The Jeopardy! prodigy Arthur Chu, who bent the rules but did not break them, has had his win streak snapped at 11 games. A particularly lousy night answering trivia landed him in 3rd place in the final round, with little to no chance for shenanigans. Judging from the list of questions Chu got wrong, apparently pop music, the Spanish Inquisition, and contagious diseases aren’t his forte. “In this 1988 hit, Poison lamented that every rose has one of these.” Even I know that one.  

When I wrote about Chu a month ago, he was riding high, employing a devious strategy that struck a raw nerve with the ethos of the Jeopardy! illuminati. He circumvented the tradition of warming up the brain with easy questions before moving on to tougher ones, jumping around in a haphazard manner to score big. Purists claimed he was manipulating the system, but the rest of us loved it (at least until the Internet got bloated with Arthur Chu think-pieces, as it tends to). But the trivia will always come back to bite you: thus is the cruel fate of the blue board.