Chair of Economics Ron Cheung was recently invited to compete in the Jeopardy! Season 39 Champions Wildcard. After cementing his champion status in December 2022, Cheung participated in the two-week Tournament of Champions that had 26 other former champions compete for the spot.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you end up competing in Jeopardy!? Is there an application process?
I first appeared on Jeopardy! in December of 2022, and that was a situation where I did apply and then audition for the game show. I never thought I would actually be applying for Jeopardy!, to be honest. I had done some trivia. I was on the trivia team in high school, but that was many years ago, and I’ve always been really interested in games and puzzles and trivia and so on. But I never thought that I would be Jeopardy! material. While I was traveling on sabbatical though, my wife suggested that I could go ahead and try to take the test and apply to be on the show. So I took the annual Anytime Test that Jeopardy! has. And then from there, it led to another test, which led to an audition. And then I got the call to appear on the show in October of 2022. After I won that game, I became a one-day champ. And I thought that was it. I thought that was the end of my Jeopardy! career because nobody gets re-invited back if you’ve only just won one game. But then middle of 2023, the producers made this very surprising announcement that they were instituting a new tournament called the Champions Wildcard, where they would invite people who had won like one or two games to come back and compete for a slot in the Tournament of Champions, which is the marquee competition of the year. So I got that chance and got flown back out to Los Angeles in January of this year to compete with 26 other DTE champs for a slot in the Tournament of Champions, and I made it as far as the semifinals.
What skills do you need to be successful at Jeopardy!?
I think there’s two things that I tried to focus on as I was preparing to come back onto the show. Number one, by far, was I knew I needed to work on my hand-eye coordination with the buzzer. The buzzer is, I think most Jeopardy! contestants would say, the most frustrating thing that they had to deal with because at home you could just shout out your answer, but when you’re actually playing on the set, you have a buzzer. And the buzzer is a race against the other two contestants. And many people don’t know this, but you can’t buzz in too early. So there is a bank of lights, which are around the game board, which the home audience doesn’t see, but we do, and only after the host reads the entire question does that bank of lights turn on. And that’s your cue to buzz in. And if you buzz in even a split second too early, your buzzer gets locked out for a quarter of a second. So what I found out from playing the game was that I was generally anticipating the buzzer, and so I would come in too early and that would frustrate my attempt to get in, and so I knew that I had to practice the buzzer technique.
The second thing that I would try to do was general reading, mostly Wikipedia articles or introductory textbooks on certain topics that I felt less familiar with. For instance, I tried to read books on art, classical music, and literature. The problem with that, though, is that Jeopardy! doesn’t tell you what kind of categories or questions will be on the show. So it’s a matter of luck whether or not you read the right types of books. I found that trying to study for a particular topic wasn’t always very productive because there’s no guarantee you’d study the right thing, and there’s no guarantee that you could recall it on the stage.
Do you think you’ve gained any valuable skills from Jeopardy!?
I don’t know if practicing for Jeopardy! made me a better teacher. But I do feel like students have enjoyed talking to me about it. So it’s a good way to break the ice when I come into a classroom. And a few students did ask me about the show the first day of class. It created a nice kind of friendly environment, and we were able to chat about my silly answers or my wrong answers. I hope that it just becomes a nice conversation starter.
Are there any other competitions you can apply for after Jeopardy!?
Not with Jeopardy! for sure. I recall that the initial time I appeared and signed something, one of the things I signed was saying that I have never been a contestant before. So when I appeared for the first time and then I won one game, and then they sent me home after I lost the second game, I never thought I would ever be back to Los Angeles again for this show. So the fact that they instituted this very new Champions Wildcard competition was a complete surprise. It was a real pleasant shock, not just for me, but for all my fellow contestants. It was a real unexpected treat to be able to go back. I felt that the general vibe when talking with the other contestants was that everybody was just so delighted just to be able to play this again. It was much more of a relaxing, fun, and less stress-inducing environment than the first time I was on.
What would you say to students interested in Jeopardy!?
Well, I would just invite your readers to check out that Anytime Test. I mean, if they go to jeopardy.com they can take that test once a year. It’s a timed 50-question test. They don’t tell you how you did. And you may never be contacted, but you never know. I mean, I felt really lucky to have been contacted after taking that test. And it just progressed from there. I know Oberlin is full of really smart Jeopardy!-worthy contestants and I hope that we will be able to see some more students apply and be on the show.
