HOW TO WIN ON JEOPARDY

You don't need to learn everything. You need to learn one thing about everything.

- DREW GOINS

When you wake up on the day of your first appearance on America’s favorite quiz show, you will have more knots in your stomach than a quipu, the tied-string recordkeeping device used during the Inca empire. You will take a nervous walk through beautiful, weatherless Culver City, California, where the title song of Singin’ in the Rain was shot during a water shortage. Perhaps you will stop for a $14 juice at the boutique grocery store Erewhon, telling yourself that you have to spend money to make money. From the entrance of the Sony Pictures lot, you will be conveyed to the “check-in area” in the back of a dim parking garage; you will wonder whether this is actually some sort of hostage situation that is going to end with you at the bottom of a tar pit or, worse, on Wheel of Fortune.

And when you walk into the greenroom for contestants, you will see a door in the corner labeled JEOPARDY! CHAMPION, and you will be consumed by one thought, which I will phrase in the form of a question: How do I get in there?

IN 2024, I competed on Jeopardy for the first time. In 1653, Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler, a treatise on fishing technique. These two events are related, actually.

No one loves The Compleat Angler more than Jeopardy does, and I am counting Izaak Walton himself; the show has asked about his book 35 times. If you want to appear on Jeopardy—and if you also want to win—it is important to know what Jeopardy likes.

The mild Mexican salsa whose name translates to “beak of the rooster” is pico de gallo. Jeopardy likes this.

Another popular fact is that Lucy Hayes, wife of Rutherford B., was the first first lady to host the Easter-egg roll on the White House lawn. You don’t know anything else about Lucy Hayes, and you don't need to. Like Nebraska's Platte River—44 mentions on the show—Jeopardy is a mile wide and an inch deep.

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