I’m rewatching masters, and I usually just have Jeopardy on always on on my TV lately. So my watching mostly consists of old episodes and whatever they put new.
I’ve been noticing that they allow some answers to be pronounced wrong while others it does matter. Also some answers need to be more specific in their phrasing and some don’t.
What confuses me most about this is sometimes Ken(or Alex, if it’s an old episode♥️) will allow the contestant to rephrase or they’ll say “can you be more specific?”. Whereas sometimes they’ll just say “no” and give another contestant a chance to answer, where they say almost the same thing.
How do they decide when to just declare them wrong right away vs. giving them a chance to rephrase/re-pronounce? Is it favoritism? (lol) Or are they giving everyone a chance to rephrase and these things are just cut from the show?
And how do the writers decide which words need specific pronunciation? I’ve seen some answers where the pronunciation is different but it doesn’t change the word at all. It just seems like there is no firm rule about these things. I’ve seen many times where they declare someone wrong right away, and then the next clue they give a chance to rephrase. It doesn’t seem fair sometimes.
Here’s one example off the top of my head. In Jeopardy GOAT; Brad buzzed in and answered something like “uncharacteristic—-“ and Alex declared him wrong before he said “ly” in “uncharacteristically” (or whatever the word was I can’t remember). Time did not run out he was just thinking and counting letters, the category was 20 letter words. So then Ken buzzed in and said “uncharacteristically” and was right.
Alex did apologize, but still, things like that happen that don’t seem fair.