Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [93]
Craig would tilt strongly toward Mars. In his first game, he held a slender lead when he landed on a Daily Double in the category Elemental Clues. The previous clues in the group all featured symbols for elements in the periodic table. Craig didn’t know all hundred and eight of them, but as a scientist he was confident that he’d know any that would be featured on Jeopardy. He said he was “95 percent sure” that he’d come up with the right answer, so he bet almost all of his money, $12,500. It turned out to be the largest bet since one placed by Ken Jennings six years earlier. The clue was “PD. A great place to hear music.” For the scientist, it was a cinch. “Palladium,” Craig said, recalling his golden moment. “Boom. Twenty-four thousand dollars.”
That was when he made what he called his rookie mistake, one he was convinced Watson would avoid. His palladium clue was the first Daily Double of the two in Double Jeopardy. Another one lurked somewhere on the board, and he forgot about it. For the leader in Jeopardy, Daily Doubles represent danger, for they can lift a trailing player back into contention. So a leader who controls the board, as he did, should hunt down the remaining Daily Double. They tend to be in higher-dollar rows, where the clues are more difficult. Craig seemed to be on the verge of winning in a romp. With only seconds left in the round, he led his closest competitor, a medievalist from Los Angeles named Scott Wells, by a commanding $33,600 to $11,800. But he lost control of the board with a $400 clue: “On May 9, 1921, this ‘letter-perfect’ airline opened its first passenger office in Amsterdam.” Wells beat him to the buzzer and correctly answered “What is KLM?” Then, as time ran out, he proceeded to land on the second Daily Double. Craig was mortified. “I thought I’d die,” he said. Wells bet $10,000, which would put him well within striking distance in Final Jeopardy. The clue: “In 1939 this Russian took the 1st flight of a practical, single-rotor helicopter, & why not? He built the thing!” Craig survived his blunder when Wells failed to come up with “Who is Igor Sikorsky?”
As he left the Culver City studios after his first day on Jeopardy, Craig was experiencing a host of human sensations. First, he was euphoric. He had amassed $197,801, a five-game record. As he headed out for a bite with the fellow players he had befriended, he felt a little embarrassed. Here he was, swimming in money, and thanks to him, every one of them had crashed and burned on their once-in-a-lifetime chance to win at Jeopardy. Between breakfast and dinner, he had doused the dreams of ten players. Many of them had prepared for years, even decades, watching the show religiously, reading almanacs, studying flash cards, wowing friends and relatives, and envisioning that they’d be the next Ken Jennings—or at the very least stick around for a few games. Now they were heading home with a loser’s pay of $1,000 or $2,000, barely enough for the plane ticket. Craig, on the other hand, might turn out to be the next superstar. It was at least a possibility. Ken Jennings had never won as much in a match or a single (five-match) day. No one had. That night, in his room at the Radisson Hotel in Culver City (which offered limo service to the Sony lot), he tossed and turned. The next morning, while a Jeopardy staffer was applying makeup to the new champion’s face, Craig found himself yawning. This was worrisome. The night before his magical five-game run, he recalled, he had slept soundly for nine hours. Now, he didn’t feel nearly as good.
Still, Craig blitzed though his first game. His crucial clue was another jumbo bet—$12,000, this time—on a Daily Double, in which he identified “small masses of lymphoid tissue in the nasopharynx” (“What are adenoids?”). He chalked up another $34,399 and appeared to be off and running.
But the next match