‘Jeopardy!’ Champions Wildcard Continues With New & Unused Categories

Isaac Rouse October 3, 2023, 7:45 pm

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Jeopardy! Champions Wildcard Greg Marrero, Katrina Hill, and Lawrence Long on October 3, 2023 — Jeopardy! Inc.

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the October 3, 2023 episode of Jeopardy.]

The second round of Jeopardy! Champions Wildcard is underway with returning champions from Seasons 37 and 88, including Greg Marrero, a school administrator from Huntington Beach, California; Katrina Hill, a program officer from Alexandria, Virginia; and Lawrence Long, a nursing student & stay-at-home uncle from East Bend, North Carolina.

Katrina, who was a one-day champion back in Season 38, has been using her new status to recruit players for her pub trivia team, host Ken Jennings informs us after the first break. “I shared last time I was on that, I played pub trivia with some friends, but we never had a first-place finish. I was beaten by Luigi de Guzman, who went on to win many games after he beat me. He happens to live right around the corner, so I recruited him to my team, and now we have several first-place pinches,” she stumbles and laughs off alongside the audience. “First place finishes under our belts.”

“That’s the silver lining. He beat you on Jeopardy! but he’s doing his part for, what’s your team’s name?” Jennings asks. “I don’t think I can say it on TV,” she says coyly.

Although the game started out with a used category, “Hey LAD-E,” it was the only one in the game, unlike the first game this week, which featured 9 resued categories, a Reddit user pointed out.

Jeopardy! found a workaround that allowed it to return to filming amid the WGA writers’ strike, which ended at 12:01 a.m. ET on Wednesday, September 27, which was reusing previous categories.

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When Jeopardy! Season 40 premiered on Monday, September 11; fans didn’t see many resued categories but are now beginning to see them as the strike has come to a close.

Does that mean Jeopardy! writers have resumed producing original material for the show now that the WGA cut a new deal? More likely than not, there were categories produced during or before the strike that previously went unused until now.

“Is it just me, or are the categories either super challenging are way too easy lately? Something about the difficulty level just seems off recently, going in both directions,” a Reddit user pointed out. Makes sense, since these strike-era boards are slapped together from leftover parts, rather than written to work well together as a whole,” the original poster replied.

But as far as the game goes, Lawrence took the lead during the first round and never let up, getting all three Daily Doubles correct. Although Greg was the only one able to answer the Final Jeopardy correctly, it wasn’t enough, and Lawrence took the games with a winning score of $22,600, Greg $17,199, and Katrina $6,284.

The stay at home uncle advanced to the semi-finals and X (formerly Twitter) celebrated the win. Check out the reactions below.

Lawrence is dapper #jeopardy

— Aslanclaire (@Lionwoman54) October 3, 2023

Our favorite stay-at-home-uncle has been doing a LOT of reading while at home. #Jeopardy

— Amanda Weimar (@alias093001) October 3, 2023

guy on jeopardy got described in the intro as a stay at home uncle

— Dylan (@notdylm) October 3, 2023

Lawrence the stay-at-home uncle cashed in a successful tru daily double. He then cruised in the Double Jeopardy round thus turning today’s game into a runaway. We will see him back in the semi-finals. #Jeopardy #ChampionsWildCard

— Jeff Veloso (@jveloso100) October 3, 2023