Local girl makes good on ‘JEOPARDY!’

Since you can only appear on the television game show “JEOPARDY!” once in your life, Susannah Jacobson didn’t want to blow her one chance.

“It felt very strange to suddenly have a lifelong goal in front of me,” says Jacobson, a program assistant in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Office of University Communications.

Jacobson, a graduate of UW–Madison (2002) and West High (1997), was a “JEOPARDY!” contestant at a taping in Los Angeles during the week of April 17 after — long after — auditioning in Chicago last year. She says that before she got the call from L.A. she thought the coordinators had forgotten about her.

“I hadn’t been preparing at all. With only a few weeks between the call and the taping, I crammed over my lunch hour using a book of lists made for game show prepping. A few days before the show I realized that the book was full of glaring errors,” she says.

Nevertheless, Jacobson says she made a more-than-credible showing.

“I mainly wanted to avoid making stupid mistakes — I’m so glad I didn’t jump at clues about which I wasn’t entirely certain,” she says, adding that overall strategy provided a bigger pitfall than any particular question. “I’ve always avoided poker because the uncertainty of wagering consequences drives me crazy. ‘JEOPARDY!’ aficionados online name and identify particular ways of betting, almost like chess strategies, but no matter how much you prepare for a situation, you can’t always predict what others will do. I’m really proud of the fact that I didn’t jump at questions about which I wasn’t entirely certain.”

See how Jacobson handled “JEOPARDY!” questions when her segment airs at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, June 30, on NBC 15 in Madison.