That Time I Tried Out for Jeopardy
Alissa Grosso
Ron and I have a nightly tradition. We play as a team the online trivia game Thrice. If you’ve never played this I encourage you to check it out. It tends to be pretty challenging. Each day there are five answers. There’s a total of three clues/questions for each answer. If you correctly get the answer on the first clue you get three points, on the second clue you get two points and if you get it on the third clue you get one point. If you manage to fail completely to guess it then you get a big fat X and zero points. Some days are trickier than others. I’ve set the goal of 11 for us. If we get 11 points I feel like we’re doing pretty good. The most we’ve gotten is 13 (at least when I initially wrote this, but read the postscript for an exciting update) and the worst, I’m embarrassed to admit, is 4. Did I mention that it can be very challenging?
Ron likes to keep things interesting (read: struggles with punctuality and keeping track of time) so that we have an added time crunch challenge. The Thrice game resets to the next day’s clues at precisely midnight eastern time. We usually end up playing around 11ish, but sometimes it’s more like 11:50-something. There are times when we haven’t been able to finish before the game reset, and at least one time I fell asleep as we were in the middle of our game. Of the two of us, I am not the night owl.
Thrice and other trivia games makes me think of Jeopardy! Like many Americans I used to regularly watch the game show. It used to be that once a year at a set date and time the Jeopardy! online test would be offered. It works a little differently now. I used to regularly take the Jeopardy! online test. After taking the test in 2012, I was invited to come for an in-person audition in New York City.
As it happens the NYC audition was the same week as BEA (BookExpo America) which at that time was at the Javits Center, and I happened to be there anyway to do some promo for my recently released book Ferocity Summer. So, the timing worked out well for me. I took a break from my book promo stuff to head to the audition in a lower level of a midtown hotel where the prospective contestants had their headshots taken with a polaroid camera and were given an official Jeopardy! pen. I still have the pen somewhere.
To prepare for the audition I tried to study up on my weakest categories: geography and opera. I made flash cards for myself with every country and its capital as well as popular operas and their composers. I must not have been the only one who had this idea, because as I was waiting for the auditions to open I overhead a mother there quizzing her twenty-something daughter on country capitals. In case you were wondering, in the intervening twelve years I have largely forgotten most of the countries and capitals.
Ron helped me to prepare for the physical portion of the Jeopardy! experience by building me a buzzer complete with light bulbs. His grandmother was still alive then and living in the basement of this house at that time, and I have fond memories of Ron and I, his parents and his grandmother watching Jeopardy! in the basement while I buzzed in to answer the clues.
Alas, despite all my preparation, I never made it onto Jeopardy! To be honest, I don’t think I’m quite smart enough to be Jeopardy! material. The show has never said what you need to score on the online test to make it onto the show, but according to the rumors on the forums you need to get a minimum of 35 of the 50 test questions correct to make it on. You don’t receive a score after taking the online test (at least you never used to, that might have changed too), but after taking the once a year test you used to be able to go on social media sites or forums and find someone who posted all the clues and answers after the fact and work out what you had scored. That’s how I know I pretty consistently scored in the low 30s on the online test. Probably that one time I made to to the audition I got lucky with some clues and managed to get 35 or more correct.
There were two parts to the in-person audition. First we had to take another test, this one on paper. Then each of us there did a mock round of the game, playing for just a short bit along with two other contestants. They let us know that even if we scored well enough on the test, that was no guarantee that we would make it on the show, but if we did we could hear from them anytime in the next 12 months. Well, as you can guess I never did hear from the show, and my best guess is that on that paper test I scored below the 35 minimum threshold.
I took the online test again for several years after that, though it’s been years since I’ve taken it. I had fun at the audition, but Jeopardy! is tough and this old girl doesn’t have the reflexes of the younger generations, so I don’t really think it’s in my destiny to be on Jeopardy!
So for now, I’ll stick to our daily games of Thrice and the Page-A-Day Jeopardy! calendar that Ron buys me every Christmas.
— Alissa
P.S. I wrote the first draft of this post on Monday afternoon, and late that night Ron and I played our usual game of Thrice, when something miraculous happened. We earned a perfect score. We were showered with digital confetti, and I had to take a screenshot to mark the momentous occasion.
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: Model Home by Rivers Solomon
What I’m Watching: Quiz Lady
What I’m Listening to: “A Change is Gonna Come” by Bernie Bomba
Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com
Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com
My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
My sister-in-law was on Jeopardy! It was fun to watch her on TV. I think she came in second.
They've really been plugging "take the test" lately, so I think they are eager for new contestants.
My husband and I agree we are probably a little past our prime to be contestants, as we are clueless about most of the pop culture categories--we have no idea who most of the current singers and actors are. Also, I think the buzzer would be my undoing.
Enjoyed your foray into the Jeopardy scene. A friend who lives in Columbus was on the show, she’s an attorney -not practicing - and I believe she came away with a few thousand dollars. I thought she did well. Just making the cut is difficult. Love your slice of life essays. Thx.