A third time is the magic for a “Jeopardy!” contestant.
Earlier this week, “Jeopardy!” fans were outraged when host Ken Jennings caused a stir with a questionable verdict.
A New Jersey analyst, Phil Hoffman, was given several chances by Jennings to correctly answer a Daily Double.
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KEN JENNINGS MAKES A “JANG!” FIRST AFTER UNIQUE PARTICIPANT REQUEST
Ken Jennings was criticized for his interaction with contestant Phil Hoffman. (Danger!/ABC)
The Daily Double was found in the category “A Brief History of Time” and the note read: “An 1884 conference chose the meridian of that institution’s transit instrument as the ‘primary’ starting point for time zones.”
“What’s Greenwich?” Hoffman guessed.
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“A conference in 1884 chose the meridian of this facility’s transit instrument as the ‘primary’ starting point for time zones,” Phil Hoffman’s note read. (Danger!/ABC)
After a long pause, Jennings asked, “Can you be more specific?”
Then he made a second guess: “What is Greenwich, England?”
‘DANGER!’ PARTICIPANT STRANGED FOR “BONEHEAD BET”: “CANNOT HE COUNT?”
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Since there was a few seconds of hesitation, the “Jeopardy!” sounded. The contestant made another attempt to answer the question with “What is the Greenwich Observatory?”
“Danger!” Fans criticized host Ken Jennings for another questionable judgment call during the popular game show. (Christopher Willard/ABC via Getty Images)
“It’s the observatory; I didn’t want to leave you hanging,” Jennings said after allowing the third and final answer.
“Danger!” Fans weren’t too happy with Jennings’ decision, suggesting that the co-host was being too “generous.”
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“I’m sure there are no official stats on this, but Daily Double 2 is almost certainly the longest time I’ve ever seen a Daily Double…maybe ever,” one fan wrote on Reddit.
“At least that’s how it felt; three strokes, even if you are close to the answer, in a period of about 10 seconds is pretty forgiving.”
Some fans believe that Ken Jennings gave the contestant too many opportunities to give a correct answer. (Raymond Liu/ABC)
Another comment said, “The clue clearly asked for a ‘setup,’ so why he was given three chances to respond I don’t know.”
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“I think Ken was being generous because Lucy already had a big lead and a negative would have dropped Phil to $1,” one fan said to another “Jeopardy!” contestant.
“Phil got away with one at the Royal Observatory! Cheap. He should have taken some time off,” read another comment on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Despite “Jeopardy!” fans criticizing Jennings’ decision, contestant Lucy won Monday’s episode, taking home $16,200.
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Despite “Jeopardy!” fans criticizing Ken Jennings’ decision, contestant Lucy won Monday’s episode, taking home $16,200. (Danger!/ABC)
This isn’t the first time “Jeopardy!” fans have been left wondering about Jennings’ game show choices.
‘DANGER!’ Producer criticizes fan criticism of MAYIM BIALIK and KEN JENNINGS: “This show is so difficult to host”
In March, a clue was presented and a participant came in to answer. Jennings immediately told him that the answer was wrong, and immediately another participant came forward with what Jennings said was the correct answer.
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The only problem is that both participants gave the same answer, just with different pronunciation.
The clue read: “After the Last Supper, Jesus traveled to this garden to pray and was arrested there.”
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Ken Jennings was previously criticized for his questionable “Jeopardy!” Judgments. (Ron Batzdorff/ABC)
The correct answer was the Garden of Gethsemane.
A participant named Kevin was the first to attempt an answer, and even though he said “Garden of Gethsemane,” he seemed to pronounce the “n” at the end of “Gethsemane” more like a “d.”
Jennings quickly said “no” and then moved on to the next contestant to provide an answer: Tamara.
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“What is the Garden of Gethsemane?” she said.
In her answer, she pronounced the “n” sound correctly, but did not use the hard “g” sound at the beginning of the word as it is usually pronounced, but instead used a soft “g”.
Regardless, Jennings accepted the answer and also pronounced the word with the soft “g” sound.
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Ken Jennings first appeared on “Jeopardy!” as a contestant in 2004. (Getty Images)
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As always, viewers were quick to take to social media to discuss the issue.
“I thought the contestant who answered “The Garden of Gethsemane” was stripped of his points tonight,” one person wrote on X. “What did he say wrong? The participant who received points for this question didn’t even pronounce it correctly.”
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Fox News Digital’s Emily Trainham contributed to this report.