Isaac Hirsch continued his winning streak on Tuesday night’s (July 9) episode of Jeopardy! but not without a little drama.
Hirsch competed against chemistry professor Kathy Davis and stay-at-home mom Anna Paone for his fifth game and found himself in a bit of hot water at the start of the first round: Davis was a far better buzzer than him at first. Eventually, though, he caught up, and by the start of Double Jeopardy, he led the pack with $4,200 to Davis’ $3,800 and Paone’s $2,600. And that’s when the real drama began.
During Double Jeopardy, Hirsch had a staggering number of incorrect answers become correct after reconsideration. In all, there were three of his answers that producers eventually accepted, adding a whopping $4,000 to his winnings and putting him at $19,400 to Paone’s $9,800 and Davis’ $3,800 ahead of Final Jeopardy.
Just a few hundred points shy of a runaway, Hirsch’s fate rested in the Final Jeopardy results. In the category “Literature,” the clue was, “In one story he is enslaved by the Old Man of the Sea & uses apes to pick fruit so he can afford his fare back to Baghdad.” While Davis used her answer space to give a shoutout to loved ones after being stumped, and Paone incorrectly guessed Aladdin, Hirsch got it right by writing, “Who is Sinbad?”
Ultimately, Final Jeopardy proved to be less important than it could have been if Paone had gotten it right; she wagered just $1,201, while he added $201 to his tally and walked away a five-time champion with $120,187 and counting.
For fans on Reddit, the amount of corrections was “mind-spinning,” with one commenting, “I didn’t know the magic triangle was a thing.”
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