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Entertainment Wednesday, February 13th 2013 at 12:50 pm

Young Man Wins Jeopardy! Teen Tournament With Best Answer Ever [Video]

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If you watch Jeopardy! regularly then you know how the rules work. If you don’t watch Jeopardy! regularly, you need to reassess your priorities because you’re missing a perfect half hour of television. If a contestant goes into Final Jeopardy with more than twice as much money as their opponents, they can not lose. That was the case last night when Leonard Cooper won $75,000 in the Teen Tournament by giving one of the best Jeopardy! answers of all time, because he knew his answer didn’t matter.

After what host Alex Trebek called a “gutsy move” — betting $18,000 of his $18,200 on a Daily Double with one minute left to play — Cooper pulled into an unbeatable lead by knowing that the titular 12 Angry Men were serving on a jury. Going into Final Jeopardy, his opponents couldn’t touch him.

The smart play when you have the game on lock is to wager $0 in Final Jeopardy and try to answer the question anyway. If you’re right, you look smart. If you’re wrong, it doesn’t matter because you won anyway and didn’t lose anything for being wrong. The bold play is to use the written answer to make a joke, and that’s exactly what Cooper did.

In response to the Final Jeopardy clue:

On June 6, 1944 he said, “The eyes of the world are upon you.”

Cooper wrote:

Who is some guy in Normandy? But I just won $75,000!

You sure did, Mr. Cooper. You sure did. You see the video below in case you missed it last night.

(YouTube via Business Insider)

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  • Anonymous

    BALLIN

  • janvones

    What a wonderful experience it was watching that, best half hour of TV since the Berlin Wall came down!

  • Jacob

    Does this kid sound and sort of act like a black Seth Rogen?

  • Anonymous

    Cool, very cool.

  • DanMan1976

    You’re leaving out an important detail, though. Because this was Game 2 of a two-day final, Leonard wasn’t a lock to win the tournament with a $0 wager. Yes, he had an unbeatable lead in the game, but since he finished a distant third in Game 1, he could have been beaten, and his answer would have been far from the “best ever.”
    But I’m glad it all worked out. He was a very likable winner.

  • mtp

    yeah it seems strange that he would write that, when he certainly would have done the math, and known he wasn’t a lock to win the $75k with a $0 bet.

    The kid with $14.4k could have wagered $10k and beat Leonard with a correct response, because he had $19k coming from the day before.

    Obviously, they each have to make their wager before knowing their competitors’ strategies, so clearly Leonard made his wager before knowing his closest challenger would respond incorrectly, and before knowing what would be the amount of the challenger’s wager.

    On the other hand, Leonard’s challenger’s wager made perfect sense; he bet just enough to beat Leonard’s two day total, if his own answer was correct and if Leonard either wagered $0, or wagered any amount and gave an incorrect response. Are we to believe that the one teenager entered Final Jeopardy with a clear mathematical understanding of the situation at hand, and Leonard was clueless?

    What is most peculiar is that nearly every online blog or news post about this, presents it as if Leondard was indeed a guaranteed winner, as his response misleadingly indicates. Am I to believe that none of these bloggers or online journalists weren’t tempted to do the math themselves? For anyone with the math skills of a 5th grader, it would have been obvious going in to Final Jeopardy that it was, in fact, still anybody’s game…depending on the wagers and final responses.

    Blatanly poor journalism is perhaps expected from some, but not from so many. Everyone just jumps on the feel-good-story bandwagon, I suppose. Sure he was a likeable kid on the show, but couldn’t it be suggested that his response was cocky and in bad taste? Arrogant, one could even say, if he made that statement in writing, ignorant of the fact that he was quite beatable and not quaranteed the $75k. I mean, how stupid would he look if the challenger before him had just given the correct response????? Wouldn’t the camera then pan to Leonard, show his $0 wager, and, what would then be perceived, as a foolishly bold and overzealous remark? If my math is correct, Leonard would have a combined two-day score of $40k, compared to the other young man’s $40.4k (if he had responded correctly).

    You and I can’t be the only ones to see this. Smh.

  • David C. Frier

    The only thing I can think of is that Leonard bet zero on the assumption that they would ALL miss in what he judged a difficult category. The others bet what they did hoping to get the answer *and* catch Leonard when he missed.

    Still, not a lock, and an awful chance to take, writing what he did.

    What Leonard really bet on was this: if he won he’d be an everlasting STUD for writing that, and if he lost he’d be quickly forgotten.

  • http://twitter.com/Hacker_Jack Swansea Till I Die!

    Actually he sounds like an ass.

    There is such a thing as being a gracious winner.

  • Kajal

    What i think everyone also misses is that all he said was…”But I just won $75,000.” He was right, his total would have been $75,000 regardless of what the others wagered. He never said he won the game…he said he won a certain amount of money and implies that either way he would be fine.

  • DanMan1976

    No. He won $75,000 for winning the tournament. Had the answers/wagers of his opponents been different, he might not have won the tournament. It was never the lock he assumed it to be, even though things played out in his favor.

  • Canadian Guy

    I’m just flabbergasted that someone writing an article about Jeopardy (a show that, at its essence, is about intelligence) and others commenting on it could miss something so fundamental as the fact that he did not have a lock on the two-day championship round.

    I was very pleased that he won, but he would have looked very stupid – and arrogant – had the first place boy from Day One answered the question correctly, as he would have bested him by $400.

  • http://www.facebook.com/wllrobey Will Robey

    He was a ballsy player. And winner. Much more fun! It’s a TV game show not Lawn Tennis.

  • Anonymous

    He won… deal with it…