CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA: 'Jeopardy!' as a game show has developed many rules of its own, some of them evolving and changing over the years. This has also greatly impacted the way the game is played and won, to the point that players have had to form new strategies to come out as the show's big winners.
Rules have ranged from minor to major ones. For instance, back in the day when current host Ken Jennings was a contestant, you didn't need the whole clue to be read out by the host and you could buzz in to answer it. Now, of course, there's a rule in place to give everyone an equal opportunity.
Viewers came across some confusion related to the rules of how a clue must be answered by the players for it to be deemed valid and deserving of points. This was provoked by a contestant's performance last night on 'Jeopardy!' who seemed to be ignoring this really significant rule.
Not answering in the question format
Anyone who has ever seen 'Jeopardy!' knows that players have a unique manner of answering the clues — in the format of a question. The given clues have to answer the questions you respond with in order to win points and a certain amount of prize money.
Two-day champ Taylor Clagett seemed to be responding without the prefix of the question in his "answers". Further in the episode, it also sounded like contestant Andrew Knowles had also picked up the same habit. It is quite unclear as the contestants could have said them quickly or quietly. But it did provoke the fans to discuss the rule itself.
Fans unpack the 'What is...' rule
In a Reddit thread discussing the latest episode, a fan seemed to be unhappy with what the two contestants had done. They wrote, "Taylor continued to swallow his 'What is'es so badly that it appears to have spread to Andrew. I was cheering for Julie as the only one who spoke clearly on that stage. Way to go, Julie!"
A different Reddit thread proposed the question related to the format of the answers on 'Jeopardy!'. The question was, "My understanding of the rules is that answering in the form of a question is only officially enforced in the Double Jeopardy round, if you fail to do so in the Jeopardy round, the host reminds you of the rule, but your answer is still deemed valid. Has any contestant ever attempted to test the limits of this?"
"I think contestants are so thrilled to be there, they aren't going to behave like jerks!" one fan wrote under the thread. Another one shared their idea on the rule and wrote, "My sense is if a player did this repeatedly, they would do a stopdown and tell the player if they did it again, they would be penalized. They would not let someone just thumb their nose at the most fundamental rule of the game and get away with it, and make the host look like a fool in the process."
A fan seemed to agree that they had also witnessed the breaking of this rule on this episode saying, "I thought I saw this going on today; did I just mishear a bunch of times?" to which another fan replied, "It was hard for me to hear several times as well, but I assumed the players were just speaking very quickly."
