Kalispell resident Stuart Crane, right, stands with “Jeopardy!” game show host Ken Jennings. Crane took part in the show’s Champions Wildcard tournament. (Courtesy photo)
After Stuart Crane won his first game of “Jeopardy!” in 2021 he assumed his time on the trivia game show was over. But, he is returning Monday night to take part in the Champions Wildcard Tournament, having even more fun his second time around.
Crane said viewers can watch him attempt to answer several clues about varieties of cheese. Contestants are given general knowledge clues in the form of answers and they must reply in the form of a question.
He couldn’t reveal too much about the outcome but said the experience was different compared to his last stint on the game show — which was filmed in 2020 and aired in 2021. Back then, pandemic restrictions were at their height, so everything from the testing process to the actual game show day was changed to reduce the spread of the virus.
Crane, a product manager at Applied Materials, is a real trivia lover. He claims being part of the Trivial Pursuit generation, playing the games often as a child, making him a natural fit to become a “Jeopardy!” fan. He usually has the show playing in the background while he and his wife make dinner. The show runs ads encouraging people to take the online test to become future participants, so one day, Crane and his wife Rebecca decided to give it a shot.
“We knew some stuff, so we took the online test. We did that a couple of times and I think after the second or third time, I got a call back from Jeopardy! I was scheduled to fly from Kalispell to Portland for in-person tests on March 17, 2020. Right about the time everything shut down,” Crane said.
Crane completed his tests over Zoom, followed by an interview process, and said show staff rolled the dice to fly him out for a taping of the show in late 2020. Five shows per day are taped, and Crane won the fourth show moving on to the fifth show, his second game, where he lost. But, he won a nice cash prize to take home to his family.
“By the fifth show, I was pretty tired, pretty spent. Which makes it all the more amazing how those people go on and win five, 10 or 15, however many shows. Ken Jennings won 74 consecutive games. They are a different species,” Crane said.
He said there’s not a surefire way to train for “Jeopardy!” Past champions have used middle and high school textbooks to study, he noted, but there’s no way to know what they are going to ask. To prepare, he read the book he used last time for the show, called “The Intellectual Devotional,” meant to be read daily.
“I’m not sure if I retained anything, but it did make me feel like I was doing something so that I could avoid some sleepless nights as the tape day approached,” Crane said.
His special interests can be narrowed down to science and geography, but he mostly enjoys playing the game and leans on the ability to pull from what he learned in school.
“I don’t think I have any recondite knowledge, I just have the ability to retain the things that I learned in middle school or high school. My strategy for ‘Jeopardy!,’ at least the first time, was if I know one thing about a thing, they’re probably asking me about that thing. So go ahead and try that,” Crane said.
Because he had to keep his distance from other contestants during his first time on the show, Crane noted how nice it was to have camaraderie with other contestants this time around. And took note of how they were preparing to take the stage.
“There was one guy who was reading a book of lists, like top 10 whatevers just pages and pages. As we’re laughing and joking in the room he’s studying. And then another woman had a stack of fine art flashcards that she was going through looking at paintings and stuff. So people had all sorts of different strategies,” Crane said.
He is adamant that anyone interested can take the test and do well on the show.
“Almost everybody who was in the green room said the same sort of thing like, ‘Well, I didn’t know that I could do it. But I took the test and they said I could do it, so I went and did it,” Crane said.
He said in general, the returning contestants were not as nervous returning, and though everyone deals with stress differently, he just tried to have fun with it.
“I just really had a good time. I buzzed in way too often, but I just enjoyed the experience,” Crane said.
Tune in to see how Crane fares in Monday night’s episode of “Jeopardy!” which airs at 6 p.m. Mountain time on KPAX.
Reporter Taylor Inman can be reached at 406-758-4433 or by emailing tinman@dailyinterlake.com.
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