Jeopardy!'s returning to GSN

[heisman65]

Love having new shows to play over the summer, especially with my audition coming up. I wonder, though, if anyone else if having troubles using their PVR remote as a buzzer. On the new shows, I can pause it, give my response, and when I unpause it I can clearly hear the contestant's answer. With the GSN shows, after I unpause it, I completely miss the response, and I have to rewind to hear it. I wonder if they've edited the shows differently for GSN, or if that was the way they edited the show back in the day. Not that I'm complaining, it's just kinda annoying and messes with my flow.

Also, does anyone else find these Season 22 shows much harder than today's shows?

[thejeopardyfan]

heisman65: My question for *you* is: You still have an audition coming up? As for difficulty, my Coryat for the Sunday show was 13000, which is scary low for me. I had an equally scary 7 negs, though. My Saturday Coryat was 22800.

[heisman65]

Yeah, I know, the auditions are running kinda late this year. Mine's a week tomorrow in Seattle. My Coryats are usually right around $30,000-$31,000 and my score Sunday was $24,600 (didn't finish Saturday's game due to a PVR malfunction, but I found that one to be tough, too). I remember the first go-round with this season on GSN and how hard it was, but I figured 18 months later it might be easier. Not yet, at least.

[Rex Kramer]

Also, does anyone else find these Season 22 shows much harder than today's shows?

Absolutely!

Rex

[Volante]

Also, does anyone else find these Season 22 shows much harder than today's shows?

Absolutely!

Rex

I dunno, I didn't score them but outside of those really oddball categories (Hair? Really?) the questions weren't harder than I'm used to seeing. Maybe it was the stacked obscurity of things like...well...hair.

[Rex Kramer]

Also, does anyone else find these Season 22 shows much harder than today's shows?

Absolutely!

Rex

I dunno, I didn't score them but outside of those really oddball categories (Hair? Really?) the questions weren't harder than I'm used to seeing. Maybe it was the stacked obscurity of things like...well...hair.

Easy for you to say from the safety of your living room couch. You're weren't there . . . you never heard the knees knocking behind the podium . . . smelled the reek of brain cells frying under the constant onslaught . . . watched the guy next to you spiral down in flames, knowing that it could have been you . . . and that someday, yeah, it would be you . . . You sit all secure on your La-Z-Boy recliner with a full stomach and a beer and watch a sanitized, commercialized product, and you dare to tell me that the questions weren't harder? Tell that to George Zip.

Rex

[jepkid97]

Absolutely!

Rex

I dunno, I didn't score them but outside of those really oddball categories (Hair? Really?) the questions weren't harder than I'm used to seeing. Maybe it was the stacked obscurity of things like...well...hair.

Easy for you to say from the safety of your living room couch. You're weren't there . . . you never heard the knees knocking behind the podium . . . smelled the reek of brain cells frying under the constant onslaught . . . watched the guy next to you spiral down in flames, knowing that it could have been you . . . and that someday, yeah, it would be you . . . You sit all secure on your La-Z-Boy recliner with a full stomach and a beer and watch a sanitized, commercialized product, and you dare to tell me that the questions weren't harder? Tell that to George Zip.

Rex

I'm scared.

[heisman65]

OK, having read Rex Kramer's bio on another thread I think I'm understanding his posting a lot better (and I think I'm getting the gist of his humor, too). My question to you, Mr. Kramer, is, OK it was harder "under the lights," understood, but do you still play J! and can you see a difference in the difficulty of material from then to now? Also, any advice to a hopeful contestant?

A belated congrats on your impressive run. I look forward to seeing you in action some weekend in the near future.

[Volante]

OK, having read Rex Kramer's bio on another thread I think I'm understanding his posting a lot better (and I think I'm getting the gist of his humor, too). My question to you, Mr. Kramer, is, OK it was harder "under the lights," understood, but do you still play J! and can you see a difference in the difficulty of material from then to now? Also, any advice to a hopeful contestant?

(Yeah, I had to dig up the name...once I saw the ref, I remembered the context a bit more, but I'm still scared...)

[Rex Kramer]

OK, having read Rex Kramer's bio on another thread I think I'm understanding his posting a lot better (and I think I'm getting the gist of his humor, too). My question to you, Mr. Kramer, is, OK it was harder "under the lights," understood, but do you still play J! and can you see a difference in the difficulty of material from then to now? Also, any advice to a hopeful contestant?

A belated congrats on your impressive run. I look forward to seeing you in action some weekend in the near future.

Anyone who implies that I have a sense of humor gets a personal response from me!

My impression of most of Season 22 -- and I believe this impression was shared by a number of Boardies at the time -- was that the clues were generally a couple of notches harder than previous seasons and following seasons. My fuzzy recollection is that we speculated that this was a reaction to the long runs of Ken Jennings and David Madden, perhaps a purposeful attempt to lessen the significance of buzzer skill on game outcome, though of course there was no way to confirm this. In any case, they seemed to back off by the end of the season.

When I play off the TV now, I do think the clues seem easier than they used to be, but in fairness that could just be because I know more.

As for advice:

1) Develop habits that help you learn a little bit about the world every day -- reading newspapers, magazines, or websites, listening to NPR, watching the National Geographic channel, etc. . . . and make a point of attending to things you wouldn't reflexively examine. So, for example, if you don't follow sports, make a point of reading the sports pages once a week. It's not asking much of yourself, and eventually you will develop enough of a context that these things will actually start to seem interesting to you.
2) Build off context -- it's much easier to learn things attached to what you already know. So if you're a movie junkie, for example, go ahead and memorize the major Academy Award winners year by year -- you probably know more than half of them anyway, and filling the gaps will be relatively easy. Of course, if you do #1 in conjunction with #2, what will happen over time is you will develop more and more context about more and more different things and then lay the groundwork for filling in your holes deliberately.
3) Figure out what you don't know, and whether it's important. Go through a couple of dozen old games in the J!Archive and figure out where you get things right and wrong, and how often such subjects tend to come up. Sometimes we confuse "like" with "know", and don't realize that we don't actually know much about a category we enjoy seeing, or that we know a lot about a category we don't. Also, you may discover, say, that you're not very good with poetry, but that it doesn't come up all that often, so you'd be better off learning more about another area -- say, classical music -- even though you feel you are already decent in that area.
4) Remember that the tryout is really an audition -- once you pass the online test and score an invite, your trivia skills are the least important assets to display. At the tryout, you want to show that you will look and sound good on TV, lively and presentable and amiable and interesting, so think about the anecdotes you'd want to tell, dress well, be outgoing, and most important of all, follow any instructions you are given instantly. If the contestant coordinator has to tell you twice at the audition to speak up, or slow down, or whatever, she is going to assume you would be similarly uncooperative on stage, during the course of a stressful, rushed taping day, and your chances of being picked will drop.

Good luck!

Rex

[heisman65]

Thanks, Rex, great tips. I actually have used certain key presidents that I know (Lincoln 16, Madison 7, JFK 35) to figure out the ones in-between. And that theory about KJ and David Madden crossed my mind more than once when I was cursing the screen for what seemed like arcane bits of knowledge after arcane bits of knowledge. Not that I don't love learning, don't get me wrong, but Catherine the Great's husband? Really? Czars of Russia is one of those areas you mentioned where I have pretty much narrowed it down to Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Nicholas II. I'm thinking I don't have to add Peter III to that list.

Thanks again!

[Volante]

Thanks, Rex, great tips. I actually have used certain key presidents that I know (Lincoln 16, Madison 7, JFK 35) to figure out the ones in-between.

(Might want to double check that list... Madison 4, Jackson 7)

[heisman65]

Ooops! Good catch — thanks, volante! Jackson is a blind spot for me, for some reason. Back to the books …

[Woof]

(Might want to double check that list... Madison 4, Jackson 7)

I thought that it was Jackson 5!

[bomtr]

(Might want to double check that list... Madison 4, Jackson 7)

I thought that it was Jackson 5!

plus Latoya and Janet...?

[seaborgium]

(Might want to double check that list... Madison 4, Jackson 7)

I thought that it was Jackson 5!

plus Latoya and Janet...?

I smell a new mnemonic!

[Woof]

(Might want to double check that list... Madison 4, Jackson 7)

I thought that it was Jackson 5!

plus Latoya and Janet...?

Well played, sir!

[thejeopardyfan]

Maria Wenglinsky's first episode aired today!

[jeff6286]

Maria Wenglinsky's first episode aired today!

If no one wants to be spoiled to 5-year old Jeopardy results, then look away...

It's pretty crazy how things work out sometimes. Maria went on to win over $120,000, and just missed out on making the Tournament of Champions final, but she shouldn't have even made it past her first show. Joey Bland made a very poor wager, going all-in from second place, and allowing Maria to win her first game with just $6,000 after both missed this Final Jeopardy! in the category of 20th Century Republicans:

Never president, he was the youngest man ever to receive the Republican presidential nomination.

Spoiler: show

Who is Thomas Dewey? Joey said Barry Goldwater, who was 55 in 1964, (Not even close, says Alex), and Maria said Wendell Wilkie, who was 48 in 1940. Dewey was just 42 in 1944. I guess Dewey was "before their time".

[chuck5982]

Maria Wenglinsky's first episode aired today!

Her second episode aired today, her third and fourth games air Labor Day Weekend, and her fifth game and the first game of that season's College Championship the next weekend.