monica. O’Brien’s trivia night is legendarily difficult, and plenty of Jeopardy alumni are known to compete there. I’d been once before, with my sister and her husband, and we had a great time coming in last. So on our tape day, before we all went out there to play Jeopardy! I briefly took the floor, told everyone a little bit about trivia night, and said I would be there and would love it if any or all of the others would be there. The reaction was muted—I worried I’d violated some invisible social cue, but in retrospect I think everyone was just nervous.

Long story short: At least ten of us ended up at O’Brien’s. When we first arrived, Game 1 of the NBA finals was on TV and the place was packed with crowds watching the Knicks grind out a win. Then trivia started. There were enough of us that we had to split up into multiple teams, and we had an absolute blast. My team was in 10th place at the halftime break, and finished in 6th, which is an extremely respectable showing. I really think the outing to O’Brien’s cemented the friendships in that green room group. I’m in chat groups from all four of my tape days, but the first and last are the most active.

After the quiz I summoned an Uber back to my hotel. I was slightly loaded, and I just punched the first recognized address that popped up in the Uber app. The driver and I were chatting as we tooled along, and when he said “OK, here we are” I looked up to see the entrance to the Sony lot, which was locked up and fully dark at 11pm or whatever it was. I apologized for being a dope, we set a new destination, and off we went. So getting back to my hotel that night cost me about $50. (I still wonder: Was he going to just drop me off there in the dark? Maybe.)

It sounds a bit treacly I know, but truly, the best thing about the Jeopardy! experience has been the great new friends I’ve made.

No, just kidding. Winning 12 games, taking home $306,000, and getting an invitation to the Tournament of Champions is the best part. The friends are great, though.

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I’ve been trying to put my Jeopardy! streak into perspective.

• Twelve wins ties me for 17th most all-time, alongside (among others) Austin Rogers, my favorite player to watch who isn’t named Ken Jennings.

• NFL Network ranks Barry Sanders (highlight reel) the 17th-best NFL player of all time, which REALLY blew my mind. I’m the Barry Sanders of Jeopardy! Or… Barry Sanders was the Adam Remsen of football.

• More people have achieved the EGOT than have won 12 games of Jeopardy!.

• I’m one of 51 players in the “300 Club,” people with 300 or more correct responses on Jeopardy!.

• Turns out a win streak is a credential that opens doors. I’ve emailed a literary agent and found there’s interest in a book, which I’m working on now. I also sold about 700 copies of my self-published novel after I mentioned it during one of the interviews.

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One more observation. After the game I lost, I sat in the audience to watch one more, and I couldn’t help thinking, “I would have won this game.” It’s tempting to think of a Jeopardy! streak like a playoff run, where the games get harder as you go, but outside of a tournament setting, it’s not like that. With different clues, I could have beaten Richard Nguyen (to whom I lost) and continued my streak. Or my first game could have gone differently, and I’d be at home with a good story about the time I lost my one and only game.

Nancy Zerg, who ended Ken Jennings’s 74-game streak, lost the very next game. The game is a bit like poker, in the sense that there are things you can do to improve your odds, but there will always be a huge amount of plain dumb luck involved. That’s probably what’s so enchanting about it.