![]() ![]() This isn’t exactly high-octane television, though. They banter with Alex Trebek and tell stories of life after Jeopardy! And then there are the in-game quips, like “I’ll polish off that category” or “I’ll make it a true Daily Double,” said with a little too much confidence. The contestants are minor celebrities, having stayed relevant on Twitter (#fakeToC2014 is a real thing, and so is live-tweeting a game) and Reddit and the Internet. The tournament itself is like the second season of a reality show. Just look at the Star Wars-inspired picture headlining the tournament: the largest heads are Collins, hands on her cheeks and flashing her perfect teeth, and Chu, boasting a classic “I’m smarter than you” face. Chu, derided by Internet trolls for his use of game theory when bouncing around the board, versus Collins, a traditional player, who looks more like she’s baking a cake when on television. The native of Chicago’s North Shore, known for her sweaters and necklaces and friendly Midwestern persona, slaughtered 40 contestants earlier this year to win $428,100-second only to Ken Jennings (74 games, $2.4 million).įor the 50-year-old quiz show, television’s 30-minute Mensa test with bathroom breaks, this is a wet dream. (While the tournament, a battle of the top players of the last two years, was actually taped over two days at the end of September, the first rule of Jeopardy! is that you keep your mouth shut and not spoil the illusion that things unfold in real-time.) The winner, who will be crowned on television Friday, gets $250,000. Her performance, as many have noted, has been like Michael Jordan’s “Flu Game” in the 1997 NBA Finals. The unemployed 31-year-old advanced to the final round of the Tournament of Champions, where she will play Arthur Chu and Ben Ingram. “I’m certainly not in the mind-set that I need to be locking myself away,” she said before the tournament. (“Hitting the buzzer / OMG I’m the new champ / The best time ever”) She said she spelled her name incorrectly when an audience member asked for an autograph and she just couldn’t remember what haiku she wrote-a getting-to-know-you exercise for contestants on the show-when getting her makeup done. ![]() The processing errors of her mind manifested in a few debilitating ways: Her wagers, written with Jeopardy!’s signature light pen, were messy she was a few milliseconds slow on the buzzer when watching one of her tournament matches on television last week, she had no recollection of answering a Daily Double correctly. “It’s a real bummer,” she told me after the tournament. And instead of studying for the Tournament of Champions, taping in Los Angeles in a few days, she watched How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. She canceled bridesmaid dress shopping and wedding cake tasting with her best friend. Her doctor delivered this factoid and prescribed antibiotics for her illness-which would persist undiagnosed for nearly seven weeks-and told her to sit near a window and do nothing. Twenty-time Jeopardy! champion Julia Collins did not know that the human brain swells when you’re sick. ![]()
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