He needs no introduction!
Q: Your wife was shown in the audience one day. How did you meet her? Does she aspire to be on the show? Do you have any kids?
A: We met at Swarthmore College. She was actually the president of our weird little nerdy science-fiction/fantasy club (“SWIL”, Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature, an acronym that really tells you all you need to know about it). I was the club’s resident gadfly and troublemaker. We had a tumultuous love-hate relationship that eventually blossomed into romance.
She has told me repeatedly that she doesn’t understand how I can put myself in the public eye so readily and that she’s the kind of nerd who flees attention. She did say that she’d probably rather be on Wheel of Fortune than Jeopardy, because Wheel of Fortune has much more of a random component so she wouldn’t feel so personally judged if she screwed up. Also, Wheel doesn’t do “returning champions” so the steadily building pressure and attention from doing well on the show couldn’t ever happen, which she sees as a good thing about Wheel (just as I see it as a bad thing).
We do not yet have any kids. Since the cash windfall from Jeopardy removes a lot of the financial barriers to our having kids, the “Maybe-we-should-maybe-we-shouldn’t” conversations have gotten way more intense lately. (I described it this way to a reporter who misquoted me as saying that we “intensely want” kids, which was a lot of fun when my mother-in-law got hold of that article.)
Q: How many times did you try out? Someone wants me to ask: At your audition, what did you say you’d do with Jeopardy! winnings?
A: I’ve auditioned for the show twice. The first time I made it to the in-person audition but was never called; that was when I lived in LA (so I got to audition right in Culver City). After my time in the contestant pool expired I took the online test again, passed again, got called to the in-person audition and this time dressed a little better than the first time and tried to prepare for it more like an acting audition. I must’ve done something right because I got The Call, and the rest is history.
(Fun story: The second audition required me to drive to Baltimore from my then-home in Alexandria, VA right on the day we had to move out of our apartment. My wife was not pleased when I told her I couldn’t be around to help her move because I had to drive to Baltimore to try to be on Jeopardy. In retrospect, I think she’s glad I did it.)
I really do not remember any answers I gave to the “contestant interviews” in the audition. I think I must’ve said something like what I said on the show, about taking a trip to China and Taiwan, to see relatives and to see tourist sights I’ve never gotten a chance to see and bring my wife with me.
That is something I genuinely intend to do, but it’s something that at the time I kind of came up with on the spot because I hadn’t made serious plans for what to do with any winnings — that’s counting your chickens before they hatch. And the primary answer to that question, which I think is the smart answer, is also a boring answer — stick it all in safe investments to speed up saving for retirement.
Q: Did you watch from the audience after you lost?
A: No. I was pretty much utterly exhausted and dead on my feet after that loss, and it was lunchtime, and my wife pretty much insisted we go out for a nice meal and just chill out before flying back to Ohio. You can tell on TV how strung out I was after two consecutive days of playing Jeopardy — I have mad respect for Dave Madden and Ken Jennings for lasting as long as they did.
Fun fact: We chose the restaurant to eat at after my loss because my mom happened to have a buy-one-get-one coupon for it, even though I’d just won $300,000. Cheap habits die hard.
Even though I missed the games on that afternoon of taping I was “spoiled” for the fact that Diana succumbed to the Giant-Killer’s Curse of losing the next game because I totally by chance ran into her mom and her best friend at the airport on the way back home. They were really cool and really friendly, and we talked at length about what an experience the taping had been and they talked about how heightened their emotional conflict was when they realized the person they were rooting for might be the one to put an end to my run. I already hadn’t harbored any ill will toward Diana for playing well and beating me, but hearing them talk about how excited Diana was to be playing while I was playing and all the behind-the-scenes stuff of how carefully she planned her matchup against me to maximize her chance of beating me really endeared her to me. She did exactly what I’d like to think I’d try to do if I were up against a long-running champ. I’m sad the two of us didn’t get more of a chance to interact directly.
Q: Have you spoken to Diana Peloquin?
A: Honestly? It was such a whirlwind experience — and we weren’t allowed to have our phones or any writing materials while we were in the green room, remember — that I pretty much forgot everyone’s name and contact info after the taping, and have only slowly been rediscovering people on social media as the shows have actually aired.
I did find Diana and friend her on Facebook shortly before our episode aired. I sent her a message asking “Are you ready for what the media is going to do to you on Wednesday?” and she replied “No!” We chatted a little about how crazy the whole media buzz was and I gave her some tips, mainly just pointing her in the direction of Sony’s publicist for Jeopardy as someone who could help her deal with being accosted by reporters if she wasn’t prepared for it.
Here’s a really cool small-world thing I only found out after the show, though. When I lived in the DC area my go-to nerd convention was MAGFest (the Music and Gaming Festival), which is a combination of a video game convention and a rock concert held around New Year’s every year. I actually proposed to my wife at MAGFest, enlisting MAGFest staff and volunteers to help me create a giant fake scavenger hunt for her where the final scavenger hunt “challenge” would lead to me with an engagement ring. (This is a story I repeatedly tried to tell on Jeopardy only to have it be rejected because I think Jeopardy is sick of guys all coming in telling their Cool Proposal Stories.)
It turns out the Director of Logistics for MAGFest is Diana’s brother. He had been shocked to find out that Arthur Chu the Jeopardy Champion was a regular MAGFest attendee, more shocked to find out it was his own sister that beat me, and most shocked of all to find out that I was one and the same as the infamous Guy Who Proposed at MAGFest.
He contacted me on Facebook afterwards and we both talked about how the world is a frighteningly tiny place.
Q: Did you keep track of your Coryats when you were preparing for your original run? Are you doing anything to prepare for the ToC?
A: Yeah, the first thing I did when I got The Call was buy a pair of
rabbit ears so I could actually watch Jeopardy at home, which I hadn’t done for a long time (due to refusing to pay for traditional TV service). People make a lot out of my Forrest Bouncing strategy as the key to my success but I also did do a lot of studying, and I saw my play-at-home Coryat go up steadily in the month before the show.
rabbit ears so I could actually watch Jeopardy at home, which I hadn’t done for a long time (due to refusing to pay for traditional TV service). People make a lot out of my Forrest Bouncing strategy as the key to my success but I also did do a lot of studying, and I saw my play-at-home Coryat go up steadily in the month before the show.
It’s since gone down again because I was honestly so burned out when I came home that I just wanted to relax, spend time with my wife and do other things that interest me — playing video games, acting in theater, etc. — that I’d neglected during my long exile in Trebekistan (to paraphrase Bob Harris).
I really should get back into studying for the upcoming Tournament of Champions soon, though, especially since against all my expectations I’ve actually gained a ton of notoriety as the “Jeopardy Villain” and now have a reputation to uphold. It will be very, very embarrassing for me to get knocked out in the Quarterfinals in the next ToC. I’ll have no choice but to change my name, get plastic surgery and disappear.
Q: Someone has asked, why did you wager it all on a Daily Double and Final Jeopardy in this, your last game?
A: The DD is because I’ve generally had a high DD conversion ratio and honestly most contestants generally do — DDs tend to be in some ways easier than the rest of the board, more commonly written with tease-outs in them, etc. I just happened to brain-fart on a DD that I’d gauge as an unusually hard DD.
I’d had a rough start to the game including giving up a DD to Diana that she successfully converted as a True DD, and True DDing myself seemed the only way to put the game away.
Once I was badly trailing going into FJ, the “right” thing to do would I guess have been to bet conservatively and hope for a Triple Stumper — but honestly I was so strung out and upset by that point I made the “suicide wager” instead because I honestly thought the category was one we were more likely to get right than get wrong. Turns out it didn’t matter what I did because Diana did in fact get the correct answer, so hey.
Q: Is there anything else you want to say?
A: Yes, actually. The reason I wanted to do this Q&A is because while I’ve certainly given lots of shout-outs to the J! Archive, the J! Board, Roger Craig’s games and interviews, Keith Williams’ The Final Wager blog, etc. in preparing for Jeopardy in terms of game strategy, reading your blog was a big part of my preparing for the game emotionally.
I was looking around for any online sources I could find about Jeopardy — the experience of playing Jeopardy, the culture surrounding it, anything I could use to prepare myself emotionally. I found your blog, and after clicking through various entries found your account of what it was like for you to play and lose your episode:
I have to say that it’s one of the most moving things I’ve read on the Internet. It’s certainly the most moving thing I’ve ever read about Jeopardy. The bittersweetness of your experience really came across, the regret, the pain — the way you talked about how strange it felt, as the lifelong Jeopardy fan, to be the one who had to leave the room while your sister watched the show because what had been your greatest dream had become something too painful to relive.
I have to say — and I know this might not be the message you intended readers to take from it — that reading you talking about the pain of losing made me determined not to lose. That aggressive, take-no-prisoners, hyperfocused attitude people saw on TV? People called it “mercenary”, and I’d be disingenuous to claim that winning lots of money wasn’t part of my motivation. But the main thing I was determined to do was NOT LOSE — to not go home with a heavy heart and a mind filled with woulda-coulda-shouldas and if onlys.
I admired how much emotional strength it took for you — as a lifelong fan of the show — to get past it, to treat your loss as a positive experience and to continue being The Jeopardy Fan. I don’t know if I could’ve done that — had my Jeopardy experience been a humiliating defeat in my one and only episode, I might well have been turned off the show for life rather than just for a few weeks, and I knew I wanted to do anything I could to keep that from happening, to be able to say I had won at least one game.
“As for you who dream of winning on Jeopardy!, I plead with you: consider this time your “second” chance. Work. Focus and eliminate distractions. Pray. And bask in the dream itself. You will not get it back, and nothing will replace it.”
That was what was echoing in my head while I was studying. That was why I couldn’t take it easy, why I didn’t relax, why I didn’t just play the game the “normal” way and leave the outcome up to fate, why I took no prisoners — because I was playing as though I’d already lost my first game and then suddenly, miraculously been given another chance. Because reading your post made me feel as though I really had already experienced trying my best and losing, and that my first time was my “second chance”.
So while Keith Williams and Roger Craig and Watson can take credit for the substance of my strategy, reading your blog was the emotional impetus behind my decision to pursue it as doggedly and uncompromisingly as I did. In that sense Jeanie Kenkel, Jeopardy Fan, made Arthur Chu, Jeopardy Champion (or Jeopardy Villain, if you prefer). I felt like that’s something your readers, the Arthur Chu “fanbase” (such as it is) and the world at large deserved to know.
So thanks, and here’s hoping The Jeopardy Fan continues on for many seasons to come.