Buzzer beater

Can Ken Jennings keep his 'Jeopardy!' streak going? A local contestant has the answer

By Joe McCauley

Ken Jennings, the human buzzsaw who cut down all the mere mortals he faced last season on TV's "Jeopardy!" game show, is no fluke, according to Liese Tamburrino, who competed against him on his 36th straight winning episode that aired in July.

"Jeopardy!" begins its 21st season Monday, with the clean-cut, 30-year-old software engineer from Salt Lake City trying to extend his streak of 38 consecutive episode wins--and increase his record $1,321,660 in winnings. The record streak for a game show is 46.

Tamburrino and her husband, Bob, call Jennings "amazing," not only for his breadth of knowledge--of things sometimes so arcane that it intimidates his competitors--but because he knows how to work the game better than the other contestants. It starts with Jennings' ability to "get in" first.

"People who go on that show all say, `It's the buzzer,'" Liese says. "And I thought, oh, c'mon, how can it be the buzzer? But it's the buzzer. One of the things that makes Ken Jennings a master is that he's a master with that thing."

Many viewers don't realize that the buzzer, the handheld device that contestants activate to indicate they want to answer a question, is operable only when "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek stops reading a question. If a contestant buzzes in before Trebek stops reading, they're locked out. Contestants who buzz prematurely all let off so they can try again, but they can't get in. Jennings knows just when to buzz, and he buzzes for almost every question.

"All of the people who go on that show know the answers. It's the game, the `getting in' first," that makes or breaks contestants, says Bob. "And many times Jennings gets in first, and he really hasn't thought about the question, and is not sure what the answer is; he just gets in, and then he has eight seconds to drag it up. He's a bright guy, and he's got a pile of information in his head, but think about that--he first concentrates on being the first guy in."

Bob says that from where he and friends Sheila Loftus and Pat O'Malley sat watching Liese onstage, away from the main audience and slightly behind the contestants, they could see the contestants "frantically" working their buzzers. The live studio audience isn't able to see much of the buzzer action, and the TV audience at home doesn't see it at all, because at the same time Trebek is reading a question, it is being shown full-screen to viewers.

"The only unfortunate part of what Liese experienced," Bob says, "was she got up against this machine. He's amazing to watch. We three sat in the audience and we just kept looking at each other like, `Is no one else in the game?'"

Bob and Liese say they've wondered if Jennings has Trebek's speaking rhythms and cadences down to a T, helping him to know when to buzz. Regardless, once in, Jennings' quick, nimble mind takes over.

The Tamburrinos also suspect that Jennings' success on "Jeopardy!" has maybe been "years in the making"; that he's been boning up a long time for it, and when "Jeopardy!" changed its rules, permitting winners to keep going until they get beat, Jennings saw his chance. Liese thinks Jennings may have harbored a lifelong ambition to be on "Jeopardy!" much as she did--except that at some point Jennings took his ambition much more seriously.

"Every person who has ever watched that game faithfully," Liese says, "has thought to themselves, `You know, I'm smarter than he or she is.' Then you get there, and the pressure is immense. You can see it in the faces of all those other people. All those other people who are there think they're smarter than you are."

Simply getting on "Jeopardy!" is grueling. Liese applied online at the "Jeopardy!" website. Easy enough. Then she was notified to audition in Las Vegas, where she had to pass a difficult 50-question exam. In the end, she was one of only 13 accepted from the more than 80 people who showed up. That was in February. Producers gave her no guarantees that she'd appear on the show, and if she did, they told her it might be as long as a year away.

But only two weeks later they called her. "Jeopardy!" taped her show on March 17, and Liese believes she got on the show so quickly because of Jennings, who was blowing the competition away.

Liese and Bob moved to Pahrump from Chicago, and suddenly found themselves only half a day's drive from Los Angeles and the "Jeopardy!" studio. Initially, Liese says she wanted Bob to go on the show. He encouraged her to do it. A neighbor, Sheila Loftus, bought a "Jeopardy!" board game, on sale, clearance priced, and the last one available at the Pahrump Wal-Mart, for $10. Sheila, Pat, Bob and Liese started playing the game. Then they got to the real thing.

"I had the very last clue of the game before Final Jeopardy," Liese says, "and it happened to be the Daily Double. I think Ken had approximately $24,000 and I had $6,500. So if I doubled my $6,500, I would have $13,000, and if I got Final Jeopardy right it would have forced Ken to make a bigger bet.

"With all the people who will see this, you hope that you will acquit yourself well," Liese says. "You don't want to make a fool of yourself. So my brother, apparently when he saw me bet it all, he yelled, `That a girl!' and that made me feel good."

But Liese missed the question, and Art Borgemenke, from El Paso, finished the game against Jennings. At one point in the broadcast, as Jennings was running the board, Art answered, "Really?" when Trebek told him he had buzzed in first.

Liese and Bob describe Jennings as "aloof," possibly because of the situation that he now finds himself in--he's simply the guy to beat. But that's not going to happen, they say, predicting that Jennings will keep right on winning this season. "We've seen Ken get a run for his money, and he just comes roaring back," Liese says.

"What struck me about Ken were his eyes," says O'Malley, a retired homicide detective from Tacoma, Wash. "He was really there. He bores in. There's nothing going on around him. He's totally focused.

"I worked in the Tacoma school district after I retired," says O'Malley, "and he's so focused it's almost autistic what he can do, the way he can dredge things up. If he's nervous, he doesn't show it. Nothing on the set intimidates him. He's got that buzzer down pat. He knows he can come up with the answers. He's got a leg up on anyone who walks onto that show, such a leg up that I'm not sure that that guy can be beat."

"When he gets pushed into a corner," says Bob, "when he gets behind, he just grabs a category that he knows and he just goes right through it. He's amazing. What I'm wondering is, what are they going to do. `Jeopardy!' has said, `This guy plays till he loses.' Are we going to be watching Ken Jennings in 2008? Because the more he plays, the more difficult it is to beat him."