Will Jeopardy! have to eat its words again? Viewers of America’s favorite quiz show are calling out the June 1 Final Jeopardy! clue, the category of which was “Idioms & Expressions.”
The clue read, “In the 1830s cities on the Mississippi banned cardsharps, creating more of these, now meaning one who takes big risks.” The answer, which none of that game’s players got, was “riverboat gamblers.”
On Reddit, however, one viewer argued that “riverboat gambler” isn’t familiar enough to be idiomatic and the Jeopardy! writers should have said that Mississippi cities banned gambling and not cardsharps, since cardsharps are players who win card games by cheating.
“‘Cardsharps’ ruins this clue [in my opinion],” another Reddit user wrote.
Another person said, “I turned to my wife after that was revealed and said, ‘That clue sucked.’”
But the Jeopardy! writers and judges aren’t infallible. Below are other oopsie-daisies from the show.
A production error
Per J-Archive, late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek owned up to a goof on the game show in 2018 after a Final Jeopardy! clue read, “It’s the first Oscar nominee for Best Picture to be produced by an internet streaming service.” As Trebek told viewers in an epilogue to that episode, writers “should have indicated that [Manchester by the Sea] was distributed by a streaming service, not produced by one.” He also said the contestant affected by that error, Rebecca Zoshak, would have another chance on the Jeopardy! stage.
A “Schism” between right and wrong
The Jeopardy! website’s own J!Buzz blog issued a mea culpa in 2018 ahead of contestant Ryan Fenster’s return to the game show. Fenster had previously struck out on this Double Jeopardy! clue: “St. Thomas Aquinas died traveling to Lyon, France, while attempting to heal this rift between the Latin & Greek churches.” He was deemed incorrect when he responded with, “What is the Great Schism?” But the show ultimately deemed Fenster’s response correct, J!Buzz explained, since “The Great Schism” typically refers to the East-West Schism of 1054 but can also refer to the Western Schism of 1378, the topic of the clue.
Losing on “his” terms
Two months later came another admission of guilt on J! Buzz. This time, the game show had done contestant Vincent Valenzuela wrong during a Final Jeopardy! round, due to a typo on the game board. In studio, the clue was shown thusly: “His slang term for an environmentalist is literally true of groups that used passive resistance vs. deforestation, as in India in 1973.” But the “his term,” which led Valenzuela to offer the incorrect response “Carl Sagan,” should have read “this term” in reference to the correct response of “tree-hugger.” Judges atoned by inviting Valenzuela back to the show.
Gamed by a Tetris meme
A 2019 episode featured this clue: “The 7 rotatable blocks used in this video game have names like Orange Ricky, Hero & Smashboy.” The intended response, as you might surmise (and as contestant Jessica Garsed guessed), was Tetris. But the problem, Polygon pointed out, is that those goofy names for the blocks came from a meme image showing faked pages from the game’s NES manual. And the official Tetris Twitter account responded with a GIF of a skeptical Will Smith.
As much as we love “Orange Ricky,” that Tetris trivia on last night’s Jeopardy was not actually true: https://t.co/5KBSeBaZhQ pic.twitter.com/3iofJJDejF
— Kotaku (@Kotaku) October 8, 2019
A wreck of a parenthetical
In a 2026 clue about the Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — which itself was about a real-life shipping disaster — the Jeopardy! scribes wrote, “This song includes, “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay (Wisconsin) if they’d put 15 more miles behind her.” The issue, as many Midwesterners pointed out, is that the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank near Whitefish Bay, Michigan, not Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, according to WOOD. “Do better, Jeopardy! Fact-checkers!” one social media user wrote at the time.
um…. @Jeopardy, it’s Whitefish Bay in MICHIGAN where the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk 🥲 #jeopardy pic.twitter.com/g7JwlMGtQl
— ⓢⓐⓜ (@samanthadake) January 3, 2026
A fishy debate
Stella Trout got a place in the 2027 Tournament of Champions after giving a 2026 Champions Wildcard response “that is closer in accuracy than the one on the script,” as executive producer Michael Davies admitted. The clue: “Within the Department of the Interior, this is the country’s oldest conservation agency.” The judges were looking for the Fish and Wildlife Service, not the National Park Service, which was Trout’s response. But researchers later determined that the National Park Service had been a single entity under its current name for longer than the Fish & Wildlife Service had.
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