Sophia Maymudes can tell you which goddess’s apple started the Trojan War. She can tell you where to find the island of Komodo, who won a Tony for playing Billie Holiday, and what to call Georg Steller’s namesake marine mammal. And she can tell you all these things in a few seconds flat in front of millions of TV viewers. That’s what she did when she was a contestant on Jeopardy! on Oct. 23.
Maymudes, a Seattle-based software engineer for Google and crossword constructor for both the New York Times and the Provincetown Independent, grew up spending summers with family in Wellfleet, where her aunt, artist Susan Anthony, lives. She still visits every year.
Collecting facts is something Maymudes has always enjoyed. She finds bar trivia competitions satisfying: she likes the feeling of “Oh, I know this thing — now it’s actually useful!” she says. Plus, she admits, she really likes winning. When one of her friends asked why she decided to go on TV, “Well, I’m a competitive nerd,” was her answer. “What else am I going to do?”
Jeopardy! is a game show with very simple rules. Three people compete to buzz in and answer a series of 60 questions, each with a dollar value attached. A correct answer adds that number to a contestant’s score, and an incorrect answer subtracts it. If you get a “Daily Double” question, you can wager some or all of your total (before you see the question, of course). In the end, after one last Final Jeopardy question, whoever has the highest score keeps those winnings, while second and third place get $3,000 and $2,000 respectively.
The show, with its fast pace and tough questions, has a massive following — the New York Times reported last year that about 9 million people watch on any given weeknight. Maymudes is no superfan, she says, but she has always been a “casual watcher.”
So, one evening last February, she gave the Jeopardy! “Anytime Test” a shot. This online quiz barrages you with questions for which you have to type the answers within 15 seconds. She did well enough to be selected for a follow-up, where she and a few dozen other would-be competitors take a quiz while being proctored over Zoom. She did well.
This was followed up with a mock game in June, with a proctor to ensure contestants understood how the show works and could perform well on air. Again, Maymudes did well. She was told she would be put in a pool of possible contestants for the next two years. If you’re not selected in that time, you’re removed from the pool and have to start the process over if you want to try again.
Maymudes assumed it would be a long time before she was selected. But just two months after that mock game, she got the call: she’d be going on Jeopardy! in four weeks.
How do you study for a test when the subject encompasses pretty much everything? Her first thought was to make a list of the categories she didn’t know much about: opera, bodies of water, Christianity, poetry. She started combing through a massive Jeopardy! question archive to find common ones she might not know the answers to, then made flash cards of them.
But Maymudes says the best advice she found was in a Washington Post interview with James Holzhauer, the third-highest-winning contestant in the show’s history. He had studied by reading kids’ encyclopedias. She checked out a whole bunch of books like the DK Eyewitness series, aimed at upper-level elementary school students, from the library to study. “They give you real facts, but really high-level stuff,” she says.
When the day finally came, Maymudes flew with her parents to Los Angeles. At the studio, she met her fellow competitors: Will Wallace, a game design director from Austin, and Brett Kelly, an actor best known for playing the Santa-believing child Thurman Merman in the 2003 movie Bad Santa.
Being in the studio was “surreal,” Maymudes says, but going into the game she wasn’t too nervous about being on TV. She had just two goals: “I wanted to have money at the end of the Double Jeopardy round” — which would allow her to participate in the final question — “and I wanted to not go viral on Twitter.” The latter would be likely to happen only if she made a blooper.
As the first round started, Wallace took an early lead, but by halfway through, Maymudes was making progress. She got a question about Inigo Montoya’s line in the 1987 film The Princess Bride and a question about the Biblical figure Lot (the only answer Maymudes says she knew because of her studying), and she had a five-question streak in a category called “Be Witched.” By the end of the first round, she was in the lead with $3,400 to Wallace’s $3,000 and Kelly’s negative $600.
For Maymudes, the most challenging part of the game was keeping so many things straight in her head. Besides just reading and listening to each question, you have to think about what category it’s in and how difficult it’s likely to be, all while trying to hit the buzzer at the exact moment that host Ken Jennings finishes the question. “If you buzz in too early, you get locked out,” she says. “If you buzz in too late, someone else will come in and get it.”
Going into the Double Jeopardy round, Maymudes was where she wanted to be, until she missed one question, which left her tied with Wallace. Then Wallace began racking up points. Maymudes ended the round with $2,800, while Wallace had $10,800 and Kelly had $0. This meant Maymudes and Wallace progressed to Final Jeopardy: one question, everyone answers, wager as much as you want.
The question, about which day is sometimes considered the “birthday” of the Catholic Church, was one neither of them knew (what is the Pentecost?). In the end, Maymudes placed second, and took home $3,000. After the show, Jennings informed her that despite coming in second she’d actually answered the most questions correctly, a result that she’s pleased with.
Maymudes isn’t sure what she’ll do with her winnings. “Maybe I’ll take a trip somewhere,” she says.
As for her two goals, she succeeded in making it to the Double Jeopardy round but she failed at not going viral. It happened in the best possible way: the official Jeopardy! social media clip of her five-question streak has amassed 396,000 views. “I did not expect to have a semi-viral TikTok after this,” she says.
