My Wheel Report (LONG)
Dec 11, 2019 11:49:17 GMT -5
via mobile
Prizes, MarioGS, and 5 more like this
Post by RoonilWazlib on Dec 11, 2019 11:49:17 GMT -5
So after I appeared on the show I wrote a two-part report of how it went. I was bursting to tell people how well it had gone and working on the report made the time pass much more easily. As a warning, this thing is written for a general Facebook friend audience and it is huge, so bear that in mind if you're trying to read it all in one sitting.
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PART ONE: GETTING ONTO WHEEL OF FORTUNE
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INTRODUCTION
Hi! My name is Jamie. I recently made an appearance on the syndicated American game show Wheel of Fortune. Depending on who you are and where you are reading an introduction may seem extraneous; I plan to link and copy this as necessary, so please bear with me through any parts that you may already know. Before moving to an episode play-by-play in the second half of this composition, I want to start with some background on what has been the common refrain for a while now: *how in the world did I end up on Wheel of Fortune?*
Though I have known and enjoyed the show for as long as I can remember, unlike many Wheel fans I haven't had lifelong grand designs to play it. Let's wind back the clock a bit. Shortly after sinking into a nice, deep clinical depression in my early 20s I got booted from college and moved back in with my father. Things were strained between us for a while, and many were the draining nights in our family den spent cutting to the core of what had gone so wrong and how exactly I planned to right things. The Wheel/Jeopardy! programming block, however, was a ceasefire, an hour-long reprieve from the uncomfortable talks about recovering from the tailspin I'd watched myself fall into. Though my trivia brain isn't sharp enough for real Jeopardy! aspirations, I've always had a knack for words, especially the logic of arranging letters--I was a county spelling bee competitor as a child, I anagram words and phrases almost reflexively, and I will throw down in bare-knuckle Scrabble with anybody who asks. All of this being the case, it should come as no surprise that I gravitated toward Wheel of Fortune.
I viewed and played alongl more as the years passed, through meeting my extraordinary girlfriend Meg, treating my depression, and clawing into the workforce without a degree. I went from a casual fan to someone who would request flipping the program on at 7 o'clock. I can specifically recall the Bonus puzzle that made me say, "Wow, I could play on this show. I could beat the Bonus round. I could win it." It was a rerun in the summer of 2016, a Person puzzle with several of the "killer" consonants that have become all the rage in Bonuses of late: JAZZ GUITARIST. It was clearly intended to be a rough solve, with a more common yet impossible phantom answer (BASS GUITARIST) that would put blinders on all but the most disciplined contenders. In spite of hitting the G, the contestant couldn't get there. I spit the solution out like I was reading it off a page. That day I resolved that if the stars ever aligned, I would play Wheel of Fortune.
Now, there are two main routes to kicking off a Wheel journey: the smart way, and the lucky way. The smart way is to upload a minute-long video that gives a taste of your personality and shows why you would be a worthwhile contestant to have on the show. Someone will eventually watch this video, so if you're fun, interesting, and stand out from the pack enough, you advance to the next stage. The lucky way entails crossing paths with the Wheelmobile, the show's official Winnebago that serves as an auditioning command center, at which point you spend a day standing around in a group of hundreds while you cross your fingers for the slim chance to be called onstage for an interview and mock game.
In what would become my calling card during this saga, I ended up on the lucky path. My dad clipped a newspaper article in the fall of 2018 which advertised a weekend Wheelmobile event at Stony Point Fashion Park. The Wheelmobile covers cities major and minor, but it's far from exhaustive; most of its followers would consider driving less than two hours for it a no-brainer. Some superfans gather in groups for a pilgrimage of three hours or more.
Stony Point is twenty minutes from my dad's house. It looked a lot like stars in alignment to me.
AUDITIONS
Although there were two Wheelmobile days I could have attended, I had Saturday plans already in place that weekend. Breaking a commitment to my significant other felt like no way to enter this sort of process with good vibes, so I showed up on Sunday morning prepared for the long haul.
Cut to five or six hours later, by which point I had downed many ounces of energy drink to stay peppy and interview-ready at a moment's notice. I could hear color and my skin was vibrating. To complete the very stable self-portrait I was painting, I was repeatedly muttering the personal spiel I had jotted down upon hearing one person too many talk about children or a dog as their fun fact. However, it was starting to look as though the preparation slingshot I had planted myself in was for naught; per the time that had been blocked out there would be only a handful more people called that day. The odds were well and truly against me.
Never tell me the odds. I heard my name, the fourth of five in one of the day's final groups. I exulted loudly, jumped two feet into the air, and since my cool guy image was clearly still salvageable I forwent the full Area 51 ninja sprint and settled on a half-jog to the stageside. Thank God I had spent all day dialing in that speech. This was where I would be marked as either a promising candidate for a follow-up audition or just another face in the crowd.
I'm going to be humble through most of this report, I promise I am. An amazing number of things went right that were partially or totally out of my control. I got lucky in a lot of places. But not here. *I CRUSHED that interview*. I'm sure it was one of the most memorable of the day. I led off with my age, my job, and an easy opening for the host, Marty, to playfully dunk on me: "I still live with my parents! What up, millenials!" We got around to my hobbies, including that I was a competitive Magic: the Gathering player who would love to play the card game professionally, and he deadpanned to the audience, "He is never leaving the house." The crowd laughed in an uproar. I couldn't keep a grin off my face as Marty shook my hand. It had not been just another interview. It had been good. Better than good--entertaining. TV-caliber. I was positive it had been.
The On the Map puzzle itself was anti-climactic; I guessed a bad O and the first person in line cracked it on her second turn. Though I would have been happier displaying some solving acumen along with my strong interview, I told myself it wouldn't matter and gladly took home my new t-shirt and paper Wheelmobile model.
Fast-forward to the middle of 2019. I would still reminisce back to Wheelmobile day on occasion but per the time interval we had been led to expect, I had mostly counted myself out. Hey, I tried. Maybe I could see about that video thing once the mandatory year between audition attempts had elapsed. I opened my email during an afternoon workout with the boys and my eyes shot to the subject line WHEEL OF FORTUNE CONTESTANT AUDITION, all capitalized. I was purportedly invited to the next stage of auditions, one of which was being held right in Richmond, VA. My heart was a jackhammer as I scanned the email for authenticity. Punctuation intact, everything spelled correctly, listed address wasn't an abandoned warehouse...nothing stuck out as a scam red flag. I called the number listed and received some official-sounding information, then gave some of my own. The ember of hope that had smoldered feebly for months roared to life anew. I had advanced!
I stepped up my Wheel-watching discipline to stay sharp, and my workplace was thrilled to shuffle some hours around once I told them the unique circumstances of the half-day I needed to take. I arrived downtown the morning of the audition with application and amateur headshot in hand to find sixty or seventy other hopefuls. I had read in my preparation that the auditioners in this phase pay close attention to how much you act like you're already on the show, so I did. From the most visible aisle seat I could grab I did my best trained seal impression, clapping nonstop at others' successes and pulling a disappointed "aw, shucks" face at their misses. One player in our popcorn-style mock game came within inches of solving a Same Name puzzle before brain-farting and punting it over to me. I heard "Can I get a Y?" leave my lips and internally grimaced. (The audition team, along with Pat Sajak himself, dislikes complicating phraseology being tacked onto letter guesses--I kicked myself for not simply saying "Y"!) But I rallied from the gaffe and solved the puzzle with my best loud, clear, well-enunciated radio voice. I won a hat and the room's applause.
The written test followed in what was without question the shortest five minutes ever perceived by a human being. I think I solved twelve out of the sixteen puzzles, then did what I could for partial credit on the rest. There were some boneheaded misses that I figured out later in the day, in particular a simple Before & After that had clearly been intended to test basic understanding of how the category works.
Next came an agonizingly long wait with a somewhat outdated montage of Wheel best-of moments while the audition team vacated the room for grading purposes. They returned with a list of names, insisting that being asked to leave at this point was not an automatic no, and that being asked to stay was not an automatic yes; it simply meant there were some folks that had to be observed further. I was pretty sure this was a pacifier to get people to leave without a fight. All through high school and college I operated in the acting world where you will hear the very same disclaimer regarding callbacks for a role, and in that realm "callback good, dismissal bad" holds true 99% of the time. The list of perhaps twelve names included one Jamie that wasn't me. I felt a pang of disappointment but put on a smile, wished luck to those remaining, and left for work.
This was surely the end of the road. Wasn't it? I combed over the day obsessively. I did...fine. I dressed well without overdressing. I smiled and clapped like a maniac. I spoke loudly, clearly. I solved a 90% finished puzzle. I thoughtlessly appended "can I get a -" to a letter guess. I think I did well on the written portion, though not top of the class. Could there have been no need for further examination? Could I have shown all they needed to see? Judging my secondary audition on its own merits it seemed things must be over, but I dared to continue carrying the hope, dared to keep it barely, barely alive.
It turned out I didn't have to carry it far. At a movie night with friends, sooner than I could possibly have expected it, so soon it was dumbfounding, I got an email. There was no way. I was dismissed from the last audition, plus the team had specified times and modes of communication that contradicted this. I tried in vain to keep my expectations low and forestall the excitement that had already begun exploding in me. I shakily dialed the listed number, unable to keep breathless joy from escaping into my voicemail but needing to confirm that everything I'd read was legitimate. The swift callback came with me to a neighboring room. We talked.
I heard silence in the living room as the call ended, which I obligingly broke: "I'M GONNA BE ON WHEEL OF FORTUNE, GUYS!"
THE TRIP
I am not a well-traveled man. The flurry of activity that accompanied the once-in-a-lifetime chance to play America's game was therefore new and plenty stressful--I was out of practice at booking a hotel, I hadn't flown since I was about 10, heck, I had never even used Uber until I downloaded it the day before our flights out. To say nothing of events related to Wheel of Fortune, my girlfriend Meg and I have also been at the epicenter of a number of life changes of late, from moving into a house together to taking on new job challenges.
It was clear from the start that this whole affair wasn't so much out of Meg's comfort zone as it was squinting in search of her comfort zone from orbit, so in order to make it a satisfying and worthwhile vacation we stuffed several tourist-y activites into our short visit to the Golden State. We had an excellent room service breakfast our first morning where a freshly-squeezed glass of orange juice ruined every carton of Tropicana for me forever. The Santa Monica pier and adjacent beach were beautiful and iconically Californian. I couldn't pass up the chance to leave my mark and an RVA tag in the high scores of the arcade's Guitar Hero machine. At my dinnertime urging we sampled the wares of In-N-Out Burger, which strongly reminded me of a West coast hamburger version of Chick-fil-A in most respects from cleanliness (spotless) to employee quality (high) to popularity (jam-packed) to nomenclature (hyphenated). The primary differences appeared to be relative price, which while premium for Richmond was quite fair in Los Angeles, and french fry quality. Sorry In-N-Out, you've got some catching up to do in that department.
The evening before the taping was quiet. I opened the Wheel of Fortune phone app I had downloaded during the audition process and played as many puzzles as my free tickets allowed. Of course we watched the night's TV broadcast of Wheel where I was jubilant at nailing a tricky Food & Drink Bonus round. A good omen, I hoped. For some reason, watching this episode appeared to really stir something in Meg. The possibility of my winning a sizeable amount of money for us, perhaps not life-changing but certainly life-affecting, was setting in. With tears in her eyes she implored me to play hard the next day, to do anything I could to make it happen and help us continue building our lives together. I assured her that I was only a bit nervous, and at that point it was true. I was less nervous than I tend to be before even a modestly-sized Magic tournament. This makes little sense when you compare the relative stakes and probabilities of each situation, but what can you do? Emotions are weird.
I ironed the next day's shirt and tried sleeping until it became apparent that our room's air conditioning refused to bring the temperature below 75 degrees. Anyone who has watched me sweat at the slightest provocation knows this was a no-go for me, and a hotel technician came up in short order to reset our system. Ultimately I didn't get to sleep until close to 11:00 PM--much later than I wanted given the hour I'd have to wake. My final thoughts before drifting off were of Meg's hopes for the following day, hopes that mirrored my own.
I woke up on taping day at 3:45 and rolled over knowing full well I would not be getting another wink. I settled for listening to Meg's breathing with closed eyes in an attempt to suggest sleep to myself and calm my thoughts. Another fool's errand. I finally kicked off my morning routine a little after 5:00, waking Meg toward the end so she could admire me in my new suit, then left her to her three extra hours of sleep while I went to the hotel lobby to wait for the Sony Studios shuttle.
Nearly everyone who talks about playing Wheel of Fortune mentions that taping day goes by in a flash. I'll agree that parts of it do, and I'd love to tell you about them. Unfortunately the details of the behind-the-scenes contestant experience are kept under tight lock and key, so you'll have to excuse me for not diving into it here. Suffice to say that while preparatory pieces of the day alongside our new friends the contestant coordinators did meld together and pass by quickly, other parts bordered on interminable. A number of restrictions exist on the activities and interactions permitted to contestants while within studio walls in order to ensure the security and fairness of the competition. For an introvert like myself, this meant that between nervous pleasantries I had a lot of time alone with my own thoughts.
I'm convinced my greatest asset on tape day, especially during this period of relative isolation, was nothing to do with word puzzles but rather experience in high-pressure mental competition settings. Years of Magic: the Gathering tournaments, often on too little sleep and against players better and smarter than myself, have conferred upon me knowledge of how to help my brain think under fire and, just as importantly, how to avoid mental traps. A player who makes it into the tense single-elimination playoff that is a Magic top 8 and says, "Wow, this is better than I expected to do, I'm just happy to be here," has all but cooked their own goose. Making top 8 is fine and dandy but taking down a tournament comes of NOT being happy just to be there.
You must say, "I'm not done here. I came to win. I CAN win. I MUST win. I WILL win." Think this and say it to yourself, over and over, until you believe it without doubt. No one can believe in you more than you do yourself.
Let's talk about the other side of this winner's mentality for a moment. I have a reasonably well-cultivated reputation for being a nice guy to play Magic with. I adore the poetic rhythm of a well-fought game where both sides make meaningful decisions and the one who deserves the win gets it, I lament when anything unfun gets in the way of that, and I can usually take some satisfaction from a cool, well-engineered play even when it results in my head on a stick. Unfortunately the mentality I describe which is so helpful in the pursuit of a win can directly lead to poor sportsmanship or "salt" when its bearer comes up short, because that person is being forced to reckon with an incongruous reality from the one they have assured themselves will arrive. It is a tough tightrope to walk and demands great control of your own attitude to flip from "Losing is not an option" to "Hey, it's just a game, well played." I don't believe anyone is perfect at this, myself included; there exist Magic players to whom I've represented myself poorly in the loser's postgame, and their esteem for me is rightfully low. Nevertheless, I try to make losing well a habit in any game I play, and I typically find myself able to wear a winner's killer edge and loser's grace on either side of the same button.
What does this have to do with Wheel of Fortune? You see, I had to handhold my brain through this entire thought process as though for the first time shortly before my taping.
"Really, it's just amazing that I got this far," I thought.
"Money would be nice, but the experience is the real prize," I decided.
"It's not so bad if I don't win," I conceded.
The moment I realized what I was doing, I cut myself off. I was dulling the edge. Scuffing both sides of the button. Curbing the negative emotions before they could come while also dousing the winner's fire that could be my greatest asset. If I, a relatively seasoned competitor, was thinking this way, there was a chance my two opponents were as well. I would be at an advantage if I could rise above it and they could not.
I snuffed the consolation thoughts out. If I came up short, if the Wheel just wouldn't cooperate, if I lost, I could trust myself mentally and emotionally to flip to the loser's side with dignity. Until then I would compete with everything I had and believe that I would win. *Know* that I would win.
At last, my two opponents and I received microphones and took our places onstage, me at the middle yellow podium--my least favorite of the three, not even close. I absorbed the whole of the stage from my perch and noted how much larger the cameras make it appear on TV. My eyes found Meg and my dad in the crowd, the sight of them neither alleviating nor exacerbating my nerves.
Jackie, one of our backstage coordinators and a potentially infinite source of energy who should be turned over to Earth's top scientists, hyped us up in front of the audience like a sugar-buzzed drill sergeant as a last blessing before the game. Her job is to get contestants pumped, loud, and ready to play, and she is very good at it. Finally, she vacated the set. The three of us were alone. Well, we were if you ignored the crew, the few hundred eyeballs, and the few million more waiting for us in the future.
And with barely a minute's warning--a couple of months' warning--no warning at all, really--we were rolling. The classic "WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!" chant rang out. Jim Thornton's black-coffee baritone summoned two of the most recognized faces in show business from behind the iconic letter board. Vanna took her post at the screens while Pat instructed us to lift our buzzers for the first toss-up.
It was time to play.
CONTINUED IN PART TWO
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PART TWO: PLAYING WHEEL OF FORTUNE
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(This piece contains spoilers concerning the outcome of my 12/06/2019 Wheel of Fortune appearance. Also, I'm switching to the present tense for this gameplay part because it's more dramatic. Grammatically inconsistent from part one? Sure, but it's my report and I'll do what I want.)
GAME TIME
A toss-up puzzle I could have gotten from the couch but in the moment have no chance at starts the game with $1,000 for Stephanie, the player to my left, when she revises Ashley's MAKING MOVIES into MAKING MEMORIES. Our week's theme is Safe Travels and as the first toss-up this should be connected to it. I suppose traveling is a good time to make memories, and it would be best to stay safe while doing so? In any case, I end up being glad I had only invested ten fruitless minutes of research into our theme before deciding to wing it, because it feels like it doesn't have too much influence over the subject matter of our puzzles. Pat does his signature chat with each of us in turn, I smile and nod through his mentions of tabletop gaming and amateur rapping with way too many butterflies for a former theatre kid, and it's into a Food & Drink toss-up for $2,000. Something slides into place in my brain and I solve CHEESE DANISH, granting me control for round 1 of traditional Wheel gameplay.
I have always heard it said that playing Wheel of Fortune for real is different from playing at home, which is about half-right.
It is *nothing* like playing at home.
I have, estimating generously, 40% of the brainpower I typically do to figure out puzzles. The rest of my awareness is consumed by deciding what game action to take next, physically spinning a heavy wheel covered in money, clapping, staying aligned with my center mark for the camera, glancing at the used letter board for guidance, clapping, pouring sweat into my suit under blazing stage lights, starting to feel the weight of many nerve-wracked hours, and clapping. Never in my life have I felt my attention so besieged from so many angles. I would soon learn that when it isn't your turn you can go back into spectator mode and commit to working the puzzle out, but while you're the active player you have to be either very good at multitasking or very lucky (my approach).
Now, in case there is anyone in doubt, running the table on a Wheel puzzle is difficult and extremely stressful. For the entirety of this round 1 Phrase puzzle I'm spinning like there is a five-legged rabbit shoved up my butt, buying vowels left and right for precious thinking time, and all the while trying not to pass out as my score snowballs into five digits. The really crazy part is that *I do not have the answer*, not even while using my Wild Card, until it stampedes into my head all at once just before my solve. Considering the structure of the puzzle is quite particular with strong clues like a one-letter word, a two-letter word, and a contraction, I probably would have known it in my living room after two or three letters. I will never make fun of another player for what looks like a stupid move on this game show and I implore you, reader, to refrain as well, because I'll tell you firsthand that could have and probably should have been me right here. Keeping your wits about you as you spin the Wheel of Fortune and stare at a puzzle you should know but can't quite crack is a Herculean feat.
Thankfully, the round one puzzle is close to idiot-proof in that it has the top five consonants plus every vowel, so if there's ever a time to quintuple-dip on the $2,500 wedge while totally in the dark it's right now. There can be no overstating how lucky I get during this puzzle; there are *so many* places I could have missed a letter and passed it to my opponents, and that would have been that.
Round 1 ends with my solve of ROME WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY, and the spins from the four-leaf clover dimension plus my toss-up have me sitting on $14k and change. This is, to put it gently, a good start: more than $14,000 after the first puzzle is an obscene jump on the game, the kind of score it isn't unheard of to see someone win with outright. During my commercial makeup/sweat-mopping session I'm getting excited in the same way I do after drafting a powerful Magic deck. The bad don't-mess-up nerves are out, and the good nerves--the ones that heighten your senses, turn your blood to liquid metal, and silently confirm your winner's mantra--are in.
Round 2 begins. Control of the Wheel passes to Stephanie who does plenty of work on the Before & After puzzle. It's quickly identifiable as SESAME STREET something, which I realize to be HOCKEY a few letters later. At this point I realize how much weaker I am at solving while it's my turn and I thank my stars that I didn't self-destruct during my perfect round 1.
Stephanie fills out the first two words, then loses her turn to a bad P before she can find HOCKEY. Ashley loses her first possession to a bad D. Whatever I've done to deserve it, destiny has put control of the Wheel back in my hands and I know I can solve the puzzle. Plenty of contestants would do so immediately in this spot (perhaps correctly with such a dominant score) to deny Stephanie her medium stack and scoop up the baseline $1,000. However, I have always said people panic-solve for the minimum too readily on this show, not to mention I'm on a high from last round and in a gambling mood. I rattle off H, then C, and as though my luck wanted to prove exactly how much further it could flex, my last spin before solving SESAME STREET HOCKEY is a $3,500 that a chipmunk could have pushed into the Bankrupt wedge by burping on it.
Pat reviews for us: my hoard is $19k, all cash. We go to commercial. The makeup phalanx returns and I can barely keep straight what's happening, where I am, who I am. I could not ask for better at this point in the game. The second toss-up into an impossibly good round 1, plus a why-not $3,500 in my round 2 steal? If I can take the prize puzzle I will have nearly locked up the win and a trip to the Bonus round. I'm in the eye of the hurricane. After like eight seconds of break time it's back to the podiums.
That extra chime means it's time for the round 3 prize puzzle, and it's certainly the most important and lopsidedly-valued traditional puzzle of the show. Unlike the rest of the game's puzzles where wringing out consonants for value can be strategically sound, the prize puzzle is worth such a ludicrous baseline amount that it should be solved the moment you figure it out. Ashley takes her spins and I watch the letters fall into place. Again it is made plain to me how much better I am at playing this game when I don't have to do anything. I have WHALE WATCHING pretty quickly, but I'm stuck on the final word for a while. EXPEDITION doesn't fit. EXPULSION is nonsense (only fish go to school). EXPLOSION is more of a WHALE BEACHING thing. With a thrill, I finally crack it and pray that the turn gets back to me.
And why wouldn't it? After such a preposterous series of lucky swings in my favor, why would they stop now? Ashley is probably one letter away from recognizing the answer to the puzzle when she Bankrupts, and the distant part of me that isn't ecstatic acknowledges she is having a rough game. I solve WHALE WATCHING EXCURSION without hesitation. A Panama Canal cruise valued at just over $7,000 is mine. It could have been a trip to the great Pacific garbage patch and my excitement would not have diminished much. We're back to commercial, and in an awe-inspiring show of sportsmanship neither of my opponents makes a move to strangle me.
If you had asked me earlier that morning where I wanted to be by this point in the show, it would have been laughably greedy to say anywhere near this. My score is $26k and change. My competitors are on a grand and a goose egg. The most reliable ticket back into the game for either of them is safely in my pocket. To be honest, I'm starting to feel a little guilty. I am running away with things in embarrassingly decisive fashion. In a breach of the winner's mentality, I secretly hope that Ashley and Stephanie can pull some money out of the next few rounds--not enough to beat me, obviously, but at least enough to pay for the trip. Enough that their families don't wish me bodily harm.
The triple toss-up, a new game element this season, is next: three toss-up puzzles in quick succession, worth $2,000 apiece and usually thematically or linguistically related. This seems as good a place as any to dig into toss-ups because they are the weak link of my Wheel game by a country mile. My reflexes have never been stellar and overall it's tough for me to find the mental sweet spot of when to buzz--you want to get in there *right before* you know the answer, since there is no penalty for a miss besides the lockout and you get a free instant of thought between ringing in and speaking. I'm not certain but I also may have been buzzing sloppily. I am too early to capitalize on Stephanie's miss of MEDIEVAL CASTLE and I get in late on THE THRONE ROOM, though I finally nail DEEP DARK DUNGEON. I'm thrilled to have performed this well on toss-ups overall, taking the two out of five that grant control of the Wheel and just missing out on two more.
In the interest of full disclosure, the round 4 Landmark puzzle wasn't in the initial draft of this report. I had completely forgotten it, wiped it clean from my memory in its entirety until I saw it at the watch party. Perhaps related, it is the first traditional puzzle I don't win; I call a fairly straightforward T-H sequence before buying a bad A and Stephanie wisely takes THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN for the minimum. Time for the main game is growing short and she probably wants to start in control of a fresh puzzle to maximize her potential earnings for the final spin, which announces itself with a bell at the start of round 5.
Now for the scariest moment of the entire show. Although it doesn't appear in the TV broadcast and therefore is not something I'll explicitly delineate, most Wheel watchers will know that there is only one final spin result that can keep this from being a runaway game for me. I encourage you to watch the far shot of Pat's spin to figure out what about it may have put my heart in my throat. In any case, we land on $600. My lungs and breath are reunited. Consonants are worth $1,600 apiece, and barring our Thing puzzle being THE SENSATION OF SAND GRITTING IN ONE'S BACK TEETH or something written in Welsh, there won't be enough of them to make up the gap. I can't be caught. I've won. I'm headed to the Bonus round.
I'm ashamed to admit this realization disarms me of the competitive edge I've been brandishing, resulting in a last puzzle where I could be much more mentally present than I am. We tag some common letters, I miss with C, and Stephanie, who I'm realizing was probably much better than I was at solving all along, stylishly calls X and gets LABORATORY EXPERIMENT on her next pass.
The main portion of the episode ends, and the nice guy in me is relieved that both Stephanie and Ashley escaped the thousand-dollar minimum prize. I dramatically pause before choosing Event for my Bonus category, after which the stage manager walks me through the Bonus round procedure. I hype Magic: the Gathering to actual American entertainment icon Pat Sajak during the commercial break when he asks about my favorite tabletop games, and he quips back that Monopoly is more his speed. This all feels like part of his routine to calm the contestant for the portion of the episode they have fantasized about reaching for a long time. I'm pretty grateful for it in the moment. Parts of my brain are still MIA after the final spin, watching all this happen through a long tunnel, and I need Pat's banter to pull me out to the final challenge.
Pat's joke upon our return about my being a sure thing to hit the $100,000 glances off the cloak of robotic focus I've hastily put on. Spin Bonus wheel, pull envelope, give to Mr. Sajak. My arm is little more than a claw. We walk closer to the letter board, which from this angle looms monolithic and intimidating. My Event Bonus puzzle after the given RSTLNE reads as such:
_ E _ R L _
_ _ _ _ _ N _
_ _ S _
Not the worst array of starting letters. Far from it. In fact, I'm sure there are former players of my Facebook Bonus game who can get this with no other help. I may have been able to do that myself given an hour or so. Unfortunately, though there is no explicit time limit on choosing letters for the Bonus puzzle, I certainly don't have an hour. Historical precedent dictates that I have somewhere between thirty and ninety seconds from initial reveal to the end buzzer depending on how much I stall. I take as much time between letter picks as feels reasonable. I should have taken longer, much longer, anything to fire another neural connection, to increase my chances a fraction of a percent more.
While I'd love to say my Bonus letter picks are derived from a savant-level interpretation of the puzzle and its structure, once again it's mostly luck with a pinch of good habits. From several sources I researched during the audition process, I know that two of the highest-yield groups of letters you can choose in a modern Bonus round are C D M A and (B/P) G H O, the latter of which became my go-to when I wasn't sure of what else to do when playing Bonuses on the Wheel phone game. Trusting my intuition, I adapt old reliable into P G H A. The results are strong to say the least. The puzzle information I now have to work with is as follows, which I wouldn't be surprised if you can figure out the moment you read it:
_ E A R L _
_ _ _ P A N _
_ A S H
Just like in round 1, I'm ready to faint. It's a treasure trove of assistance. Although this Bonus ends up being a far cry in difficulty from my week's real killers like UPBEAT VIBE and PLAYFUL FOXHOUND (barf), I still don't quite have the answer as Pat falls silent. The ten-second timer begins counting down. I gather up enough presence of mind to talk it out while every other person in the studio must be screaming the answer inside their head. YEARLY something BASH, I'm sure of that much. YEARLY something BASH. What kind of YEARLY BASH?
And in a final thunderbolt of insight, a last furtive check of the used letter board, I see it. With five seconds left I practically shout YEARLY COMPANY BASH, shout it as sure as reading it off a page, and it's over. My wish to play and win at Wheel--not simply to avoid making an ass of myself, but to win and win big--is realized. It's done. As the cherry on top, it turns out I had even defended from a double skunking, two consecutive broadcast weeks of Bonus round defeat. The word "surreal" barely scratches the surface. For maybe the only time in my life thus far I am fully out-of-body. It's a moment that just feels impossible, the sensation between noticing a telltale oddity in a dream and your alarm sounding to wake you up.
Pat opens my Bonus envelope. I've never been more content to see the minimum dollar amount. Meg erupts onto the stage and almost floors me with a tackling hug, flanked by my dad. We shoot the customary happy-happy-joy-joy winner's outro, and in a daze I'm ushered off the stage for the last few steps of the contestant process before I can leave. I need several things repeated to me in this stretch as I'm finally on the mental comedown from the least believable day of my life. I'm sure the team is used to it.
EPILOGUE
After leaving the studio and my legion of new fans, my two lovely guests and I felt there was no other path than a celebration dinner. We agreed we had had enough excitement for the day without any more long drives or table-waiting, so we simply made it rain at our hotel restaurant for a menagerie of drinks, appetizers, steaks, and desserts. The bar even offered some complimentary drink concepts they were working on once it became clear our concerns about happy hour had been rhetorical. The boozy passion fruit concoctions were almost as saccharine-sweet as the win, and I gulped mine readily.
Hopefully my part one commentary about being shunted down the lucky path makes sense now. To say nothing of the entire leadup to it, it's not every episode of Wheel of Fortune that a contestant is as unerringly, infallibly blessed by happenstance as I was in mine. I'm very grateful that such a chance was put in front of me, and equally grateful not to have choked it. I can't prove that the winner's mentality had much to do with it. I also can't prove that it didn't. Some people have reinforced positive thinking, some have superstitious rituals, some have prayer. The devout of any of these camps know there are better uses of time than trying to convince anyone of what works.
My success on the stage notwithstanding, I don't believe my play was far above that of the average contestant. Plenty of people with more gumption or Wheel-watching experience could have outperformed me given all the same opportunities.There were some real leaks in my game that could have had rough consequences, such as:
1. getting overwhelmed during round 1 and stabbing at a few letters at random, which should have tripped me up at some point;
2. using my Wild card when I did--strategically good on $2,500 as long as you're sure your consonant is going to hit, but I wasn't;
3. partially checking out during the final spin. In my defense, even at full power I don't think I would have been able to solve first.
Now I wouldn't say luck was 100% responsible for my win. It was at worst an 80/20 split between us. Joking aside, I do think I showed bits of skill and smarts, namely:
1. milking SESAME STREET HOCKEY rather than solving for the minimum, which I would do again even with how close I came to getting burned;
2. *not* milking WHALE WATCHING EXCURSION, because no streak is hot enough to risk giving away the prize puzzle and a near-guaranteed pass to Bonusland;
3. picking Event and letters I knew I could work with for my Bonus round. Thing is just too broad to be in the discussion. Place is more tempting but not so much as the more narrowed-down Event. By the way, I would have told you before the taping that my ideal Bonus category would be Phrase since I feel I have a good handle on the kinds of verbiage they like to use there, though it's possible I have a new favorite now.
I hesitate to further drag out this already-sprawling tale, but I would be remiss not to add two thoughts, one that was planted in me very recently by the words of a friend and one that's been in my mind since this all began. The first is that not only should your lowest moment not define you, it may indirectly sow the seeds to take you higher than you ever were to start, just as happened with my failing college triggering an increased interest in Wheel and eventually a desire to audition. Closed doors really can yield open windows.
Second, through this whole thing, from driving up to the Wheelmobile to winning more in cash and prizes than I've ever owned in my life, I could not shake the feeling that *this isn't me*. I don't go to huge open casting calls and wait around for hours, hoping against hope that I beat the odds and get in front of a decision-maker. I don't actually get called up and make the crowd laugh as hard as they have all day. I don't advance to a secondary audition. I don't fly to California. I don't sweep up piles of money on one of the world's most famous game shows in a more consummate victory than I could have imagined. At every pertinent point of the entire year-long roller coaster it felt like someone else was wearing my skin, doing the sort of thing I don't do.
The only conclusion to be drawn here is that a life well-lived includes things you are pretty sure you just don't do. And so I'll tell you, at the risk of this becoming a graduation speech, to surprise yourself. Show up early. Wait around late. Talk to the person you don't think will give you the time of day. Attend the party. Apply for the job. Leave yourself unguarded. Show who you are without apology. Risk embarrassment. Risk disappointment. Risk losing. We all know the Wayne Gretzky quote about shots you don't take; in truth, the shots you take often miss, too. You have no way of knowing which ones are goals in the making, which ones will hit their mark. But some of them are. Some of them will. They might be of little consequence. They might be some of the most impactful ones you ever take.
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If you'll indulge me with one last parallel to my favorite tabletop game, there is a time-honored (if hackneyed) tradition of concluding a Magic: the Gathering tournament report with negative callouts and positive shoutouts, or "Slops and Props." I've never won a Magic competition important enough to warrant a report with such an ending, and given how much of fate's favor I expended in the last year I sincerely doubt I'm ever getting a better chance than this.
SLOPS:
-Plane passengers who don't recognize middle seat's armrest privileges. The internet has led me to believe that inside gets the aisle, outside gets a wall and window, and middle gets two armrests, but it was like the Wild West up there.
-The untested flip flops I brought on the trip. I trod California with them for all of 45 minutes before getting a blister and buying different shoes.
-My sweat glands for trying to drown me on television.
-The yellow podium for being far and away the unluckiest thing to happen to me all trip.
-Los Angeles traffic for training all its Uber drivers to fly like bats out of hell. Returning to LAX on our last night was sincerely terrifying. I was sure we would scrape or outright smash into other cars at half a dozen points.
-Wildfires for attempting to swallow the state of California whole. It is really rough over there. Just one more way we got lucky was that the fires didn't affect our trip in any measurable way.
-The digital antenna at our watch party for waiting until 6:57 p.m. to become almost unusable.
-The price of room service. Though it was delicious, you think you know how much it's going to cost after a few surcharges, and it is always more than you think.
-On a similar note, the $5 bottled waters in our hotel room.
PROPS:
-The free cucumber water in the lobby. This right here is what a Magic player calls "strictly better" than that $5 bottle business.
-Andrew at the watch party, for holding our unruly antenna in a reception sweet spot for all of round 1, and whoever came up with putting the thing on a tower of boxes, which somehow worked perfectly when an equally tall glass display case did not.
-In-N-Out Burger burgers for meeting my expectations and then some. Next time I'm skipping fries and making the sandwich a 3x3.
-Caffeine, for being one of the few unanimously accepted performance enhancing drugs.
-Everyone backstage at Wheel--Shannon, Jackie, Teddy, Alex, you guys are rock stars--but especially the makeup team, who charged in like D-Day at each commercial to keep my sweaty mug from looking atrocious.
-The other contestants at the taping. It could have been any of us that broke the bank, and it was great to meet you all and have others to share the nerves of the day with. Special props to one who came over in the hotel restaurant to congratulate me; she was in remarkably good spirits throughout the day's events, even through her would-be guests getting stranded in Texas on the way to see her.
-Every minor instance of good luck in my life that could have arrived but didn't. Unbeknownst to me, you were all busy charging up into a Spirit Bomb.
-Battlegrounds in Midlothian, VA for snap-agreeing to host a watch party on their busiest night of the week. If you're in central Virginia and are seeking tabletop hobby materials from board games to cards to miniatures you must give this place a visit. I've been to a number of game shops and I've never seen one better than Battlegrounds at marrying the charm of a friendly local hangout with the wide open space and inventory of a superstore.
-My dad, who took a late flight after a work meeting to spend less than a day with us in California.
-Everyone back home that patiently waited to find out how I did (especially my mother, for whom being on the outside of a secret is agony). Trust me, I wanted to tell even more than you guys wanted to know. I hope it was worth the wait.
-My girlfriend Meg, who had never been on a commercial airliner before this trip, for fighting through a panic attack and a half on our first flight. You are the most important person in my life and I am so overjoyed and proud that you found the courage to share this experience with me. I love you more than anything.
-Anyone who enjoyed the episode or sat through the entirety of this story. I hope the watching and reading were anywhere near as fun as the doing and documenting!
-The kitchen staff of the Doubletree by Hilton in Culver City, CA. Maybe it was $65,567 in prizes I was tasting but that was the best steak I've ever eaten.
Jamie E.
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PART ONE: GETTING ONTO WHEEL OF FORTUNE
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INTRODUCTION
Hi! My name is Jamie. I recently made an appearance on the syndicated American game show Wheel of Fortune. Depending on who you are and where you are reading an introduction may seem extraneous; I plan to link and copy this as necessary, so please bear with me through any parts that you may already know. Before moving to an episode play-by-play in the second half of this composition, I want to start with some background on what has been the common refrain for a while now: *how in the world did I end up on Wheel of Fortune?*
Though I have known and enjoyed the show for as long as I can remember, unlike many Wheel fans I haven't had lifelong grand designs to play it. Let's wind back the clock a bit. Shortly after sinking into a nice, deep clinical depression in my early 20s I got booted from college and moved back in with my father. Things were strained between us for a while, and many were the draining nights in our family den spent cutting to the core of what had gone so wrong and how exactly I planned to right things. The Wheel/Jeopardy! programming block, however, was a ceasefire, an hour-long reprieve from the uncomfortable talks about recovering from the tailspin I'd watched myself fall into. Though my trivia brain isn't sharp enough for real Jeopardy! aspirations, I've always had a knack for words, especially the logic of arranging letters--I was a county spelling bee competitor as a child, I anagram words and phrases almost reflexively, and I will throw down in bare-knuckle Scrabble with anybody who asks. All of this being the case, it should come as no surprise that I gravitated toward Wheel of Fortune.
I viewed and played alongl more as the years passed, through meeting my extraordinary girlfriend Meg, treating my depression, and clawing into the workforce without a degree. I went from a casual fan to someone who would request flipping the program on at 7 o'clock. I can specifically recall the Bonus puzzle that made me say, "Wow, I could play on this show. I could beat the Bonus round. I could win it." It was a rerun in the summer of 2016, a Person puzzle with several of the "killer" consonants that have become all the rage in Bonuses of late: JAZZ GUITARIST. It was clearly intended to be a rough solve, with a more common yet impossible phantom answer (BASS GUITARIST) that would put blinders on all but the most disciplined contenders. In spite of hitting the G, the contestant couldn't get there. I spit the solution out like I was reading it off a page. That day I resolved that if the stars ever aligned, I would play Wheel of Fortune.
Now, there are two main routes to kicking off a Wheel journey: the smart way, and the lucky way. The smart way is to upload a minute-long video that gives a taste of your personality and shows why you would be a worthwhile contestant to have on the show. Someone will eventually watch this video, so if you're fun, interesting, and stand out from the pack enough, you advance to the next stage. The lucky way entails crossing paths with the Wheelmobile, the show's official Winnebago that serves as an auditioning command center, at which point you spend a day standing around in a group of hundreds while you cross your fingers for the slim chance to be called onstage for an interview and mock game.
In what would become my calling card during this saga, I ended up on the lucky path. My dad clipped a newspaper article in the fall of 2018 which advertised a weekend Wheelmobile event at Stony Point Fashion Park. The Wheelmobile covers cities major and minor, but it's far from exhaustive; most of its followers would consider driving less than two hours for it a no-brainer. Some superfans gather in groups for a pilgrimage of three hours or more.
Stony Point is twenty minutes from my dad's house. It looked a lot like stars in alignment to me.
AUDITIONS
Although there were two Wheelmobile days I could have attended, I had Saturday plans already in place that weekend. Breaking a commitment to my significant other felt like no way to enter this sort of process with good vibes, so I showed up on Sunday morning prepared for the long haul.
Cut to five or six hours later, by which point I had downed many ounces of energy drink to stay peppy and interview-ready at a moment's notice. I could hear color and my skin was vibrating. To complete the very stable self-portrait I was painting, I was repeatedly muttering the personal spiel I had jotted down upon hearing one person too many talk about children or a dog as their fun fact. However, it was starting to look as though the preparation slingshot I had planted myself in was for naught; per the time that had been blocked out there would be only a handful more people called that day. The odds were well and truly against me.
Never tell me the odds. I heard my name, the fourth of five in one of the day's final groups. I exulted loudly, jumped two feet into the air, and since my cool guy image was clearly still salvageable I forwent the full Area 51 ninja sprint and settled on a half-jog to the stageside. Thank God I had spent all day dialing in that speech. This was where I would be marked as either a promising candidate for a follow-up audition or just another face in the crowd.
I'm going to be humble through most of this report, I promise I am. An amazing number of things went right that were partially or totally out of my control. I got lucky in a lot of places. But not here. *I CRUSHED that interview*. I'm sure it was one of the most memorable of the day. I led off with my age, my job, and an easy opening for the host, Marty, to playfully dunk on me: "I still live with my parents! What up, millenials!" We got around to my hobbies, including that I was a competitive Magic: the Gathering player who would love to play the card game professionally, and he deadpanned to the audience, "He is never leaving the house." The crowd laughed in an uproar. I couldn't keep a grin off my face as Marty shook my hand. It had not been just another interview. It had been good. Better than good--entertaining. TV-caliber. I was positive it had been.
The On the Map puzzle itself was anti-climactic; I guessed a bad O and the first person in line cracked it on her second turn. Though I would have been happier displaying some solving acumen along with my strong interview, I told myself it wouldn't matter and gladly took home my new t-shirt and paper Wheelmobile model.
Fast-forward to the middle of 2019. I would still reminisce back to Wheelmobile day on occasion but per the time interval we had been led to expect, I had mostly counted myself out. Hey, I tried. Maybe I could see about that video thing once the mandatory year between audition attempts had elapsed. I opened my email during an afternoon workout with the boys and my eyes shot to the subject line WHEEL OF FORTUNE CONTESTANT AUDITION, all capitalized. I was purportedly invited to the next stage of auditions, one of which was being held right in Richmond, VA. My heart was a jackhammer as I scanned the email for authenticity. Punctuation intact, everything spelled correctly, listed address wasn't an abandoned warehouse...nothing stuck out as a scam red flag. I called the number listed and received some official-sounding information, then gave some of my own. The ember of hope that had smoldered feebly for months roared to life anew. I had advanced!
I stepped up my Wheel-watching discipline to stay sharp, and my workplace was thrilled to shuffle some hours around once I told them the unique circumstances of the half-day I needed to take. I arrived downtown the morning of the audition with application and amateur headshot in hand to find sixty or seventy other hopefuls. I had read in my preparation that the auditioners in this phase pay close attention to how much you act like you're already on the show, so I did. From the most visible aisle seat I could grab I did my best trained seal impression, clapping nonstop at others' successes and pulling a disappointed "aw, shucks" face at their misses. One player in our popcorn-style mock game came within inches of solving a Same Name puzzle before brain-farting and punting it over to me. I heard "Can I get a Y?" leave my lips and internally grimaced. (The audition team, along with Pat Sajak himself, dislikes complicating phraseology being tacked onto letter guesses--I kicked myself for not simply saying "Y"!) But I rallied from the gaffe and solved the puzzle with my best loud, clear, well-enunciated radio voice. I won a hat and the room's applause.
The written test followed in what was without question the shortest five minutes ever perceived by a human being. I think I solved twelve out of the sixteen puzzles, then did what I could for partial credit on the rest. There were some boneheaded misses that I figured out later in the day, in particular a simple Before & After that had clearly been intended to test basic understanding of how the category works.
Next came an agonizingly long wait with a somewhat outdated montage of Wheel best-of moments while the audition team vacated the room for grading purposes. They returned with a list of names, insisting that being asked to leave at this point was not an automatic no, and that being asked to stay was not an automatic yes; it simply meant there were some folks that had to be observed further. I was pretty sure this was a pacifier to get people to leave without a fight. All through high school and college I operated in the acting world where you will hear the very same disclaimer regarding callbacks for a role, and in that realm "callback good, dismissal bad" holds true 99% of the time. The list of perhaps twelve names included one Jamie that wasn't me. I felt a pang of disappointment but put on a smile, wished luck to those remaining, and left for work.
This was surely the end of the road. Wasn't it? I combed over the day obsessively. I did...fine. I dressed well without overdressing. I smiled and clapped like a maniac. I spoke loudly, clearly. I solved a 90% finished puzzle. I thoughtlessly appended "can I get a -" to a letter guess. I think I did well on the written portion, though not top of the class. Could there have been no need for further examination? Could I have shown all they needed to see? Judging my secondary audition on its own merits it seemed things must be over, but I dared to continue carrying the hope, dared to keep it barely, barely alive.
It turned out I didn't have to carry it far. At a movie night with friends, sooner than I could possibly have expected it, so soon it was dumbfounding, I got an email. There was no way. I was dismissed from the last audition, plus the team had specified times and modes of communication that contradicted this. I tried in vain to keep my expectations low and forestall the excitement that had already begun exploding in me. I shakily dialed the listed number, unable to keep breathless joy from escaping into my voicemail but needing to confirm that everything I'd read was legitimate. The swift callback came with me to a neighboring room. We talked.
I heard silence in the living room as the call ended, which I obligingly broke: "I'M GONNA BE ON WHEEL OF FORTUNE, GUYS!"
THE TRIP
I am not a well-traveled man. The flurry of activity that accompanied the once-in-a-lifetime chance to play America's game was therefore new and plenty stressful--I was out of practice at booking a hotel, I hadn't flown since I was about 10, heck, I had never even used Uber until I downloaded it the day before our flights out. To say nothing of events related to Wheel of Fortune, my girlfriend Meg and I have also been at the epicenter of a number of life changes of late, from moving into a house together to taking on new job challenges.
It was clear from the start that this whole affair wasn't so much out of Meg's comfort zone as it was squinting in search of her comfort zone from orbit, so in order to make it a satisfying and worthwhile vacation we stuffed several tourist-y activites into our short visit to the Golden State. We had an excellent room service breakfast our first morning where a freshly-squeezed glass of orange juice ruined every carton of Tropicana for me forever. The Santa Monica pier and adjacent beach were beautiful and iconically Californian. I couldn't pass up the chance to leave my mark and an RVA tag in the high scores of the arcade's Guitar Hero machine. At my dinnertime urging we sampled the wares of In-N-Out Burger, which strongly reminded me of a West coast hamburger version of Chick-fil-A in most respects from cleanliness (spotless) to employee quality (high) to popularity (jam-packed) to nomenclature (hyphenated). The primary differences appeared to be relative price, which while premium for Richmond was quite fair in Los Angeles, and french fry quality. Sorry In-N-Out, you've got some catching up to do in that department.
The evening before the taping was quiet. I opened the Wheel of Fortune phone app I had downloaded during the audition process and played as many puzzles as my free tickets allowed. Of course we watched the night's TV broadcast of Wheel where I was jubilant at nailing a tricky Food & Drink Bonus round. A good omen, I hoped. For some reason, watching this episode appeared to really stir something in Meg. The possibility of my winning a sizeable amount of money for us, perhaps not life-changing but certainly life-affecting, was setting in. With tears in her eyes she implored me to play hard the next day, to do anything I could to make it happen and help us continue building our lives together. I assured her that I was only a bit nervous, and at that point it was true. I was less nervous than I tend to be before even a modestly-sized Magic tournament. This makes little sense when you compare the relative stakes and probabilities of each situation, but what can you do? Emotions are weird.
I ironed the next day's shirt and tried sleeping until it became apparent that our room's air conditioning refused to bring the temperature below 75 degrees. Anyone who has watched me sweat at the slightest provocation knows this was a no-go for me, and a hotel technician came up in short order to reset our system. Ultimately I didn't get to sleep until close to 11:00 PM--much later than I wanted given the hour I'd have to wake. My final thoughts before drifting off were of Meg's hopes for the following day, hopes that mirrored my own.
I woke up on taping day at 3:45 and rolled over knowing full well I would not be getting another wink. I settled for listening to Meg's breathing with closed eyes in an attempt to suggest sleep to myself and calm my thoughts. Another fool's errand. I finally kicked off my morning routine a little after 5:00, waking Meg toward the end so she could admire me in my new suit, then left her to her three extra hours of sleep while I went to the hotel lobby to wait for the Sony Studios shuttle.
Nearly everyone who talks about playing Wheel of Fortune mentions that taping day goes by in a flash. I'll agree that parts of it do, and I'd love to tell you about them. Unfortunately the details of the behind-the-scenes contestant experience are kept under tight lock and key, so you'll have to excuse me for not diving into it here. Suffice to say that while preparatory pieces of the day alongside our new friends the contestant coordinators did meld together and pass by quickly, other parts bordered on interminable. A number of restrictions exist on the activities and interactions permitted to contestants while within studio walls in order to ensure the security and fairness of the competition. For an introvert like myself, this meant that between nervous pleasantries I had a lot of time alone with my own thoughts.
I'm convinced my greatest asset on tape day, especially during this period of relative isolation, was nothing to do with word puzzles but rather experience in high-pressure mental competition settings. Years of Magic: the Gathering tournaments, often on too little sleep and against players better and smarter than myself, have conferred upon me knowledge of how to help my brain think under fire and, just as importantly, how to avoid mental traps. A player who makes it into the tense single-elimination playoff that is a Magic top 8 and says, "Wow, this is better than I expected to do, I'm just happy to be here," has all but cooked their own goose. Making top 8 is fine and dandy but taking down a tournament comes of NOT being happy just to be there.
You must say, "I'm not done here. I came to win. I CAN win. I MUST win. I WILL win." Think this and say it to yourself, over and over, until you believe it without doubt. No one can believe in you more than you do yourself.
Let's talk about the other side of this winner's mentality for a moment. I have a reasonably well-cultivated reputation for being a nice guy to play Magic with. I adore the poetic rhythm of a well-fought game where both sides make meaningful decisions and the one who deserves the win gets it, I lament when anything unfun gets in the way of that, and I can usually take some satisfaction from a cool, well-engineered play even when it results in my head on a stick. Unfortunately the mentality I describe which is so helpful in the pursuit of a win can directly lead to poor sportsmanship or "salt" when its bearer comes up short, because that person is being forced to reckon with an incongruous reality from the one they have assured themselves will arrive. It is a tough tightrope to walk and demands great control of your own attitude to flip from "Losing is not an option" to "Hey, it's just a game, well played." I don't believe anyone is perfect at this, myself included; there exist Magic players to whom I've represented myself poorly in the loser's postgame, and their esteem for me is rightfully low. Nevertheless, I try to make losing well a habit in any game I play, and I typically find myself able to wear a winner's killer edge and loser's grace on either side of the same button.
What does this have to do with Wheel of Fortune? You see, I had to handhold my brain through this entire thought process as though for the first time shortly before my taping.
"Really, it's just amazing that I got this far," I thought.
"Money would be nice, but the experience is the real prize," I decided.
"It's not so bad if I don't win," I conceded.
The moment I realized what I was doing, I cut myself off. I was dulling the edge. Scuffing both sides of the button. Curbing the negative emotions before they could come while also dousing the winner's fire that could be my greatest asset. If I, a relatively seasoned competitor, was thinking this way, there was a chance my two opponents were as well. I would be at an advantage if I could rise above it and they could not.
I snuffed the consolation thoughts out. If I came up short, if the Wheel just wouldn't cooperate, if I lost, I could trust myself mentally and emotionally to flip to the loser's side with dignity. Until then I would compete with everything I had and believe that I would win. *Know* that I would win.
At last, my two opponents and I received microphones and took our places onstage, me at the middle yellow podium--my least favorite of the three, not even close. I absorbed the whole of the stage from my perch and noted how much larger the cameras make it appear on TV. My eyes found Meg and my dad in the crowd, the sight of them neither alleviating nor exacerbating my nerves.
Jackie, one of our backstage coordinators and a potentially infinite source of energy who should be turned over to Earth's top scientists, hyped us up in front of the audience like a sugar-buzzed drill sergeant as a last blessing before the game. Her job is to get contestants pumped, loud, and ready to play, and she is very good at it. Finally, she vacated the set. The three of us were alone. Well, we were if you ignored the crew, the few hundred eyeballs, and the few million more waiting for us in the future.
And with barely a minute's warning--a couple of months' warning--no warning at all, really--we were rolling. The classic "WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!" chant rang out. Jim Thornton's black-coffee baritone summoned two of the most recognized faces in show business from behind the iconic letter board. Vanna took her post at the screens while Pat instructed us to lift our buzzers for the first toss-up.
It was time to play.
CONTINUED IN PART TWO
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PART TWO: PLAYING WHEEL OF FORTUNE
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(This piece contains spoilers concerning the outcome of my 12/06/2019 Wheel of Fortune appearance. Also, I'm switching to the present tense for this gameplay part because it's more dramatic. Grammatically inconsistent from part one? Sure, but it's my report and I'll do what I want.)
GAME TIME
A toss-up puzzle I could have gotten from the couch but in the moment have no chance at starts the game with $1,000 for Stephanie, the player to my left, when she revises Ashley's MAKING MOVIES into MAKING MEMORIES. Our week's theme is Safe Travels and as the first toss-up this should be connected to it. I suppose traveling is a good time to make memories, and it would be best to stay safe while doing so? In any case, I end up being glad I had only invested ten fruitless minutes of research into our theme before deciding to wing it, because it feels like it doesn't have too much influence over the subject matter of our puzzles. Pat does his signature chat with each of us in turn, I smile and nod through his mentions of tabletop gaming and amateur rapping with way too many butterflies for a former theatre kid, and it's into a Food & Drink toss-up for $2,000. Something slides into place in my brain and I solve CHEESE DANISH, granting me control for round 1 of traditional Wheel gameplay.
I have always heard it said that playing Wheel of Fortune for real is different from playing at home, which is about half-right.
It is *nothing* like playing at home.
I have, estimating generously, 40% of the brainpower I typically do to figure out puzzles. The rest of my awareness is consumed by deciding what game action to take next, physically spinning a heavy wheel covered in money, clapping, staying aligned with my center mark for the camera, glancing at the used letter board for guidance, clapping, pouring sweat into my suit under blazing stage lights, starting to feel the weight of many nerve-wracked hours, and clapping. Never in my life have I felt my attention so besieged from so many angles. I would soon learn that when it isn't your turn you can go back into spectator mode and commit to working the puzzle out, but while you're the active player you have to be either very good at multitasking or very lucky (my approach).
Now, in case there is anyone in doubt, running the table on a Wheel puzzle is difficult and extremely stressful. For the entirety of this round 1 Phrase puzzle I'm spinning like there is a five-legged rabbit shoved up my butt, buying vowels left and right for precious thinking time, and all the while trying not to pass out as my score snowballs into five digits. The really crazy part is that *I do not have the answer*, not even while using my Wild Card, until it stampedes into my head all at once just before my solve. Considering the structure of the puzzle is quite particular with strong clues like a one-letter word, a two-letter word, and a contraction, I probably would have known it in my living room after two or three letters. I will never make fun of another player for what looks like a stupid move on this game show and I implore you, reader, to refrain as well, because I'll tell you firsthand that could have and probably should have been me right here. Keeping your wits about you as you spin the Wheel of Fortune and stare at a puzzle you should know but can't quite crack is a Herculean feat.
Thankfully, the round one puzzle is close to idiot-proof in that it has the top five consonants plus every vowel, so if there's ever a time to quintuple-dip on the $2,500 wedge while totally in the dark it's right now. There can be no overstating how lucky I get during this puzzle; there are *so many* places I could have missed a letter and passed it to my opponents, and that would have been that.
Round 1 ends with my solve of ROME WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY, and the spins from the four-leaf clover dimension plus my toss-up have me sitting on $14k and change. This is, to put it gently, a good start: more than $14,000 after the first puzzle is an obscene jump on the game, the kind of score it isn't unheard of to see someone win with outright. During my commercial makeup/sweat-mopping session I'm getting excited in the same way I do after drafting a powerful Magic deck. The bad don't-mess-up nerves are out, and the good nerves--the ones that heighten your senses, turn your blood to liquid metal, and silently confirm your winner's mantra--are in.
Round 2 begins. Control of the Wheel passes to Stephanie who does plenty of work on the Before & After puzzle. It's quickly identifiable as SESAME STREET something, which I realize to be HOCKEY a few letters later. At this point I realize how much weaker I am at solving while it's my turn and I thank my stars that I didn't self-destruct during my perfect round 1.
Stephanie fills out the first two words, then loses her turn to a bad P before she can find HOCKEY. Ashley loses her first possession to a bad D. Whatever I've done to deserve it, destiny has put control of the Wheel back in my hands and I know I can solve the puzzle. Plenty of contestants would do so immediately in this spot (perhaps correctly with such a dominant score) to deny Stephanie her medium stack and scoop up the baseline $1,000. However, I have always said people panic-solve for the minimum too readily on this show, not to mention I'm on a high from last round and in a gambling mood. I rattle off H, then C, and as though my luck wanted to prove exactly how much further it could flex, my last spin before solving SESAME STREET HOCKEY is a $3,500 that a chipmunk could have pushed into the Bankrupt wedge by burping on it.
Pat reviews for us: my hoard is $19k, all cash. We go to commercial. The makeup phalanx returns and I can barely keep straight what's happening, where I am, who I am. I could not ask for better at this point in the game. The second toss-up into an impossibly good round 1, plus a why-not $3,500 in my round 2 steal? If I can take the prize puzzle I will have nearly locked up the win and a trip to the Bonus round. I'm in the eye of the hurricane. After like eight seconds of break time it's back to the podiums.
That extra chime means it's time for the round 3 prize puzzle, and it's certainly the most important and lopsidedly-valued traditional puzzle of the show. Unlike the rest of the game's puzzles where wringing out consonants for value can be strategically sound, the prize puzzle is worth such a ludicrous baseline amount that it should be solved the moment you figure it out. Ashley takes her spins and I watch the letters fall into place. Again it is made plain to me how much better I am at playing this game when I don't have to do anything. I have WHALE WATCHING pretty quickly, but I'm stuck on the final word for a while. EXPEDITION doesn't fit. EXPULSION is nonsense (only fish go to school). EXPLOSION is more of a WHALE BEACHING thing. With a thrill, I finally crack it and pray that the turn gets back to me.
And why wouldn't it? After such a preposterous series of lucky swings in my favor, why would they stop now? Ashley is probably one letter away from recognizing the answer to the puzzle when she Bankrupts, and the distant part of me that isn't ecstatic acknowledges she is having a rough game. I solve WHALE WATCHING EXCURSION without hesitation. A Panama Canal cruise valued at just over $7,000 is mine. It could have been a trip to the great Pacific garbage patch and my excitement would not have diminished much. We're back to commercial, and in an awe-inspiring show of sportsmanship neither of my opponents makes a move to strangle me.
If you had asked me earlier that morning where I wanted to be by this point in the show, it would have been laughably greedy to say anywhere near this. My score is $26k and change. My competitors are on a grand and a goose egg. The most reliable ticket back into the game for either of them is safely in my pocket. To be honest, I'm starting to feel a little guilty. I am running away with things in embarrassingly decisive fashion. In a breach of the winner's mentality, I secretly hope that Ashley and Stephanie can pull some money out of the next few rounds--not enough to beat me, obviously, but at least enough to pay for the trip. Enough that their families don't wish me bodily harm.
The triple toss-up, a new game element this season, is next: three toss-up puzzles in quick succession, worth $2,000 apiece and usually thematically or linguistically related. This seems as good a place as any to dig into toss-ups because they are the weak link of my Wheel game by a country mile. My reflexes have never been stellar and overall it's tough for me to find the mental sweet spot of when to buzz--you want to get in there *right before* you know the answer, since there is no penalty for a miss besides the lockout and you get a free instant of thought between ringing in and speaking. I'm not certain but I also may have been buzzing sloppily. I am too early to capitalize on Stephanie's miss of MEDIEVAL CASTLE and I get in late on THE THRONE ROOM, though I finally nail DEEP DARK DUNGEON. I'm thrilled to have performed this well on toss-ups overall, taking the two out of five that grant control of the Wheel and just missing out on two more.
In the interest of full disclosure, the round 4 Landmark puzzle wasn't in the initial draft of this report. I had completely forgotten it, wiped it clean from my memory in its entirety until I saw it at the watch party. Perhaps related, it is the first traditional puzzle I don't win; I call a fairly straightforward T-H sequence before buying a bad A and Stephanie wisely takes THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN for the minimum. Time for the main game is growing short and she probably wants to start in control of a fresh puzzle to maximize her potential earnings for the final spin, which announces itself with a bell at the start of round 5.
Now for the scariest moment of the entire show. Although it doesn't appear in the TV broadcast and therefore is not something I'll explicitly delineate, most Wheel watchers will know that there is only one final spin result that can keep this from being a runaway game for me. I encourage you to watch the far shot of Pat's spin to figure out what about it may have put my heart in my throat. In any case, we land on $600. My lungs and breath are reunited. Consonants are worth $1,600 apiece, and barring our Thing puzzle being THE SENSATION OF SAND GRITTING IN ONE'S BACK TEETH or something written in Welsh, there won't be enough of them to make up the gap. I can't be caught. I've won. I'm headed to the Bonus round.
I'm ashamed to admit this realization disarms me of the competitive edge I've been brandishing, resulting in a last puzzle where I could be much more mentally present than I am. We tag some common letters, I miss with C, and Stephanie, who I'm realizing was probably much better than I was at solving all along, stylishly calls X and gets LABORATORY EXPERIMENT on her next pass.
The main portion of the episode ends, and the nice guy in me is relieved that both Stephanie and Ashley escaped the thousand-dollar minimum prize. I dramatically pause before choosing Event for my Bonus category, after which the stage manager walks me through the Bonus round procedure. I hype Magic: the Gathering to actual American entertainment icon Pat Sajak during the commercial break when he asks about my favorite tabletop games, and he quips back that Monopoly is more his speed. This all feels like part of his routine to calm the contestant for the portion of the episode they have fantasized about reaching for a long time. I'm pretty grateful for it in the moment. Parts of my brain are still MIA after the final spin, watching all this happen through a long tunnel, and I need Pat's banter to pull me out to the final challenge.
Pat's joke upon our return about my being a sure thing to hit the $100,000 glances off the cloak of robotic focus I've hastily put on. Spin Bonus wheel, pull envelope, give to Mr. Sajak. My arm is little more than a claw. We walk closer to the letter board, which from this angle looms monolithic and intimidating. My Event Bonus puzzle after the given RSTLNE reads as such:
_ E _ R L _
_ _ _ _ _ N _
_ _ S _
Not the worst array of starting letters. Far from it. In fact, I'm sure there are former players of my Facebook Bonus game who can get this with no other help. I may have been able to do that myself given an hour or so. Unfortunately, though there is no explicit time limit on choosing letters for the Bonus puzzle, I certainly don't have an hour. Historical precedent dictates that I have somewhere between thirty and ninety seconds from initial reveal to the end buzzer depending on how much I stall. I take as much time between letter picks as feels reasonable. I should have taken longer, much longer, anything to fire another neural connection, to increase my chances a fraction of a percent more.
While I'd love to say my Bonus letter picks are derived from a savant-level interpretation of the puzzle and its structure, once again it's mostly luck with a pinch of good habits. From several sources I researched during the audition process, I know that two of the highest-yield groups of letters you can choose in a modern Bonus round are C D M A and (B/P) G H O, the latter of which became my go-to when I wasn't sure of what else to do when playing Bonuses on the Wheel phone game. Trusting my intuition, I adapt old reliable into P G H A. The results are strong to say the least. The puzzle information I now have to work with is as follows, which I wouldn't be surprised if you can figure out the moment you read it:
_ E A R L _
_ _ _ P A N _
_ A S H
Just like in round 1, I'm ready to faint. It's a treasure trove of assistance. Although this Bonus ends up being a far cry in difficulty from my week's real killers like UPBEAT VIBE and PLAYFUL FOXHOUND (barf), I still don't quite have the answer as Pat falls silent. The ten-second timer begins counting down. I gather up enough presence of mind to talk it out while every other person in the studio must be screaming the answer inside their head. YEARLY something BASH, I'm sure of that much. YEARLY something BASH. What kind of YEARLY BASH?
And in a final thunderbolt of insight, a last furtive check of the used letter board, I see it. With five seconds left I practically shout YEARLY COMPANY BASH, shout it as sure as reading it off a page, and it's over. My wish to play and win at Wheel--not simply to avoid making an ass of myself, but to win and win big--is realized. It's done. As the cherry on top, it turns out I had even defended from a double skunking, two consecutive broadcast weeks of Bonus round defeat. The word "surreal" barely scratches the surface. For maybe the only time in my life thus far I am fully out-of-body. It's a moment that just feels impossible, the sensation between noticing a telltale oddity in a dream and your alarm sounding to wake you up.
Pat opens my Bonus envelope. I've never been more content to see the minimum dollar amount. Meg erupts onto the stage and almost floors me with a tackling hug, flanked by my dad. We shoot the customary happy-happy-joy-joy winner's outro, and in a daze I'm ushered off the stage for the last few steps of the contestant process before I can leave. I need several things repeated to me in this stretch as I'm finally on the mental comedown from the least believable day of my life. I'm sure the team is used to it.
EPILOGUE
After leaving the studio and my legion of new fans, my two lovely guests and I felt there was no other path than a celebration dinner. We agreed we had had enough excitement for the day without any more long drives or table-waiting, so we simply made it rain at our hotel restaurant for a menagerie of drinks, appetizers, steaks, and desserts. The bar even offered some complimentary drink concepts they were working on once it became clear our concerns about happy hour had been rhetorical. The boozy passion fruit concoctions were almost as saccharine-sweet as the win, and I gulped mine readily.
Hopefully my part one commentary about being shunted down the lucky path makes sense now. To say nothing of the entire leadup to it, it's not every episode of Wheel of Fortune that a contestant is as unerringly, infallibly blessed by happenstance as I was in mine. I'm very grateful that such a chance was put in front of me, and equally grateful not to have choked it. I can't prove that the winner's mentality had much to do with it. I also can't prove that it didn't. Some people have reinforced positive thinking, some have superstitious rituals, some have prayer. The devout of any of these camps know there are better uses of time than trying to convince anyone of what works.
My success on the stage notwithstanding, I don't believe my play was far above that of the average contestant. Plenty of people with more gumption or Wheel-watching experience could have outperformed me given all the same opportunities.There were some real leaks in my game that could have had rough consequences, such as:
1. getting overwhelmed during round 1 and stabbing at a few letters at random, which should have tripped me up at some point;
2. using my Wild card when I did--strategically good on $2,500 as long as you're sure your consonant is going to hit, but I wasn't;
3. partially checking out during the final spin. In my defense, even at full power I don't think I would have been able to solve first.
Now I wouldn't say luck was 100% responsible for my win. It was at worst an 80/20 split between us. Joking aside, I do think I showed bits of skill and smarts, namely:
1. milking SESAME STREET HOCKEY rather than solving for the minimum, which I would do again even with how close I came to getting burned;
2. *not* milking WHALE WATCHING EXCURSION, because no streak is hot enough to risk giving away the prize puzzle and a near-guaranteed pass to Bonusland;
3. picking Event and letters I knew I could work with for my Bonus round. Thing is just too broad to be in the discussion. Place is more tempting but not so much as the more narrowed-down Event. By the way, I would have told you before the taping that my ideal Bonus category would be Phrase since I feel I have a good handle on the kinds of verbiage they like to use there, though it's possible I have a new favorite now.
I hesitate to further drag out this already-sprawling tale, but I would be remiss not to add two thoughts, one that was planted in me very recently by the words of a friend and one that's been in my mind since this all began. The first is that not only should your lowest moment not define you, it may indirectly sow the seeds to take you higher than you ever were to start, just as happened with my failing college triggering an increased interest in Wheel and eventually a desire to audition. Closed doors really can yield open windows.
Second, through this whole thing, from driving up to the Wheelmobile to winning more in cash and prizes than I've ever owned in my life, I could not shake the feeling that *this isn't me*. I don't go to huge open casting calls and wait around for hours, hoping against hope that I beat the odds and get in front of a decision-maker. I don't actually get called up and make the crowd laugh as hard as they have all day. I don't advance to a secondary audition. I don't fly to California. I don't sweep up piles of money on one of the world's most famous game shows in a more consummate victory than I could have imagined. At every pertinent point of the entire year-long roller coaster it felt like someone else was wearing my skin, doing the sort of thing I don't do.
The only conclusion to be drawn here is that a life well-lived includes things you are pretty sure you just don't do. And so I'll tell you, at the risk of this becoming a graduation speech, to surprise yourself. Show up early. Wait around late. Talk to the person you don't think will give you the time of day. Attend the party. Apply for the job. Leave yourself unguarded. Show who you are without apology. Risk embarrassment. Risk disappointment. Risk losing. We all know the Wayne Gretzky quote about shots you don't take; in truth, the shots you take often miss, too. You have no way of knowing which ones are goals in the making, which ones will hit their mark. But some of them are. Some of them will. They might be of little consequence. They might be some of the most impactful ones you ever take.
- - - - - - - - - -
If you'll indulge me with one last parallel to my favorite tabletop game, there is a time-honored (if hackneyed) tradition of concluding a Magic: the Gathering tournament report with negative callouts and positive shoutouts, or "Slops and Props." I've never won a Magic competition important enough to warrant a report with such an ending, and given how much of fate's favor I expended in the last year I sincerely doubt I'm ever getting a better chance than this.
SLOPS:
-Plane passengers who don't recognize middle seat's armrest privileges. The internet has led me to believe that inside gets the aisle, outside gets a wall and window, and middle gets two armrests, but it was like the Wild West up there.
-The untested flip flops I brought on the trip. I trod California with them for all of 45 minutes before getting a blister and buying different shoes.
-My sweat glands for trying to drown me on television.
-The yellow podium for being far and away the unluckiest thing to happen to me all trip.
-Los Angeles traffic for training all its Uber drivers to fly like bats out of hell. Returning to LAX on our last night was sincerely terrifying. I was sure we would scrape or outright smash into other cars at half a dozen points.
-Wildfires for attempting to swallow the state of California whole. It is really rough over there. Just one more way we got lucky was that the fires didn't affect our trip in any measurable way.
-The digital antenna at our watch party for waiting until 6:57 p.m. to become almost unusable.
-The price of room service. Though it was delicious, you think you know how much it's going to cost after a few surcharges, and it is always more than you think.
-On a similar note, the $5 bottled waters in our hotel room.
PROPS:
-The free cucumber water in the lobby. This right here is what a Magic player calls "strictly better" than that $5 bottle business.
-Andrew at the watch party, for holding our unruly antenna in a reception sweet spot for all of round 1, and whoever came up with putting the thing on a tower of boxes, which somehow worked perfectly when an equally tall glass display case did not.
-In-N-Out Burger burgers for meeting my expectations and then some. Next time I'm skipping fries and making the sandwich a 3x3.
-Caffeine, for being one of the few unanimously accepted performance enhancing drugs.
-Everyone backstage at Wheel--Shannon, Jackie, Teddy, Alex, you guys are rock stars--but especially the makeup team, who charged in like D-Day at each commercial to keep my sweaty mug from looking atrocious.
-The other contestants at the taping. It could have been any of us that broke the bank, and it was great to meet you all and have others to share the nerves of the day with. Special props to one who came over in the hotel restaurant to congratulate me; she was in remarkably good spirits throughout the day's events, even through her would-be guests getting stranded in Texas on the way to see her.
-Every minor instance of good luck in my life that could have arrived but didn't. Unbeknownst to me, you were all busy charging up into a Spirit Bomb.
-Battlegrounds in Midlothian, VA for snap-agreeing to host a watch party on their busiest night of the week. If you're in central Virginia and are seeking tabletop hobby materials from board games to cards to miniatures you must give this place a visit. I've been to a number of game shops and I've never seen one better than Battlegrounds at marrying the charm of a friendly local hangout with the wide open space and inventory of a superstore.
-My dad, who took a late flight after a work meeting to spend less than a day with us in California.
-Everyone back home that patiently waited to find out how I did (especially my mother, for whom being on the outside of a secret is agony). Trust me, I wanted to tell even more than you guys wanted to know. I hope it was worth the wait.
-My girlfriend Meg, who had never been on a commercial airliner before this trip, for fighting through a panic attack and a half on our first flight. You are the most important person in my life and I am so overjoyed and proud that you found the courage to share this experience with me. I love you more than anything.
-Anyone who enjoyed the episode or sat through the entirety of this story. I hope the watching and reading were anywhere near as fun as the doing and documenting!
-The kitchen staff of the Doubletree by Hilton in Culver City, CA. Maybe it was $65,567 in prizes I was tasting but that was the best steak I've ever eaten.
Jamie E.
