UTOC: Onward and upward

So, now you know. And if you don't know, you can go find out here, then come right back.



That was a difficult game, far more difficult than a quick glance at the final scoring summary might suggest. Rachael Schwartz is an outstanding player. Rachael was one of the folks in my returnees group I least wanted to face, because (a) she's a former Tournament of Champions winner, so she's beaten some fine players before; (b) she competed in the Million Dollar Masters tournament just a couple of years ago, so her most recent live Jeopardy! experience was much nearer in the past than mine; and (c) she was inscrutable in the green room before taping started, so I had no real sense of her as a person. The devil you can read is always better than the devil you can't, in Jeopardy! as in poker.

On the other hand, it was a rather typical game for me.

• I was beaten to the buzzer a fair amount — there's a wholly different timing (later, not earlier) to the lockout mechanism now than I'd been accustomed to in my previous appearances, so I sometimes struggled to ring in at the appropriate time. (Hopefully, now that I know the rhythm, I'll be better prepared in Round Two. Hopefully.)
  
• I made one of my usual stupid errors that will have me kicking myself for weeks — the "What is Baghdad?" response ("What is Kabul?" was the correct answer) was simply a matter of my not reading the question closely. (D'oh!)
  
• I experienced some serendipity — the "Who is Tchaikovsky?" answer on the first-round Daily Double was a sheer gut-level hipshot, then I drew a Daily Double in the second round that was ridiculously easy ("What is quartz?").
  
• And Rachael made a couple of key mistakes from which I benefited, both because of the score and because they frustrated her just enough to disrupt her timing. It happens. It's happened to me, most notably in my Super Jeopardy! game.

It's interesting to watch the game unfold on TV, because it whizzes by so fast when the cameras are rolling and adrenaline has the blood thundering in your ears. There are always moments on the tape that I don't recall happening, or that I recall differently from the reality.

I feel badly for John Genova. I liked him very much from the short time I had to get to know him, and I'm certain he would have liked to have made a more representative showing.

Believe it or don't, but I feel badly for Rachael, too. I had the sense, especially afterward, that she felt she had a lot of honor to uphold. Of all of the competitors who didn't win their matches, she seemed to take the loss the hardest. But as I told her, Melissa Seal, and Leslie Frates as we were waiting for our rides back to the hotel, just by being invited to participate in the UTOC, we're members of an exclusive club with only 145 members on a planet of 6.5 billion. Not many people will have that kind of distinction in an entire lifetime. Rachael played a whale of a game, and on another day, with another set of categories on the board, the outcome might very well have been reversed. (As it was, she got in with more correct questions than I did, as the game summary at J! Archive shows.)

Big fun. I can appreciate it better with the remove of an audience member than I could as a participant. It's always that way.

I'm looking forward to Round Two. I'll let you know when I can. The invitations won't go out until the first round finishes taping, and that's at least a couple of weeks away.