The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy - The AtlanticJeopardy" data-next-head=""/>

When you wake up on the day of your first appearance on America’s favorite quiz show, you will have more knots in your stomach than a quipu, the tied-string recordkeeping device used during the Inca empire. You will take a nervous walk through beautiful, weatherless Culver City, California, where the title song of Singin’ in the Rain was shot during a water shortage. Perhaps you will stop for a $14 juice at the boutique grocery store Erewhon, telling yourself that you have to spend money to make money. From the entrance of the Sony Pictures lot, you will be conveyed to the “check-in area” in the back of a dim parking garage; you will wonder whether this is actually some sort of hostage situation that is going to end with you at the bottom of a tar pit or, worse, on Wheel of Fortune.<br>And when you walk into the greenroom for contestants, you will see a door in the corner labeled JEOPARDY! CHAMPION, and you will be consumed by one thought, which I will phrase in the form of a question: How do I get in there?<br>Explore the June 2026 Issue<br>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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In 2024, I competed on Jeopardy for the first time. In 1653, Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler, a treatise on fishing technique. These two events are related, actually.<br>No one loves The Compleat Angler more than Jeopardy does, and I am counting Izaak Walton himself; the show has asked about his book 35 times. If you want to appear on Jeopardy—and if you also want to win—it is important to know what Jeopardy likes.<br>The mild Mexican salsa whose name translates to “beak of the rooster” is pico de gallo. Jeopardy likes this.<br>Another popular fact is that Lucy Hayes, wife of Rutherford B., was the first first lady to host the Easter-egg roll on the White House lawn. You don’t know anything else about Lucy Hayes, and you don’t need to. Like Nebraska’s Platte River—44 mentions on the show—Jeopardy is a mile wide and an inch deep.<br>If Jeopardy asks about Norwegian playwrights, the answer is almost always Henrik Ibsen.<br>The Iowa painter is Grant Wood.<br>The European duchy is Luxembourg.<br>The Zoroastrian singer is Freddie Mercury.<br>To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.<br>The best method for knowing one thing about everything is to have been a curious child. I grew up reading, except for at the dinner table, when Jeopardy was on; my younger brother and I would tally our correct responses on our fingers. I first took the show’s online contestant test in middle school, and when I was 18, my dad drove me to my first in-person audition in a hotel ballroom in Raleigh, North Carolina. (“Total success,” I wrote on Instagram, incorrectly.)<br>Adriana E. Ramírez: Everyone loses on Jeopardy eventually<br>If you were not a curious child—this is difficult to change after the fact—the second-best method is to act like a curious child. When I was invited onto the show, I checked out children’s books from the public library down the street: kids’ atlases, kids’ encyclopedias, a kids’ paperback titled What Is the Super Bowl? They were for “my nephew.” Should your librarian look askance, your checkouts can also be for my nephew, or yours, whichever is easier.<br>These books have enormous stores of knowledge in them. Did you know that Buckminster Fuller developed the geodesic dome? (Thirty-seven mentions on Jeopardy.)<br>Or that the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa could be heard 3,000 miles away? (Forty-four mentions.)<br>Or that Thales, considered the world’s first true philosopher, thought all matter could eventually be subdivided into water? (Five mentions; we can’t all be Socrates.)<br>I didn’t know either, until reading children’s reference books. Given that these volumes prioritize breadth over depth, they are perfect for the ethos of Jeopardy. Most of them are illustrated, too, which helps with recall. I found it easier to remember the Battle of Crécy after seeing a cartoon 14th-century Frenchman take a longbow arrow to the chest.<br>Perhaps the best resource for learning the patterns of Jeopardy is the fabulous and disconcerting online database J! Archive, wherein fans have cataloged every question that has ever appeared on the show, as well as the frequency with which answers are repeated. Spend some time in the J! Archive and you will see that Australia, for instance, is historically the most common answer on the show. When in doubt: “What is Australia?”<br>Read: The best ‘I don't know the answer’ Jeopardy answers<br>You will see also that Jeopardy doesn’t actually ask about everything, but rather about what students of the show refer to as “the canon”—a set of knowledge that masquerades as “everything.” Shakespeare and U.S. presidents will recur, but the show doesn’t ask much about anime, or hedge funds, or risograph printing, which are all too specialized.<br>To determine whether a bit of knowledge falls...