Alex Trebek suffers 'minor heart attack'

"um, can i have the center position?"
"why?"
"....*fart*"

with more people, the more likely it is that one of them does know the correct answer. if the other two are about evenly matched, they'll cancel out each other while you steeple your hands and murmur "excellent" in your best burns voice.

ken jennings' secret is finally revealed. no wonder he couldn't beat a computer.

how do you calculate on the fly if you're more than 50% sure of an answer? you're treating that like it's a real statistic instead of just meaning "i think i know the answer but i'm not confident about it"

Given what Ken writes in Brainiac I think that people who compete probably have a good sense of it. I agree that in most situations this kind of math is useless because for most questions it's either you're 98%+ sure or can't offer anything but a wild guess (and Jennings does talk a bit about how trivia contestants do this). I definitely think there are questions for which a contestant has an answer in mind but isn't totally sure and I'm arguing they should go for it anyway. There are also questions for which a contestant doesn't know the answer right away but can figure it out with the extra 3-4 seconds that buzzing in gives you. Certain categories that feature wordplay are pretty good for this.

a lot of questions also lend themselves to being narrowed down by the two chumps who answer ahead of you. like "this stooge was the stoogiest of the three stooges"

on average, how many answers do the contestants whiff on every show?

the amount of whiffing depends on whether or not dayo is the center contestant

Hubris is a bitch. Barrett was so sure he was right on a lot of those wrong answers...his jaw-drop reactions were satisfying.

xp to no-one in particular

speaking of that reminds me of a pretty infuriating episode where a Double Jeopardy category was "Also a chess piece". All the answers were chess pieces which means there were only 6 possible answers. The first four were hit, then the last was a Daily Double. Meaning there's only two possible answers left, and you have the entire clue to go off of. And yet the contestant only wagered like $3000 instead of their whole stack. I mean I know that guessing wrong sucks but you have to think you're 90% or more to get that one right.

Hubris is a bitch. Barrett was so sure he was right on a lot of those wrong answers...his jaw-drop reactions were satisfying.

"But Rush Limbaugh told me it was like this!"

http://i.imgur.com/C0gJTe6.jpg

Clarifying some points (in response to reports on Sajak's idiocies):

I consider myself a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. I believe that climate change exists, and is contributed to by human activity. I have seen firsthand the effects of climate change, in trips to Antarctica and Mt. Kilimanjaro, both of which are showing huge changes due to global warming. I’m in favor of equal pay for women, and the Lilly Ledbetter act. I believe in equal rights for the LGBT community; in fact, this winter, I braved the Minnesota winter weather to attend a gay wedding (which was officiated over by my wife).

damn... thats brave

All Minnesotans appear to think their winter is the worst thing on earth.

I've been to Cloquet, MN in January, so they're not too far off the mark

All Minnesotans appear to think their winter is the worst thing on earth.

Considering that there are more people who live in Minneapolis-St Paul alone than the entire state of Alaska, what you're really seeing is that there are more people around to complain about the winters.

Twins' starting rotation is out of sight/mind in the winter

Alex Trebek will not be denied.

Ah man:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cInGyxCY9k

Aw crap. Fingers crossed for him.

I must say I cannot believe he is 78 years old.

oh no

grim news, his pluck is perhaps admirable but man I would not want to do one more day of work if godforbid someone told me I had advanced pancreatic cancer. even if I was on television!

Sorry, Alex, but stage 4 pancreatic cancer is not something you "beat" or a contest you "win." It is something you either die from or, in a few cases, you survive. Any way, good luck and stay hopeful. And if it helps you to imagine you are beating up on your cancer, like Popeye bashing on Bluto, then I guess it can't really hurt.

That’s a sneaky one too. Jonathan Gold found out he had his pancreatic cancer just days before he died. Same with Gene Upshaw.

I remember him well from his days in Canada. Best wishes to him. pic.twitter.com/bU5n52RTBw

— Les Williams (@leswilliams2) March 6, 2019

Still processing that Alex Trebek news. Reminder that if you're on Amazon Prime, you can watch him on Celebrity Bowling and Double Dare 76/77. pic.twitter.com/QhGeNviudX

— Pablo Hidalgo (@pablohidalgo) March 6, 2019

really sorry to hear about this. i binged all the jeopardy on netflix over 3-4 days or so a few weeks ago; it was a wonderful time. alex trebek is a key part of what makes the show work. i guess the good news is that he has the best doctors and insurance money can buy, i assume

it's strange to hear him delivering this news in the same clipped cadences he reads the jeopardy clues

"i'll take 'grim cancer diagnoses' for 200, alex"

p.s. sad news. i wish him the best.

my cousin was his radiologist recently iirc

alec trebel 4eva
http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=LF2jdTQyyyE

lol Aimless's pedantry knows no bounds

my dad told me about this time when alex trebek came to his high school, because he used to tour around presenting reach for the top (kind of like a canadian university challenge i guess? except high school? idk if you have it everywhere else) and the kids were all brought to the auditorium to watch this match between dad's school and whoever else. alex trebek got very cross with the crowd being loud at some point and said "if you don't settle down, we won't be able to continue" which of course set off the crowd even more. i guess that's the whole story, my dad's school being jerks to trebek. idk why i brought it up

jeopardy was on every day in my house as early as i can remember, my parent's favourite show (and eventually, one of mine, even though i don't have cable anymore) and alex trebek has been there the whole time. now i do trivia all the time and host a pub quiz. he's one of those guys i kinda forgot was even mortal. this is heartbreaking. that he manages to even put a fact (50,000 diagnoses a year) in his announcement is so perfectly trebek too.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1A4bKsXgAsGMLJ.jpg

Aimless's pedantry knows no bounds

I'm not the first ilxor to have expressed this sentiment on ilx. The whole "I fought cancer and won" thing is a very strange mindset to me. Pneumonia kills a lot of people, too, but no one brags about fighting it and winning.

how dare you, the true boundless pedant of this board is sic

(it's part of why i love sic posts never stop sic)

It bugs me when bus ads etc frame cancer as a battle to be won or lost, but whomst tf thinks it's a good idea to nitpick how people express dealing with their own illnesses?

JFC dude, "bragging"? I rarely feel like I know this cast of ilxors enough to call someone out on anything, but this whole take is quite dickish imo. cancer is fucked and anyone who's dealing with it and keeping up a brave face is worth your silence if you feel otherwise.

won't anyone think of how cancer must feel about all this

I'm not the first ilxor to have expressed this sentiment on ilx. The whole "I fought cancer and won" thing is a very strange mindset to me. Pneumonia kills a lot of people, too, but no one brags about fighting it and winning.

IDK, my dad died of cancer and I have no problems with the phrase "I fought cancer and won", nor would I have a problem with saying my dad eventually lost his battle. When my dad got his first cancer diagnosis back when I was 9 and went into remission (after it almost killed him) he framed it in terms of having "won" his battle so I figure it's perfectly fine.

Anyway, I'm really hoping Alex Trebek is one of the lucky few to beat this. I know pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest and stage 4 is about as advanced as they get so am not trying to get too optimistic, but surely if anyone can beat the odds it's one of the two kings of the game show, right? (The other king being Bob Barker.)

thing is a very strange mindset to me.

yet somehow you don't think casting aspersions on the outlook/semantics of people facing a terrible, likely fatal illness is very strange *shrugs til shoulders separate*

like obv there's nothing any patient can do to "fight" cancer other than get the best treatment possible, and those who succumb to it didn't do so because they weren't good enough fighters...but to point this out to someone dx'd w it is just a major dick move imo

people desire agency. there's zero harm in allowing them to think they have some, no matter how small or large.

this hits me pretty hard. when I was 6 I used to watch Jeopardy every day, I thought Trebek was the coolest guy on the planet. obviously I never knew a single answer but I loved the format of it. it was my dream to be a game show host. or a game show contestant. I still watch from time to time, it is absolutely the best thing to watch when you're working out.

obviously he was kind of a private dude but Ken Jennings writes a lot of nice words about him in his book, where he claims that he's a lot wittier than he appears on TV. I only know the "real" Alex Trebek through the many prank calls Longmont Potion Castle made to his house...he was the one guy who he could never get to crack, the only celebrity who never pulled the "do you know who I am?" line

obv there's nothing any patient can do to "fight" cancer other than get the best treatment possible, and those who succumb to it didn't do so because they weren't good enough fighters...

I accept your statement that this is obvious. It is equally obvious to me. I further accept that, for the vast majority, this obvious fact falls among the facts that are considered unmentionable and my offense was to mention it.

it's a psychological tool to frame it that way. Maybe people take it too literally, but oh well.

what is the point of having to phrase responses in the form of a question

^^^ the real million dollar question

my offense was to mention it.

"chill bro I'm just tellin facts"