It all began a little over a year before the taping of the show, when I got talked into going down to a hotel conference room with about 200 other people - most of whom had actually studied! They put us through a series of written tests, personality tests, mock run-throughs of the show, and at the end of the process, about a year later, I get "the call" in late January to come down to Sony Studios for a taping about a month later, on Feb. 28.
Needless to say, panic sets in, since I never actually watch the show! Luckily, a team of friends spring into action, and begin TiVo'ing current shows, re-run shows, quizzing me on topics, sending me suggestions, etc.
I scour the internet for ideas, and go out and buy books about "How to Succeed on Jeopardy."
Preparing for the show becomes a second full-time job! I would get home at 6:00, study, then watch that evening's show live at 7:00 (with a practice "clicker"), put on a TiVo'd re-run show, then study and memorize some more until past midnight. Many nights during that month, a friend (Jerry Leichtling) comes over and grills me on every topic of trivia that he can think of. (Jerry had been a trivia quiz champ in high school, and had lots of good suggestions and ideas - thank you, Jerry!)
A couple of interesting things about preparing for the show. First, "the clicker" ...
It turns out that the rule is that you have to wait until the host (Alex Trebek) finishes reading the question before you can "click the clicker." Actually, it's a little more complicated than that - there's a technician backstage who pushes a button when Trebek finishes reading the question. When the button is pushed, that makes the clickers "legal." If you click your clicker "too soon," you're actually blocked for a half-second (which is forever). So the trick is not speed exactly, but timing - not too soon, and not too late.
When Jeopardy scholars (I know, I know, but these kinds of folks do exist) study videotapes of shows, they find that less than a 1/10th of a second separates when the three contestants begin to click. The result is that if two or three contestants all know the answer, and are trying to "click in," it's basically random chance which one of the contestants' lights is going to go on.
Second, about studying ... you just can't possibly memorize every potential item that might come up. Instead, what was most useful was learning what the typical "depth of trivia" felt like.
What that odd phrase meant to me, was that the response that they were looking for was not going to be "too easy" and was not going to be "too hard" - it was going to be somewhere in between. So, even if you didn't know the response directly, you could figure it out by guessing what level of hardness they might be getting at.
So, for example, if the category is "Presidential Nuptials," and you have to respond what state "Harry and Bess" were married in, the writers are not expecting that you actually know the state where these two were married (that would be "too hard"). So the response must be something that you can figure out from what you already know about the Trumans - that they lived most of their early lives in Missouri ... so the correct response must be "What is Missouri?" (Any other response, like they eloped in Kansas, would be "too hard," and not the kind of response they usually are looking for.)