Trivia World
Leszek Pawlowicz:
The Homer Simpson of game shows
He won $75,400 on
Jeopardy, plus the Tournament of Champions. And with
nine wins, he is the undefeated Jeopardy player with
the best record. He has all
$5000 of Ben Stein’s money. He’s been in the Millionaire
“ring of fire” twice. He was second on HistoryIQ.
And he won a million bucks in the Goldpocket trivia contest.
Even Ken Jennings is in awe of him. No wonder the New York Times called Leszek Pawlowicz “the
Michael Jordan of game shows.”
Not that Pawlowicz
is happy with the description. “While I’m flattered, the
quote came from someone with a limited knowledge of the game
show world. Most days, I usually feel more like the Homer
Simpson of game shows.”
 As the Arizona
computer consultant sees it, “There are a lot of really
great players out there and unless they all met face to face
under the same conditions, there’s no way to say who the
greatest single player is.” [Ed. note: This interview was
before the Ultimate Tournament of Champions: see below.]
That even includes
Ken Jennings, who has been ripping holes through the record
books. “When they first changed the five-day-limit rule, I
thought the biggest problem Jeopardy might have was they’d
get somebody unlikeable starting to win, and that might hurt
their ratings. But Ken Jennings is as good a poster boy as
the show could have hoped for. He’s smart, fast, pleasant
and personable. He may or may not be the greatest, but you’d
have to put him on any list of possible candidates.”
Even so, he thinks a
lot of Jeopardy’s legendary players could have assembled
impressive streaks as well. “Some names that immediately
come to mind include Chuck Forrest, Frank Spangenberg, Bob
Blake, Jerome Vered, Dan Melia and
Brian Weikle.”
Pawlowicz’s own run
was in 1991. He won five games, four of them being decided
before Final Jeopardy. He then squeaked out a win in the
Tournament of Champions.
Beating Ben
Stein
But he wasn’t done.
In 1999, he appeared on Win Ben Stein’s Money, and
then-host Jimmy Kimmel razzed him about his hair and his
difficult-to-pronounce name. (It’s "Leh-sheck Pah-vloe-vitch,"
by the way). But Pawlowicz turned the tables when it was
Stein’s turn to play; Stein was shut out entirely when he
went up against Pawlowicz.
That meant Pawlowicz
went one on one with Stein for his cash. “I got in the booth
and missed the first two and I started worrying. I got the
next one, but missed the fourth question. I thought I was
finished! But then I got the fifth one and all the ones
after that.”
Now it was Stein’s
turn to be razzed by Kimmel. “You know all those jokes about
Polish people?”, Kimmel asked Stein. “I think that Polish
people tend to be very smart,” Stein replied. “Well, this
one in particular tends to be very smart; he’s got seven.”
“Oh .... shucks!”
Stein also missed
the first two, and Pawlowicz realized he was back in
contention. “Then he missed the third question, and it was
at least a tie. When he missed the fifth question, I knew I
had won.” The final score, 7-4.
Beating the
buzzers
Pawlowicz believes
that buzzer speed was a crucial ingredient to his success on
both shows. But buzzers would be his downfall on
HistoryIQ, a tournament that ran on the History Channel
in 2001. “They had the buzzer from hell there. Most shows,
you answer after the host finishes reading the question and
when a light goes off. Otherwise, you’re locked out for a
fraction of a second. It was the same system on HistoryIQ,
except that there was no light.”
Even so, he managed
to finish second. And despite being down seven questions in
the very last round, he pulled off a six-question
last-minute rally that very nearly won him the tournament.
“When I was watching
it on TV, I was screaming the answers, but what I was saying
in my living room didn’t always match what I was saying on
screen! Ultimately, though, I didn’t lose because of the
buzzer; I lost because my opponent, Robin Grover, was better
than I was on that show.”
(ED. NOTE: Leszek
played in the 2005 Jeopardy Ultimate Tournament Champions
and, in a shocking upset, was ousted in the first round. On
a message board, he wrote: "In the good old days, the signal
light would go on as soon as Alex read the last syllable of
the question. Now there's a 0.5-1 second delay between the
end of the question reading and the time the signal light
goes on; for someone who lives and dies on pure reaction
time, this is a big change. I think I couldn't figure out
that timing to save my life.")
Pawlowicz’s speed
also didn’t help him with Millionaire, though. He has been
on the Regis version of the show twice, but never got past
the fastest-finger round. “I had four opportunities each
time. Twice, I just didn’t know the right order, and the
other two times, I couldn’t do it in time. I tell people
that it’s like having people qualify for a marathon by
having them run a hurdles race.”
Worse, on both
shows, he knew all the answers to the actual questions,
including one worth $500,000. That might have given him a
shot at a million dollars. Maybe. “While I’ve known most of
the million-dollar answers on the prime time version of the
show, I hasn’t known all of them, and there have been quite
a few questions at lower-dollar values that might well have
stopped me dead in my tracks.”
Even so, he did
eventually win his million bucks. To promote its software in
2000, Goldpocket.com held weekly trivia contests in which
winners could get $1 million.
“The first two
people won with questions that had been in the promotions or
in their study guide, a deliberate choice so that they could
get the publicity associated with million-dollar winners.
After that, the million dollar questions got progressively
more difficult. I think I was the fourth and last person to
win the million.”
The man he beat in
the last round for a chance at the million, Maryland’s Peter
Bonner, later got in touch with him for advice on future
Goldpocket competitions. Pawlowicz went on to be Bonner’s
on-air Phone-A-Friend on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,
and he has since been on air as a phone-a-friend three more
times on the syndicated show. “I’m four for four so far,” he
says, adding that he’s waited in the wings several other
times. “And since they limit you to two on-air PAF
appearances per season on the syndicated show, and one
appearance per prime-time series, there’s a very limited
number of opportunities.”
How to win on a
quiz show
Of all the shows he
has been on, though, his favourite was Jeopardy.
“It’s a high speed show with lots of questions coming at you
in a lot of subjects. Also, I had a huge lead most of the
time, so I could relax and not worry about losing, so I
enjoyed the experiences more.”
That ability to
relax is the key to game show success. “You have to be able
to tune out everything except the game: the cameras, Alex,
the contestants, the audience. You can’t get rattled. I
didn’t even look at the score except at the breaks. Once I
started playing, everything just dropped away.”
One thing he doesn’t
recommend is an excessive amount of studying. In preparing
for the Tournament of Champions, he watched the show
regularly and wrote down the answers and questions that he
didn’t know, so that he could learn them. After many hours
of doing this and studying the material he didn’t know,
there were only two questions in the TOC that he knew the
answer to as a result of this studying.
“In most cases,
you’ll either know it or you won’t, and you’re unlikely to
learn anything by studying that will appear on the show” he
says. “After my Jeopardy appearance, I decided that studying
for Jeopardy is a waste of time, except for the
things that come up a lot—state capitals and world capitals,
US presidents, opera, weights and measures, all the
categories that regular viewers would recognize as
Jeopardy staples.”
A Jeopardy
controversy: Leszek and the Million Dollar Masters
Although he enjoyed
his Jeopardy run, in 2002 he was publicly critical of
the way that Jeopardy handled the million-dollar tournament
designed to celebrate their 4000th show. The 15
contestants were something of a surprise. Of the 15
top-money winners at the time (and Pawlowicz was #13), only
two were chosen, the legendary Frank Spangenberg (a New York
transit cop who for years held the money-won record) and
Babu Srinivasan. Only five of the 18 Tournament of Champions
winners to that point were chosen, including two women.
In fact, it seemed
to many that, far from being the 15 best players, the 15
were chosen for demographic reasons. “Dan Melia, who was
#11, wasn’t invited, even though in the 1998 TOC he’d beaten
two of the people they did invite: Claudia Perry and Bob
Harris.”
Bruce Seymour, a
fourth-season player who won $54,989, but not that year’s
Tournament of Champions, had won the 1990 Super Jeopardy
tournament on ABC against some of the same contestants
invited to the Masters. He wasn’t invited either.
For Pawlowicz, it
wasn’t the lack of an invitation per se that was the issue.
“The show has every right to choose which contestants they
want to be on, based on whatever criteria they want. They
could use personality, demographic factors, hair color,
anything. I might not like their criteria, and I probably
would still have been unhappy about not being selected, but
that’s life.”
However, he did
somewhat object to their calling it a “Masters” tournament,
as this implied that the very best players were being
invited. “But what really blew my fuses was that they were
initially selling the tournament to potential sponsors by
claiming that it would include ‘the top players from the
past 17 years,’ and there’s just no way you can defend that
statement as being accurate. They eventually wound up
promoting them as 15 of the most memorable players; better,
but that’s still debatable in my opinion.”
For another
perspective on the Masters, see what
Bob Harris has to say.
Pawlowicz concedes
he would have loved to have been part of that show, but for
now, he is trying to get on the syndicated (or “super”)
versions of Millionaire. No luck, yet.
“I’ve heard that the
syndicated version doesn’t like to have people on who’ve
been on other game shows, especially multiple winners. That
really only leaves Super Millionaire as a
possibility, and the way the qualification process is set up
this time around, my odds of getting on that show are pretty
low.”
Then again, if Marge
could get on Jeopardy, perhaps the Homer Simpson of
Game Shows has more of a shot than he realizes.
August 2004
updated: January 2005
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