Here is Part One of Two of my interview with 4-time Jeopardy! champ and 2010 Tournament of Champions quarterfinalist Ryan Chaffee. Thanks, Ryan! (Below, a picture of him with his dad the night before his original shows taped.)
Jeanie: I read on j-archive that you watched Jeopardy! every day with your dad when you were a kid. I love that! I too took the teen test in Kansas City, when I was 16.
Ryan: Yeah, Jeopardy! remains a significant geographical-distance-diminishing source of bonding for my dad and me. We’ve both been pretty impressed by the performance Roger Craig has been putting on lately. I had forgotten until a family friend reminded me a few months ago, but in addition to the time when my dad drove me from Minnesota to Kansas City for the teen test, I took the teen test a second time a year or two later at the Mall of America. How was your Kansas City teen test experience?
J: I, too, got “destroyed” by the test, as you put it on j-archive. Of course they don’t tell you how you did on the test, but that’s sure how it felt. Not very many people passed. It was over so quickly. I remember they called someone’s name that sounded vaguely like mine, so my mom and I made sure it wasn’t me. Of course, it wasn’t.
I love your attitude about wagering nothing in Final Jeopardy as opposed to wagering as much as you can without jeopardizing your win. It always comes across to me as greedy when I’ve seen people do that. I’ve intended to do like you did when I’m on the show someday.
R: I wish you all the luck there is, Jeanie. Where are you at in the getting-on-the-show process?
J: I take the test every time I’m eligible, so I last took the online version in January this year. I didn’t hear from them, so I’ll take it again this coming January.
Do you think being a tutor helped you on the show? How long have you been a tutor? (I didn’t know before preparing for this interview that you studied English at Yale!)
R: I have been a tutor since 2003, which was when I got laid off by the independent record label I was working for in New York and moved to Los Angeles and collected glorious unemployment insurance until it ran out and I had to go on craigslist to find a job and applied to work for a tutoring company (revolutionprep.com) that was just starting up and thereby stumbled upon my dream job. I absolutely love the work. My job is to learn about things and try to help other people understand them. And being a tutor totally helped me on Jeopardy!, particularly with the history material. But being a hardcore Jeopardy! fan was pretty key also, because whenever I come across information while tutoring that commonly appears on the show, I know to add a special mind-asterisk to it because, “Hey, that’s Jeopardy! stuff!”
J: That’s almost like studying for Jeopardy! for a living! How many people (friends/family) are you allowed to bring to watch you on the show?
R: I believe they tell you that you can bring up to six guests. The thing about the Jeopardy! people, though, is that they are the nicest human beings on Earth, so if you ask whether you can bring more people, they totally accommodate you. I brought nine guests to my first tape date, and it was absolutely no problem
(though the person you call to tell your guest list to will make a mock-annoyed “Oh, I’ve heard about you. Trying to make trouble for me, eh?” joke).
J: I read that you had read Bob Harris’ book and Ken Jennings’ books before you appeared on Jeopardy! for the first time. Did you study specifically for the show before you found out you were going to be on? Did you study for Jeopardy! between your regular episodes and the Tournament of Champions?
R: I pretty much consider my entire life to have been just one, extended Jeopardy! study session. And in addition to watching and playing along with Jeopardy! since forever, I have been playing bar trivia for years (my team, Mr. No Poster Shop, is currently the reigning Los Angeles citywide champion –
dreambuildersmm.com – depending, that is, on whether or not you consider that organization to be the definitive crowner of the best team in Los Angeles, which my team for obvious reasons does). I did not begin intensive preparations using j-archive.com until i got the call to be on the show, and then I got pretty obsessive about it, just playing through game after game after game. I also bought and consumed Chuck Forrest’s awesome Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions book. Sadly, in my final regular game I was unable to pull up the response to the “NOBEL LAUREATES IN LITERATURE” clue “1932: ‘For his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in “The Forsyte Saga,”‘” which is definitely covered in the Chuck Forrest book. But there were a bunch of things from that book that I did manage to remember on my road to winning valuable cash and prizes. My friend and fellow Jeopardy! obsessive Boomie is currently in the
contestant pool and is studying pretty intensely pre-getting-the-call. He’s making flash cards for god’s sake! I didn’t even know they still had those. And in answer to your second question: Yes, I studied pretty hardcore between my regular episodes and the Tournament of Champions. Fat lot of good that did me! Possibly the most painful studying-related twist of fate was that prior to the tournament I read the book An Incomplete Education and didn’t really pay much attention to the sort of tongue-in-cheek chapter devoted entirely to carriages (titled “Carriages: Wheels of Fortune”) because I thought no way I might have to know this in the tournament… and of course, what should I see appear as one of the categories in the Double Jeopardy! round of my Tournament of Champions game? That’s right: “CARRIAGES.”
J: Did you watch your regular episodes before you appeared on the Tournament of Champions?
R: Yes. One of my friends hosted a viewing party for my first game on a Friday in December in Los Angeles, and I watched the remaining four games the next week while home for the holidays with my family in Minnesota. Then, for the next two months, I cheered for all the three-game champions to lose, lose, lose! I found out I qualified for the Tournament of Champions at the end of February, and it was filmed in March.