Jeopardy! is one of the most popular game shows on TV.
Part of the fun is playing along at home trying to answer the questions.
And a Jeopardy! contestant left fans speechless after this embarrassing moment.
Jeopardy! turns in a historically bad performance
The most successful contestants on Jeopardy! become household names like James Holzhauer and the current host, Ken Jennings.
But the flip side of the coin is contestants who bomb on national TV.
For San Pedro, California stay-at-home mom Erin Buker her appearance on Jeopardy! went all wrong.
She competed against lighting designer Graham Hicks and Drew Basile – a graduate student and former contestant on the CBS reality show, Survivor.
Buker struggled during her appearance by either buzzing too early or giving a wrong answer.
She finished the game with four correct answers and nine incorrect ones.
Buker ended up with a score of -$7,200, which kept her from advancing to the Final Jeopardy! round.
That became the second-lowest total in the history of Jeopardy!, behind Patrick Pearce who finished with $7,400 during a July 2021 appearance on the game show.
Basile won the contest with a final score of $22,400.
Jeopardy! contestant who turned in a historically bad performance shares her side
Buker went to the Reddit forum for Jeopardy! to explain what went wrong during her appearance on the show.
And there she shocked fans by her upbeat attitude about the experience.
“It was a day to forget for Erin indeed! Unfortunately, they taped what little I was able to forget about it,” Buker wrote. “When it came to the buzzer, I was my own worst enemy, frequently buzzing in midway through the clue as if my thumb had a mind of its own.”
Knowing the answers is only half of the battle for contestants on Jeopardy! – lightning fast reflexes on the buzzer are also crucial.
If contestants buzz in too early before they have the green light, they receive a quarter of a second penalty.
That can be all the other contestants need to answer first.
“There’s something uniquely frustrating about knowing answers, but not having the wherewithal to ring in at the appropriate time to answer them — that was my deficit and I own it entirely,” Buker added.
Buker said that despite her struggles she loved her experience on the game show.
“It was still a great experience,” Buker continued. “As the alternate for the week before, I got to know all of the contestants who aired last week really well, and they were truly salt of the earth.”
She made some new friends from Canada serving as an alternate.
“I especially found an appreciation for the denizens of the capital to our north, from which two contestants (Kelsey and Jonquil) hailed,” Buker explained. “It was no surprise then that my fellow contestant, Graham, was another shining example of exceptional wit and character from Ottawa.”
“Thanks to my experiences with these three beautiful souls,” Buker concluded, “Ottawa is now officially on my list of places to travel.”
Erin Buker made the best of her experience on Jeopardy! and didn’t let her performance get her down.
