‘Danger!’ Champ reveals behind-the-scenes secrets about winning the Wildcard tournament

Joey DeSena may have missed his own Danger! because he was too busy taping his Champions Wildcard episode, but after his win on Thursday’s (January 16) episode, he was definitely on hand to share the fun with fans.

DeSena, a development engineer from North Carolina, attended the fourth night of the wild card games along with North Carolina attorney Eamonn Campbell and Washington-based software developer Mehal Shah.

He and Shah provided a sort of horse race throughout the game. In the first round, he earned $6,200 versus Shah’s $6,600 (and Campbell’s $2,800) thanks in part to betting as much as he could, $1,000, on the Daily Double he found it immediately. (He correctly guessed that Galileo was the one who told a papal tribunal in 1633, “I swear, curse and abhor the above-mentioned errors.”)

Then, in Double Jeopardy! In the round, he and Shah were both aggressive with their Daily Double bets, and it paid off for both of them. First, Shah doubled his $7,800 by correctly guessing that Huntsville was the Alabama town with the space and rocket center stacked with memorabilia. Then DeSena earned $11,000 by recalling that the Pope’s public advice for the 2024 US presidential election was to choose the lesser of two evils.

Before Final Jeopardy, Joey DeSena had $24,000, Mehal Shah had $19,600 and Eamonn Campbell had $9,600.

Surprisingly, the final clue turned out to be a triple error, with all three being on the same page. In the Trees category, all three participants thought laurel was the answer to the question: “Order Arecales, this tree takes its name from Roman times; A sheet of it was placed in the hands of a winner after a competition had been won.” However, thanks to each of their bets, that didn’t matter. Campbell lost everything, while both DeSena and Shah bet nothing, meaning the order wouldn’t have changed even if they were all correct.

In the end, it was DeSena who punched his own ticket to the semifinals with winnings of $24,000, closely followed by Shah with $19,600 and Campbell with $0.

On Reddit, DeSena addressed several issues surrounding the episode. He began by writing that his colleagues in the game were “tremendous competitors (and more importantly, great people)” who he enjoyed playing Contact with and watching The Princess Bride during their joint sequestration.

He also revealed that he was unaware of Shah’s previous claim to fame – that is, he bragged about setting the record for the highest Daily Double bet of the season – and added: “I’m super glad I didn’t do that. According to DeSena, it was Shah’s boldness in his own bets that led him to do the same. “I don’t know why I put so much money on the Daily Double in Double Jeopardy – but hopefully it made for some good TV. I think Mehal’s big effort just before that scared me, which was probably his goal.”

DeSena also revealed that even Ken Jennings was taken aback (pardon the obvious pun) by the “Final Jeopardy” reference and that the “Lorelai” he called in his “Final Jeopardy” answer was his four-month-old daughter , “so that they Maybe I’ll see it years in the future and smile.” D’aw.

Perhaps the most touching part of DeSena’s list of postgame tidbits was this: “Bonus tidbit about my ‘piece of flair’: The Navy pin I wore during that game belonged to my father. He died almost exactly 10 years ago. Unfortunately, we were never particularly close, but we bonded every time we watched Jeopardy together. He was always so proud when I answered a clue correctly as a child and encouraged me to never stop learning – it was my little way of paying tribute to him on the Alex Trebek stage. I did it, Dad.” What a story!

Elsewhere in the Reddit thread, fans criticized the game in some very interesting ways.

For example, one person criticized the show for “randomly inserting super-simple clues into the $2,000 spots… ‘Speeds up a chemical reaction’ = catalyst last week and now ‘slope of a line in math’ = slope.”

Another user had a lot of trouble with the wording of the Final Jeopardy clue, writing: “As an ecologist, I’m really annoyed by FJ. Palms aren’t actually trees, which makes an already difficult question nearly impossible. The silent reference to the hands was the only link to the correct answer, and that is, in my opinion, very weak.”

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