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Jeopardy! fans seem to like a good challenge, and they think the show might have lowered its standards.
Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions came to an end on Thursday, February 13, with Neilesh Vinjamuri crowned as the winner. Fans of the game show, who expected the Invitational Tournament to start right after Champions, were surprised to find that a special episode aired instead.
Three contestants (Adriana Harmeyer, Isaac Hirsch, and Drew Basile) faced off against each other in an Exhibition Game during the special episode, which had originally aired on TuneIn Radio on January 24. Host Ken Jennings explained that the game played in the episode is like a rehearsal for Tournament of Champions.
“This is a chance for these three contestants to play 61 clues, so everyone has a level playing field going into the finals,” Jennings, 50, told the participants, who had secured a spot in the semifinals but didn’t get a chance to compete in the quarterfinals.
Some of the fans watching the special episode thought that the questions the champions were being asked were not the right difficulty level and were way too easy for that stage of the competition.
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One clue under the “Sounds Like an Actor’s Name” category read, “Sounds like a Batman: 3-letter term meaning to prohibit + a company with a duck symbol.” The answer was Ben Affleck, who played Batman and whose last name sounds like Aflac, the insurance company that has a duck as its mascot.
Viewers complained that the categories in the episode were too easy. One was “Vice Presidents,” and another was “Newspaper Terms.” One asked contestants to name the lead singer of a band with backup singers, which read, “Give Me Some Backups.”
The category of the Final Jeopardy round of the episode was revealed to be “Mythology,” with a clue that read, “On an early book of Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s maps, an image of this titan holding the world was used.”
All three contestants got the question right, and despite it being an exhibition game with results that don’t count, fans of the show took to the Jeopardy! subreddit to share their thoughts about the easy categories and clues.
“The clues for this exhibition seemed easier than usual, especially FJ,” wrote one user, while a second added, “A 6th grader could have answered Final Jeopardy. What a joke.”
A third simply noted, “You all do realize that this was just a mock game, right? The questions were easy on purpose.”
Jeopardy! fans can expect to see the Invitational Tournament on Monday, February 17.
