‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Speaks Out About Controversial Daily Double Decision: ‘No Regrets’

Brendan Liaw/Instagram

Jeopardy! champion Brendan Liaw suffered what one fan called an “absolutely brutal” Daily Double loss, but he isn’t rueing his misfortune. Much.

In the episode airing Friday, May 23, Jeopardy! judges decreed that Liaw said “Girl with the Pearl Earring” instead of “Girl With a Pearl Earring” in a Daily Double question about the 2003 film in which Colin Firth played the artist Johannes Vermeer.

Liaw had bet all of his $8,200 on that Daily Double, so he dropped to zero, and by the end of the Double Jeopardy! round, he was in the red and therefore ineligible to join the Final Jeopardy! round. And thus Liaw’s three-game winning streak ended.

@ctvnews Since he was a little boy, Brendan Liaw has wanted to be a contestant on Jeopardy! “Very early on, I realized that I was getting quite a few of the answers,” said Liaw. “And so it quickly became a lifelong goal.” He was a member of a trivia team in high school, and has a knack for memorizing information. After two 50-question online tests, a mock game and an interview, the 27-year-old from Richmond was chosen to be a Jeopardy! contestant. He flew to Los Angeles and taped his first episode on March 17. Liaw has a master’s degree from UBC, but thought that description sounded boring. So, when it came time to talk to host Ken Jennings, he discussed the title he chose for himself on the show: stay-at-home son. “I figure, you know, if I lose, I might as well make some people laugh,” said Liaw. “I think it’s good to be fun and not just, you know, serious trivia guy. So that was my reasoning behind the title.” #ctvnews #news #canada ♬ original sound – CTVNews

In a Reddit comment about the episode, Liaw jokingly blamed his loss on Conan O’Brien, whom he’d hailed in the contestant Q&A segment of Friday’s episode, which he apparently filmed back in March.

“So you know how in theatre they call Macbeth the ‘Scottish play’? I’m starting to think Conan should be called the ‘Irish host’ on TV,” Liaw wrote. “[I] invoked his name on St. Patrick’s Day and immediately got the curse of the Irish/whatever the opposite of the ‘gift of gab’ is.”

Liaw said that the “fatigue hit” during that game, in which he had “lots of near misses … and kept forgetting category names.” He also commended his “super knowledgeable” competitors, David Crockett, a congressional liaison from Washington, D.C., and Jim Carpenter, a retired music professor and conductor from Charlotte, Vermont.

“Jim and David were lightning on the buzzer, especially on those music and law clues,” Liaw wrote.

As for that Girl with a Peal Earring Daily Double? “No regrets at all about the DD wager,” Liaw said. “I promised myself I’d play to win and not to play to not lose. That’s what I did — I went out [with] guns blazing.”

Liaw added that he hopes he makes the Tournament of Champions outright, but he acknowledged that Season 41 has had “quite a few” champions with winning streaks of four days or more, and the season isn’t even over yet.

“I’ll at least be back for something though, whether [Champions Wildcard] or [Tournament of Champions]! It was a dream come true to even win one let alone three games, and the three wins were not too shabby performance-wise,” he wrote. “Thanks to all my competitors this week — I feel we were a pretty strong group overall, and everyone was lovely and interesting and smart. Thanks to everyone who cheered me on, and I’m eternally grateful I got to grace your screens for the past four days.”

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