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El Cerrito resident ends 6-game Jeopardy streak
Larissa Kelly of El Cerrito finally lost on Jeopardy May 28, but only after winning six games, qualifying for the Tournament of Champions, and breaking records. She won $222,597 over the course of the six games.
Alex Trebek announced during the May 28 game that she was the first woman to win more than five games. She is also the highest-money-winning woman and the third highest overall money winner. (All of these records exclude tournament play.)
She is a fourth-year graduate student (she took a two-year break) in the UC Berkeley History Department, concentrating on 19th-century Mexico. She played Quiz Bowl at Berkeley (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~quizbowl/) from 2002-2003. She and her husband moved to El Cerrito in 2002, when they started graduate school at Berkeley.
Her husband, Jeff Hoppes, was on the show in 2004 but was up against long-running champ Ken Jennings. "He did very well," Kelly writes in an email interview, "but unfortunately it was hard to compete against someone with Jennings' level of skill and experience on the buzzer."
The game is archived at http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=47. Jeff is also a graduate student in the UC Berkeley History Department, and is writing his dissertation on the experiences of soldiers during the English Civil War.
Kelly's sister Arianna was on earlier this season and Kelly says she also had a strong game. (Her show is at http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2304 .) Arianna is finishing up her third year at Harvard Law School, and will start work this fall as an assistant district attorney in Boston.
"My sister and my husband both told me that they wished they had bet bigger on Daily Doubles during their games, so I tried to wager aggressively when I had the chance.
"I think the main advice I would have for future contestants is to practice playing past games at www.j-archive.com, and to not look too much at the scores while playing, unless you need to make a wager. The questions come so fast that looking up and keeping track of how you're doing can be very distracting."
She adds, "There is a HUGE amount of randomness involved in Jeopardy - most contestants will know the answers to most of the questions, so it really comes down to fractions of a second in buzzer timing, on who has the luck to stumble across the Daily Doubles and on the various odd pieces of information that you or your opponents may have happened to pick up over the years. I was lucky in my games that those factors mostly broke my way, but things definitely could have turned out very differently."
Kelly says being on Jeopardy was a great experience.
"All of the production staff were wonderful, and it was a lot of fun to meet the other contestants. It was also very cool just to be on the stage, and to see it as a real place rather than just a television setting. I think the most surprising thing was how high the podiums were. I, and a lot of other female contestants, ended up standing on boxes so we'd all appear to be about the same height behind them."
Kelly said they keep contestants pretty carefully separated from host Alex Trebek, to avoid the possibly that off-camera interactions might influence the outcome of a game, but she enjoyed meeting the other players.
"The other contestants were neat people, who came from all over the country and were involved in lots of different things. It was definitely cool to meet people like Sara, the Egyptologist who played in (the May 23) game, and Heather, an amazingly knowledgeable woman from North Carolina who will play in (the May 26) game."
Kelly said she and her husband plan to give some of the money to charity, and save the rest until they're ready to buy a house.
The shows that aired the week of May 19 were taped on Feb. 19, and the shows that will air the week of May 26 were taped on Feb. 20.
Run dates: 2008-05-23 - 2008-06-23 |
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