Last May, Cliff Galiher won $100,000 and the Jeopardy College Championship.
And tonight, the third-year film student will be back on the show to compete in the Tournament of Champions.
This tournament takes the most successful players of the last year and pits them against each other for a $250,000 grand prize.
Galiher, as the champion of the college tournament, was invited back to compete this time against the regular-season winners, not just against other students.
“Just before the tournament started I was talking with one of the five-day champions who was a law professor and I felt reasonably intimidated by that,” Galiher said.
“I’m 20 years old and I wish I could have at least gotten through college and learned more stuff.”
Though having fewer years of life experience to accrue trivia, Galiher felt that his preparations for this second time around were at least as good as some of his competition.
“The day that we met for the tournament we found out that one of the other players was reading the exact same trivia book that I was. She was a former five-day winner so I was on the right track,” Galiher said. He studied using “The Cultural Literacy Trivia Guide” as well as j-archive.com, a site that records answers to past jeopardy questions.
“There are lots of categories that they are very fond of,” he said. “Certainly you want to know your presidents, know your world capitals and quite a bit of pop culture.”
But while the competition came in suits and ties rather than in university sweatshirts, Galiher still found reasons to be confident. The Tournament of Champions was filmed in a regular Jeopardy studio before an audience of just about 150, and several of them friends and family, while the college tournament had been filmed at USC, before an audience of 1,000.
“It was definitely different. The set was fairly similar (but) it was nice not to have a statue of Tommy Trojan staring me in the face throughout the whole episode,” Galiher said.
Since this is not the college tournament, he could not flaunt his Bruin pride by wearing a UCLA sweatshirt.
“They wanted me to wear something less partisan just for the sake of the Tournament of Champions,” he said. “I was sorry to see that go; I was starting to feel that it was a lucky sweater.”
Despite the competition, Galiher said that the contestants were still friendly, bonding in the green room and on the bus on the way to studio.
And after the two days of taping, which were in early October, most of the contestants went out to dinner to celebrate.
“At that dinner I totaled up the combined winnings of the people at the table and there were nine of the 15 contestants there and combined we’d won over $1,250,000 on the show. So we all had plenty to celebrate,” he said.
And besides just the cash prizes, being on Jeopardy has already helped Galiher.
His interview to transfer into the film school was about a month after he won on the college tournament. He said he had been really nervous about that interview, but when he walked in, it felt like familiar territory.
“They said congratulations on winning Jeopardy and they immediately started quizzing me on film trivia,” he said. “I hope (being on Jeopardy) didn’t help too much, I hope it didn’t hurt.”
Though he has been lucky enough to appear twice on the popular game show, he has not ruled out competing in the future.
“I definitely have plans to try “˜Who Wants to be a Millionaire?'”