Trivia World
Ben Trite: Both sides of the game
show coin
Ben Tritle went from
game show contestant to game show staffer, all in less than
a year.
In 2000, in the wake
of Millionaire, Tritle was scanning the classified
for contestant ads. He had arrived in Los Angeles the year
before, hoping to make it as an actor, but he’d already
given Jeopardy a try, twice. “I’ve been a competitive
game player and I really wanted the challenge.”
He soon lined up
three auditions. He didn’t make the cut on Greed
because he “didn’t have the personality that could really
screw somebody,” and when he passed the audition for
Twenty-One, he decided to let the opportunity to be on
Winning Lines pass.
“That was a good
move,” he recalls. “Nobody remembers Winning Lines
now.”
Finally getting
on Twenty-One
Tritle attended the
very first taping of Twenty-One, but didn’t get
called to be on air. In fact, he managed to be there through
the entire run of the show, which lasted four months in
2000. He was on the very last show that ever aired, but on
that show, he won $85,000.
Tritle speculates
that although the ratings were “80 to 85 percent” of
Millionaire’s, they still didn’t meet network
expectations of a Millionaire-style rating bonanza.
Twenty-One was also damaged by inconsistent
scheduling. “There were supposed to air it twice a week, but
they couldn’t even manage to do that with the first four
episodes, because they had to schedule around the Golden
Globes.”
Moving behind
the cameras
Although he jokes
that he has “no personality or sense of humour,” the
producers must have seen something they liked in him. The
Twenty-One contestant coordinator moved on to a Fox show
called It’s Your Chance of a Lifetime, which was
based on an Australian show. Tritle was asked to play some
mock games to test the format and to sell the show to
advertisers.
They liked what they
saw, too. The producers asked Tritle to work as a
researcher. Although Fox passed on It’s Your Chance of a
Lifetime, Tritle’s name was passed along again, this
time to the producers of a new syndicated show called
Street Smarts, which is vaguely like Jay Leno’s
“Jaywalking” segment.
“As easy as some of
the questions seem, they have to be researched, and all the
wrong responses have to be researched, too, to make sure
that they are in fact wrong,” he says. “A lot of criticism
of show is that people miss easy questions, but those same
people will get difficult facts correct. Sometimes, common
knowledge is not that common!”
The big
leagues: Jeopardy comes calling
 Street Smarts
had an on-again, off-again existence at first, and in one of
the off-again lulls, Tritle tried out for Jeopardy.
“I slipped through the cracks,” he jokes. “I barely passed
the written test, but I knew how to emphasize what they are
looking for. If you’re optimistic and have a warm
personality, that will show through. A simple thing like
smiling can really help.”
By the time he was
called to appear on the show, however, there was a potential
problem. Street Smarts was back on, and Tritle didn’t
want the fact that he was working on another quiz show to be
a problem. It wasn’t.
However, to avoid
the appearance of impropriety, the show decided he’d use one
of his other two jobs for his on-air billing. He’d be an
apartment manager. His third job is guiding tours at
Universal Studios. “I actually wanted to say Tour Guide, but
was told that it wouldn't do well to advertise another
studio's product on the show.”
Tritle decided not
to study for his appearance. “College proved one thing to
me: I hate to study. I'm a slacker. The last thing I truly
studied for was the script for the Universal Studios Back
Lot Tour, but that was something that had practical daily
application. It's a little more difficult to insert
anti-popes or Nobel prize winning economists into daily
conversation.”
His first game
actually went very badly. He had a hard time adjusting to
the buzzer and went into Final Jeopardy in third place. But
by doing a little math, he realized what he needed to bet to
win if he got lucky and the two women ahead of him got Final
Jeopardy wrong, but he didn’t.
Tritle did indeed
get lucky. “In Twenty-One, whatever strategy you have
plays out in five minutes, but with Jeopardy, you
have more than 20 minutes. To have to keep your head in the
game the whole time and not think about the question you
just missed. Your fate can always change with the next
clue.”
Not only did he get
lucky, but he got better with each game, eventually becoming
a five-time champ. “There is a subtle combination of
excitement and agony that comes with winning five games,” he
recalls. “The initial out-of-body experience, followed by
the reward, then the realization that it isn't over yet.”
The Tournament
of Champions
That’s because, as a
five-day champ, he had a slot waiting for him in that year’s
Tournament of Champions, in which he went up against
Jeopardy legend Brian Weikle, whose shows hadn’t aired
by the time the tournament had taped. “We knew he had done
something extraordinary, but we didn’t know what. If you
haven’t seen somebody play, you’re up against a ghost, and
in his case it was a gigantic ghost.”
Weikle, who had won
more than $100,000 over five games and set a one-day record,
would have won the Tournament of Champions, except for a
miscalculation on Final Jeopardy. The tournament was also
notable in that two of the semi-finalists had won zero
dollars in their games, and were chosen based on their
scores going into Final Jeopardy.
Although he was
clobbered in the Tournament of Champions, Tritle did win
$78,600 on Jeopardy, plus a Jaguar. Adding the
$85,000 he won on Twenty-One, he has earned well over
$200,000 in cash and prizes in a two-year game show career.
And that’s in front of the camera. Now he’s making money
behind the scenes at Street Smarts. Someday, he may
have enough to re-launch that acting career.
August 2004
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