On Friday’s Jeopardy!, Brooklyn, N.Y.’s inventory specialist Alex DeFrank won big; later on, he disclosed what made the Final Jeopardy! clue something like a breeze for him.
Alex entered Final Jeopardy with just a slight gap between him and the next closest competitor, so underlining the strain on the March 14 edition. Fortunately, he answered the question right and left the day with $42,401, significantly more than the $26,401 score of the next closest competitor.
The triumph Final Jeopardy! “A review of this musical noted’sacrivenge’ & said it was ‘blasphemous’ but ‘its heart is as pure as…a Rodgers & Hammerstein show,'” the clue said.
Alex admitted on Monday’s episode that the hint was the Book of Mormon, which he knew quite familiarly. Given that he lives not far from Broadway itself, he really had a great chance to witness the show in New York City. He said, “My partner and I went to try to win the lottery to buy… to buy them still, not even tow in them, but they’re a fair price. She won it, though, and we occupied front row dead center. I could make out the conductor. I could have read his sheet music if I could read any kind of sheet music.
Ken Jennings, the host, commended Alex on his ticket acquisition—not a simple feat. “I bet you didn’t think it was going to be good for over $40,000 when you invested in those tickets,” he said.
Alex concurred, pointing out that the $40,000 exceeded the cost of even the usually priced and resale tickets. Ken added, “now you can afford even better seats.”
Alex emerged Monday’s episode triumphant once more, going on to become a two-day reigning champion. The last jeopardy! hints were, “Preparing for a course on descriptive geometry and researching the 5 Platonic solids led a professor to invent this.” Writing, “What is Rubik’s Cube?” he was the only one who answered the prompt exactly.
Sadly, the other contenders—Fairhope, A.L.’s writer and content strategist Brett Aresco and Toronto, O.N.’s articling student Clare Murray—failed. Alex finished the game with $14,000, while Brett barely scored $1,800 and Clare bottomed out at $0.