Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Battle of the Decades: 2000s, Wednesday

OK, the day has finally arrived!  Before getting into today's matchup, a little bit about last night's game.  It was one of those games where great players and great people are playing and you want all three of them to win!  Of course, that isn't possible in a tournament.  Stephanie (Go Valpo!) jumped out ahead early and was dominating the buzzer, with Vijay also playing well, but we saw how Roger rolls and he worked his way back into a big lead.  The final clue was relatively easy compared to most of the others in the Battle of the Decades thus far, though I wasn't really sure how we were supposed to know for sure whether it was Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  (It turns out that Stanton died a few years earlier.)  Another very well-played and exciting game by all!

So my fellow competitors are Tom Kavanaugh and Larissa Kelly.  Tom was one of several "super-champs" in the era just after Ken Jennings' run, winning 8 games in 2006.  He is also hilarious...he was keeping the whole group cracked up during the taping of the promos and the shows.  Listen carefully for his "chit-chat" story with Alex.  It's very likely that they'll edit out the key part of it, but if not, it'll be, shall we say, memorable.  He also took what is almost certainly the best contestant photo with Alex ever.

Larissa was a buzz-saw in her original run, winning over $222K in six wins (that's an average of over $37K per game!) She finished second in the ToC in 2009.  She and her husband run a company that writes questions for quiz competitions -- there can't be many other vocations that prepare you so well for being a great Jeopardy! player!  Not that there's anyone you really "want" to play against in a tournament with such great players across the board, but I didn't really want to have to play against Larissa.

The local paper did a fun article and video on my appearance, which can be found here: http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20140401/ENTERTAINMENT/304010072/CSU-professor-Jeopardy-third-time

For the chit-chat at the commercial break, they give Alex a card with a few different possible topics.  The contestants get to choose which one they prefer and they highlight it for him, but he's Alex and he can do whatever he wants.  I offered them a couple stories that I thought were pretty good, which they put on the card along with the "spam" story, and Alex said right before the interview "Russ, I'm going to go with the Monty Python one".  There wasn't any time to protest.  So it's basically exactly the same story I told in one of my ToC games.  So, despite that, enjoy the show!  (And the grammar-challenged tweet below.)

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