Being on Jeopardy! was something I’ve always wanted to do. Ever since I was in grade school, playing on my school’s trivia teams (in Canada they’re called “W5H,” as in who, what, where, when, why, how, or “Reach for the Top,” after an old CBC TV show), one of the ways I absorbed trivia and ordered information in my head was I would think about how this new fact I’d encountered would be phrased as a Jeopardy! question or category, in case I was ever on the show. It was also pretty useful for remembering things for tests and stuff.

I’d never actually thought I’d be on the show, but after living in LA for a while, one day I met viral sensation Louis Virtel (the Jeopardy! snapdragon) in a bar, and it occurred to me that, hey, this is something I could do since I live here. So, one January afternoon, I decided to look up how one becomes a contestant.

It turns out, they do an online test once a year and the test happened to be the next day. The quiz is 50 questions where you have ten seconds to type your response to each question. They don’t tell you how you do (though I’m pretty sure I got 46/50, based on the questions I remembered guessing on), just that you might hear from them sometime in the next 18 months.

Around April, I got an invitation to an in-person audition, which consisted of another 50-question test (on paper, in person, so they know you didn’t cheat), and then an on-camera mini-game, where I guess they wanted to test that you don’t freeze on camera (or blow up when your buzzer’s not working…) I was on my best behavior in the audition. I didn’t even complain when the producers accepted an incorrect answer from one of my mock competitors – *ahem*, “immigrate” is not an eight-letter word meaning to leave your country and move to another one! I think I got 45/50 on the in-person test, but again, they don’t tell you your score.

They tell you that if you passed you’ll be put in a contestant pool for 18 months, and if you didn’t pass, you won’t hear from them again. I later found out 80,000 people took the online test; of them, 8,000 passed; of them, 4,000 were offered auditions (I assume the ones who weren’t were people who were disqualified for other reasons or for geographic balance); and of those, only about 400 are offered spots on the show, there being about 200 regular shows per season and two new contestants per show. The odds of being selected for the show are therefore about 0.5%.

I got the call in June for a taping in July. Because I live in LA, I was called in as an alternate, meaning I only had a 50% chance of taping on my day, and if I didn’t get on, I would be called back very shortly and guaranteed a spot. They later explained that FCC rules require them to have an element of randomness in all aspects of the game, including contestant selection. In each game, the two new contestants are chosen at random from the contestants there that day. So, even though they only need ten contestants and a returning champion to film five episodes in a day, they actually call in eleven or twelve so that the players in the fifth game aren’t automatically determined by elimination after the other four games’ contestants are arranged. Alternates are used for the final game, and two players out of three or four are called.

I was actually hoping I wouldn’t be called on that day. At the time, I was working on a film set, and for the previous two weeks, I had been working fifteen-hour days and underslept with little time to study or prep. I didn’t even have clean, ironed clothes for the game! I told the producers when I arrived that if the other alternate wanted to play I was happy to let him and come back another day. They explained that they couldn’t do it. I was still banking on not playing because I was absolutely exhausted. During taping, I even nodded off in the middle of game four, despite having three cups of coffee, three cans of coke, and some weird Starbucks energy drink at lunch.

The first thing you do at the studio is record your “hometown howdie,” which is a mini-commercial they air for contestants in certain markets, and that you can share on social media. I’m in a different shirt because this one was moiré-ing, but they didn’t have time for me to go change it. Here’s mine:

Kyle Jones, the returning champion was a really nice guy. He’s the first person I met at the studio that day, in the parking lot waiting for producers to take us to set. I was just so excited he was a three-game winner already. Of course, at the time, I thought it was unlikely I was going to end up actually playing him, so it was a little easier to root for him! He is a fantastic player, and watching him romp his way through four games certainly did not put me in a confident mood when the producer came up to me after game four and announced that I was going to be playing next.

I honestly went into the game just hoping I didn’t come in third, and at least made it competitive. Me fighting with the buzzer in the first half of the Jeopardy round was also me saying to myself “C’mon Rob, you’re embarrassing yourself!”

What was happening was that I was buzzing too early, which locks you out for ¼ second. I got into a better rhythm during the commercial break when they retested the buzzers (they do this at every commercial break, not just when it appears one of the contestants is having a hissy fit) and one of the producers came over and told me to try waiting to see the lights at the side of the question board that indicate that the buzzers are open. Also, having Alex joke that my one correct answer put me in second place helped put me back at ease. I was really afraid I’d finish the game with zero dollars and never buzzing in!

Once you’re on the set, about 90% of the game is this timing. Most of the time, all three contestants know the answer (we all took the same placement test, after all), and there’s no real advantage to figuring it out first as long as you all know the answer by the end of the clue.

By the way, the first commercial break is also where they take your podium picture and your two-shot with Alex Trebek, who never, ever smiles. Honestly, I’ve met dozens of contestants on Facebook and he’s making the same face in all of our pics.

I really happened to luck out with the categories in the Double Jeopardy round. I wish I had said True Daily Double on the DD’s. But again, even though I knew the categories very well, I was so scared I’d just hand Kyle another victory by fumbling there.

If you don’t mind the plug, one of the reasons I did so well in “Countries Under 1 Million People” is because for the last few years I’ve been learning a lot about small countries by maintaining the @LGBTmarriage twitter feed, where I post news about same-sex marriage laws and LGBT rights around the world. For the record: Andorra has civil unions, San Marino is debating a civil union bill, Suriname and Djibouti have no recognition of LGBT couples, and Bhutan criminalizes gay sex.

Also, “It’s a Biblical Thing” is a tricky category, because the writers like to find really obscure stuff for Bible questions, but they were all fairly basic.

There were some clues that were just gifts. I was really happy to have a Marvel Comics question come up.

And this clue from “Lines from the TV Comedy” is literally my favorite joke from Friends and I think of it at least once weekly. It’s just such a perfect clever/dumb Chandler joke!

BTW, the reason I avoided the Senators category was because I didn’t realize that “115th Congress” was the current Congress until after taping. I still did pretty well, given I’ve only lived in this country two years! It was a lucky break that none of the Senators were terribly obscure. If you listen close, you can actually hear me climax a little bit after I said “Collins” to bring me over the top to a runaway. (It was already a runaway, but if Kyle got to it first, or if I’d guessed wrong, it would have been different).

Going into Final Jeopardy, my brain had basically shutdown. Trying to figure out my wager felt like doing sudoku right after sex. I literally did the math six times on scrap paper because I didn’t trust myself to not fuck up the wager and lose. The funny thing is, while the clue stumped all three of us, I had actually been looking at the Wikipedia page for “turquoise” just a few weeks previous, when I fell down a wiki-hole about gemstones. I think in my head I think of turquoise as green, not blue. Alex came over during the credits sequence to tell us that he thought the question was far too easy for Final Jeopardy and wanted the writers to change it and was disappointed in all of us for missing it. Oh well. I still went home the Champion.

Going back in for Monday’s taping was weird. I had five days off between my shows, and they were five days I walked around thinking of myself as the Jeopardy! Champion. Five days of imagining myself going on a multi-day streak, maybe even beating Ken Jennings’ record. Five days of earning and spending hundreds of thousands of imaginary dollars. Five days of planning a week’s worth of dumb podium bits I was gonna do during my contestant intro. You thought my dramatic turn was dumb? You should’ve seen what I had planned for Tuesday!

Incidentally, I didn’t do anything weird at the podium on the Friday show because the middle contestant’s intro is pre-taped so that the camera can use that time to swing from contestant three to the returning champ.

I arrived at the taping and met the week’s contestants. It’s weird being introduced as the Jeopardy! Champion because the other contestants suddenly look at you with this weird mixed expression that’s a cross between “I’m so amazed and impressed” and “I’m going to take you down!” I didn’t expect this because when I met Kyle the previous week I thought it was so unlikely we’d play each other. I barely got to know any of the week’s contestants, because I wasn’t recording a hometown howdy with them, and, being in the first game, I didn’t get to sit and watch a game with them or do lunch like I did with the last week’s contestants. I briefly met two other Canadian women and another gay dude. One of the Canadians has already had her shows air, and she pulled off two big wins!

The game was rough. The categories and clues were, I think, particularly obscure. I joked before the show that if there was a “shit that only I know” category it would be comic book trivia, so when the first round had a “Words from Comics” category I was pumped! Then it turned out they were all Depression-era comic strips. (I am happy that I got the “V For Vendetta” clue, so at least there was one comic book answer!).

“Company Car” – well, anyone who knows me knows I can only recognize cars by color and number of doors. I think I even put the buzzer down at one point here.

I hated the Galapagos video category because it ate up so much time in the game, which left us with $10,000 still on the board at the end of Double Jeopardy. I really wish the producers had let us know that if a sponsored category like that comes up, we have to get through it before the first round can end. Also, what you don’t know at home is that the video clues get played on a 36” screen that’s about 30 feet away from you. The images are not always super clear or easy to make out. I shouldn’t have guessed on that final clue (still my only wrong answer in a regular round of play!) – what happened there was that I could barely make out the photo (those plants are really small and distant in the video they used, and the screen is really far away). It looked like moss, and I was focusing so hard on the video I wasn’t listening to the clue. Whoops.

Basically, my buzzer game was Friday in reverse – I was really strong in the pre-commercial round (I answered 7/14 clues) but then only buzzed in 5 more times in the whole game. That of course made it much less likely that I’d find the Daily Doubles. I have to admit though, the fact that Nancy and Will beat me to the buzzer saved me a few times where they guessed the same wrong answer I would have, so, again, who knows? (If you look at the stats, Will and I have the same number of correct minus incorrect answers, 11; Nancy’s score was 10. Our relative performance overall wasn’t terrible, but they did better in the more important second round).

I have a few other regrets game-play wise. I suck at wordplay categories, but “alpinist” and “latinate” were on the tip of my tongue.

The Final Jeopardy category was insane. “British Monarchy.” Now, I had a list of things I wanted to study before the show, and the list of past British monarchs was literally the next thing on the list I didn’t get to. Like, I was memorizing the list of British PMs in the parking lot before the taping, and just decided to stop and go in. I figured I was done for, so I may as well wager everything. I wrote in the bet and hit the “enter” key and immediately realized what I should’ve done was bet zero. I called over a producer and asked if I could change it, since there were still several minutes before we got back from break. She said “sorry, you already hit enter. We can’t do anything.” (The producers had explained this very clearly before taping, I was just checking to see if it was really the case).

When the clue popped up, it took me a second to realize that the longest serving Prince of Wales would have been Queen Victoria’s son. I knew the kings alternated Edwards and Georges until Elizabeth II, but I didn’t know how many of them there were in between. I knew Edward VIII abdicated in the 30s. Eventually, I decided that there must’ve been four kings before Edward VIII, so it would have been two Edwards back, making the answer Edward VI. Given a few more seconds of thought, I would have realized four kings in 30 years is too many, and would’ve landed at the correct answer, Edward VII, but what are you gonna do? It’s an incredibly stressful moment!

Will and Nancy both played great. I’ll also be cheering for Kyle in the Tournament of Champions later this year, if only so I can brag that I’m the only one who’s beaten him. j/k, mostly.

The past two weeks have been amazing. I’ve loved all of your reactions to my posts on social media, and the messages I’ve been getting from friends and strangers. The other Jeopardy! players I met in the studio and on Facebook this week have all been great. This whole experience has given me stories I’ll be telling for the rest of my life – so friends, be prepared.

I guess the moral of this whole story is follow your dreams! Do all the crazy things you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting off! If it seems impossible, Google it and you might get your opportunity the very next day!

For now, I’ll leave you with this: