This summer, one Blue Devil put his aptitude to the test on the national stage.
“The Brahmaputra River runs through three countries from its source to its confluence with this other great river,” host Ken Jennings presented as the Daily Double in a “Jeopardy!” episode that aired July 5.
But at this critical moment in the game, the lights seemed too bright for Duke senior Alex Wang.
“What is the Tigris River?” Wang responded after a moment of hesitation.
“Sorry, no. It’s in India: the Ganges [River],” Jennings revealed.
“I’m really annoyed that I missed the [Daily Double],” Wang wrote in a Reddit post after the episode aired. “Geography is probably my strongest category, and I knew it was the longest river in India. I just had a complete brain fart and forgot that it was the Ganges.”
Despite this fumble, Wang gave an impressive performance during his time on the show. He ended the game in second place, winning $3000 and beating fellow contestant Sarah Crocker but falling behind returner Isaac Hirsch, whose triumph cemented a three-game win streak.
Originally from Harrington Park, New Jersey, Wang studies economics and political science at Duke. He said he has always enjoyed trivia, and he participated on his high school’s quiz bowl team.
Wang felt inspired to apply for the show near the end of his first year on campus after seeing another Duke student compete at the Jeopardy National College Championship in 2022.
He added that he “never really expected to make it on the show” but still proceeded through rounds of auditions and interviews in January and February 2023, which included proctored online rapid-fired tests and mock games designed to showcase the prospective contestants’ personalities.
Over a year later, in late March 2024, he got a call.
“You’re going to go on the show,” Wang heard from the other side of the phone.
The following weeks included an improvised preparation plan, with review sessions sometimes taking place during classes. Wang memorized world capitals alongside other categories and recruited friends to quiz him and test his knowledge.
“I would go on Sporcle during class … if I was bored,” Wang said. “I [studied] U.S. presidents, I looked at rivers … paintings and names and that kind of stuff.”
About a week after wrapping up his final exams, he was on his way to Culver City, California, for a May 15 taping of the show. Wang was the youngest of the 12 contestants waiting in the “green room,” estimating that most were in their 30s or 40s.
While episodes of the show air over the course of a week, Wang explained that all the filming takes place in one day. Starting at around 10:30 or 11 a.m., contestants are randomly selected from the pool of those waiting in the green room to play rounds.
Contestants hung changes of clothes on racks in case they won their Jeopardy round and needed an outfit change, and hair and makeup artists stood by to prepare them for their screen time.
“I’ve never done anything remotely like performance or TV or anything that would have given me that experience to go in a green room with makeup [and] all that,” Wang said. “It was really cool just to see the behind the scenes.”
Wang was selected for the last round of filming that day, going onstage around 4 p.m. after having been in the studio for eight hours already. He said the long waiting period contributed to mental fatigue during his game.
“You feel like you're ready to go [on the] first episode and then they call [a] name and it's not you, and then they keep doing that,” he said. “It does get tiring just watching them tape it.”
Wang noted that he found the game to have a “hard board” overall, with several clues that left all three contestants stumped.
He also struggled with the nuance of the buzzer system, which he knew might present a challenge after reading previous contestants’ testimony comparing its delicacy to the timing of acceleration on a game of Mario Kart. If a contestant presses the buzzer before blue lights illuminate onstage to indicate answers are being accepted, they get locked out from pressing the buzzer again for some time, which allows other contestants to buzz in ahead of them.
“Isaac was insane on the buzzer,” Wang said. “I was getting frustrated at some points just because he would be really, really quick.”
Hirsch had the benefit of having played before, allowing him to work the buzzer to his advantage.
“He definitely knew more than me and … he didn’t have any ego,” Wang said. “He just seemed like he was also there having fun, just enjoying it.”
But after a nine-game win streak, Hirsch’s success eventually came to an end in an episode that aired Tuesday. Wang congratulated his former opponent in a Tuesday message to The Chronicle, noting that he “look[s] forward to watching him in the Tournament of Champions” — a redemption opportunity for former contestants with five or more wins.
Despite falling short in earlier rounds, Wang fought his way back up during Final Jeopardy, where he was the only contestant to answer correctly and pulled ahead of Crocker.
Even though he did not ultimately come out victorious, Wang still walked away with a prize fund of $3000. He said he will likely spend most of the cash reimbursing his flight and hotel expenses to participate on the show.
“It was just a cool experience,” he said “… Everyone was just really thrilled to be there.”
When the show aired in July, he hosted a watch party with some high school and Duke friends in the New York City area.
“I never thought I would make it on the show, and certainly not while I was in college, but honestly I would recommend just taking the test, and it might work out!” he wrote in the July 5 Reddit post reflecting on the experience.
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Madera Longstreet-Lipson is a Trinity sophomore and an associate news editor for the news department.