It was January 2001 when Harvey Silikovitz first tried to get on Jeopardy!
He was working as an attorney in New York City and turned up at the audition in a Manhattan hotel at the urging of his friend Adam Taxin, who had just won more than $45,000 on the show earlier that winter. But when Silikovitz, then 30, failed the on-site application test and was sent home from the audition early, he wasn’t particularly disappointed: He didn’t really like Jeopardy! In fact, he despised it.
In the 1980s, Silikovitz had been a devoted fan of the soap opera The Edge of Night—right up until 1984, when the series was abruptly canceled. Taking advantage of the new gap in the schedule, the distributor King World Productions popped a different show into the time slot in the New York market, where Silikovitz lived: the fledgling reboot of the 1960s and ’70s quiz show Jeopardy!, hosted by a journeyman ex-broadcaster named Alex Trebek.
“I was mad at Jeopardy!” Silikovitz says, and he swore never to tune in to the interloper. As the years went by and Jeopardy! became a television institution, Silikovitz stuck to his guns and got his game show kicks elsewhere. His interest in Jeopardy! started and finished with the Cheers episode in which Cliff Clavin loses disastrously with the infamous Final Jeopardy! answer “Who are three people who’ve never been in my kitchen?”
Thus, it might have surprised Silikovitz back then to learn that this past Monday night, he would at long last appear on Jeopardy!—winning $23,600 in the culmination of a 24-year-long quest to make it onto America’s Favorite Quiz Show.
I first met Silikovitz in the summer of 2019 in Las Vegas at Trivia Nationals, a three-day convention by and for trivia fiends. As is often the case at major trivia events in the U.S., the event teemed with Jeopardy! alumni, including notable champions like Colby Burnett and Pam Mueller. That year, Trivia Nationals was also rife with aspiring alumni: Jeopardy! announced it would send its contestant production team and that anyone interested could audition then and there, effectively skipping one stage of the usual application process and thus heightening the odds of getting on the show.
At the time, I had just started working on a book about Jeopardy! called Answers in the Form of Questions. I came to Vegas to scout out the scene and hopefully start meeting the people whose stories would fill out my book. I also had an eye on the Jeopardy! audition: The show’s then–head of casting, Maggie Speak, had agreed to let me tag along and see it unfold in real time. I did just that, with Speak forcing me at the last minute to take the 50-question live test along with everyone else. (I’ll stick to writing about Jeopardy!, thanks.) Mostly, I sat back and watched as quiz show hopefuls came up one by one to play a practice game and run through a little banter with the producers to see whether they could hack it under the bright lights in Culver City.
Silikovitz immediately stood out. First, there was his name: He informed the room that he answers not just to Harvey but also to his nickname, H-Bomb. Then there was his calm demeanor in a room filled with jittery Jeopardy! aspirants: During his turn in front of the producers, he cheerfully spoke about his passion for finding karaoke spots while traveling abroad and belted out part of “La Bamba.”
And finally, there was the fact that Speak and the other producers seemed to know him. At a panel ahead of the audition, Speak had called out to him in the audience. “You’ve tried out how many times, Harvey?” she asked. Las Vegas would be his ninth audition, he said. Nine auditions? I thought, aghast: Auditions are often multiple years apart. How long had this guy been trying to get on Jeopardy!?
A long time, it turned out. After that 2001 misfire, H-Bomb finally started to soften toward Jeopardy! By the time he showed up for a second audition in June 2004, he wanted a shot on the show for real, having dedicated himself to studying and shoring up some of his weaker subjects, like the works of Shakespeare—which he attacked by reading every last one of the Bard’s plays and then watching every stage or film adaptation he could get his hands on. “Just because I was interested in it,” he says.
At the 2004 audition, he passed the test, but he never got “the call”—the formal invitation from a producer telling a waiting candidate that there is an upcoming spot for them on the show. Thus began a cycle of disappointments and auditions that never went anywhere, no matter how confident Silikovitz was about his performance after the fact. There was the time a jerk boss refused to let him out of work to attend his audition, leading him to beg the producers to let him audition with college kids over the weekend instead. (They acquiesced, and Silikovitz thought things went well—asked at the time how he would spend his potential winnings, he quipped that while he was no longer a college student, he was still paying off college—but the call never materialized.) Then there was the time he traveled to a resort in the Poconos to line up for an open-to-the-public qualifying mini-audition, only to come down with a nasty stomach bug a few weeks later, the night before the real thing, which he missed. And the time he traveled to Washington, D.C., for a regional audition, only for his phone not to ring once again.
More ‘Jeopardy!’ Lore
Then, worst of all, there was what happened in the spring of 2019. H-Bomb had last auditioned nearly two years earlier—audition no. 8—meaning that his formal eligibility window for a callback, which Jeopardy! officially caps at 18 months, had come and gone. He knew, though, that at the time, a recommendation from a Jeopardy! alum could help you get a chance, so he called up the contestant team to let them know that Jackie Fuchs, who had won four games a year earlier, would vouch for him. Corinna Nusu, then a contestant coordinator, took his call. “She was like, ‘I’m so glad to hear from you,’” Silikovitz says. “‘Maggie and I were really worried when you didn’t respond to her voicemail.’ And I’m like, voicemail?”
Earlier that year, Silikovitz had started feeling off. He went to the doctor, then another, and then another, with each referral seeming to beget yet more. That summer, he would finally get a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But when Speak had called him that March to tell him that finally, finally, his day had come and it was time for him to come on Jeopardy!, his voicemail was a tangle of recordings from various doctors’ offices. He never saw the message.
By the time Nusu finally broke the news to him, taping for the season had already wrapped up. But although production would pick back up several months later, even more time would have passed since Silikovitz’s last audition, and the producers wouldn’t be able to let his eligibility window slide any further. So there he was in Las Vegas that summer, capping his ninth Jeopardy! audition with una poca de gracia.
H-Bomb and I talked after his performance, and he told me about his years of trying and failing to get on Jeopardy! We also talked about his diagnosis and the various physical therapy and lifestyle adjustments he had dived wholeheartedly into to stymie Parkinson’s and keep himself in peak Jeopardy! shape; he proudly noted that, in addition to watching each evening’s episode while standing to maintain his theoretical lectern stamina, he was using software to track his speed on a buzzer simulator, and his results would impress any devoted thumb twiddler.
In the years after, Silikovitz and I stayed in touch, checking in every now and then to chat about Jeopardy! and Silikovitz’s latest (albeit non-televised) achievements in the wide world of trivia, where he has gained renown for his performance in online leagues, including LearnedLeague, where he usually plays in the A rundle, the highest-ranked and most challenging division and, perhaps unsurprisingly, one that is filled with Jeopardy! greats. I noticed from time to time when other people from that 2019 Vegas group finally made it onto the show, including Angelus Kocoshis, who made his debut last year. Kocoshis used his Q&A segment to recount the story of how, the day before his Vegas audition, he’d had an emergency appendectomy—an episode that I remembered because it drew gasps of wonder and, perhaps, envy in the audition room because of Kocoshis’s dubious luck in landing such a memorable tale. But still, year in and year out on Jeopardy!: no H-Bomb.
He auditioned again—his 10th attempt—in the summer of 2022, at Trivia Boot Camp, an intensive game-show-oriented summit run by storied Jeopardy! champ James Holzhauer and his wife, Melissa. Just as they had three years earlier, the Jeopardy! contestant team turned up to administer another in-person audition, and just as he did three years earlier, Silikovitz thought he’d nailed it. A year later, he went back to the same event, and he made a point of reminding Megan Miguez and John Barra, Jeopardy!’s current contestant producers, that his application was in the active contestant pool. Speak, who retired in 2020, joined that event as well, and Silikovitz says he learned later that “she had a long talk with John about me.” Surely, he thought, things had to be coming up H-Bomb.
Then the world threw yet another speed bump at Silikovitz. Since his 2001 attempt, H-Bomb has watched the audition process evolve, from a requirement that he send a handwritten postcard to the studio to make his case, to Brain Bus–style impromptu events, to sporadic regional events, to occasional online application quiz proctoring, to the current format, in which aspiring contestants take a 50-question online test and then, if their score is high enough, nab a place in a group videoconference audition.
The road to the Jeopardy! stage has always been a little mysterious: While it’s long been believed that 35 is a passing score on that online test, the show has never confirmed this. Casting also plays an inscrutable part in the process; casting directors have said that in addition to smarts, they’re looking for players who represent the show’s audience, and thus they are eager to showcase brainiacs from a variety of backgrounds. There’s also a telegenic je ne sais quoi at play, and having an unusual or downright quirky tagline (on Monday’s episode, Silikovitz was listed as an “attorney and worldwide karaoke singer”—ahem) certainly doesn’t hurt.
It has gotten much, much harder to get on Jeopardy! in the years since Silikovitz first threw his hat in the ring. In his 2006 book, Brainiac, contestant turned host Ken Jennings noted that at the time, “over thirty thousand would-be contestants try out for the show most years.” In the nearly two decades since, applications have ballooned. Since March 1, 2024, 65,242 aspiring contestants have taken the show’s online test, and an additional 54,875 applied for the inaugural season of the spinoff Pop Culture Jeopardy!, according to the show. Jeopardy! typically airs 230 episodes per season, which stretches from the late summer into mid-spring. That means that there are just 460 slots for new contestants in a given season—a number that shrinks further when extra tournaments are scheduled or the outside world intervenes, as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, which paused filming altogether.
Such a situation occurred again after H-Bomb’s 10th application. The 2023 writers strike kicked off that May, smack-dab in the midst of Silikovitz’s eligibility. Jeopardy!’s writers are members of the WGA, so they were pencils down for the nearly five months the strike endured; the show opted to spend those months using old clues and returning players, dramatically cutting down the opportunities for first-timers.
Still, Silikovitz waited, continuing to drill himself on trivia, practice his buzzer technique, and do everything he could to slow his Parkison’s. “It’s a progressive disease, but I’m still doing pretty well,” Silikovitz says; his doctors, he notes, love that he does trivia, a tried-and-true method of helping to stave off cognitive decline.
And then it was October 2024. Silikovitz was leaving the post office when he checked his email, and there, sitting in his inbox, was a message from Barra. Just days earlier, he had remarked to his friend Michael Cavaliere—a pub quiz teammate in New York and the runner-up in last year’s Second Chance Tournament—that he was losing hope and it might be time to throw in the towel. How wrong he was: “‘Harvey, I know this day has been a long time coming,’” Silikovitz says Barra’s email—now the way contestants are likeliest to get “the call”—began. And then he asked Silikovitz whether he could come to Culver City in January to tape Jeopardy!
Afterward, Silikovitz texted Speak to let her know it was finally happening: He was going on Jeopardy! They first met at an audition in 2006, and Speak had been a key ally and sounding board through H-Bomb’s journey to Jeopardy! Speak wrote back that she cried when she saw his message, Silikovitz says.
In January, Silikovitz’s parents as well as Cavaliere flew out for the taping, looking on as H-Bomb stormed to an early lead. He’d drawn Laura Faddah, already an eight-time champion, and Sabrina Blanks as opponents, but he was in control throughout: The game was a full nine clues in before either Faddah or Blanks managed to ring in. Skirting along the bottom of the board—a method used by particularly aggressive players to rack up cash and sniff out Daily Doubles—Silikovitz found two of the game’s three and entered Final Jeopardy! with triple Faddah’s score, as tidy a runaway game as the Alex Trebek Stage has ever seen. He missed the final clue—“A dark blue square in the upper left corner of the flag of this country represents the continent of Africa”—and with it his attempt to round his score up to an even $50,000, which would have been the highest nontournament total of this season. But no matter—he had won, and in dominating fashion: His Coryat score (a method Jeopardy! diehards use to analyze player achievement in a game) of $31,200 nabbed the season’s top spot. Silikovitz says that producer and longtime Clue Crew member Sarah Whitcomb Foss came up to congratulate him afterward.
“I was a little nervous the night before, but when I walked out onto that stage for the game, I was really amped up,” Silikovitz says. “I just felt like it was me and the board.”
Silikovitz looked it up, and he’s pretty sure he has made history as the first Jeopardy! contestant to play with Parkinson’s. “I wouldn’t recommend that as a preparation strategy for doing well on the show,” Silikovitz joked to Jennings of his diagnosis during his Monday Q&A segment. “But after living with Parkinson’s for five and a half years, it’s no longer just about wanting to do well for myself—I would like to give hope and inspiration to the people who are living with chronic illnesses.”
Silikovitz says he was thinking of others with the disease when he was at long last named a Jeopardy! champion. “I am hoping that just the fact that someone with Parkinson’s is on for the first time in the history of this show, it would be inspiring to them when they see me winning,” Silikovitz says. “Your life isn’t over when you get this diagnosis.”
On Tuesday, Silikovitz will take his place at the champion’s lectern and play again. But when we spoke on Monday, he had more pressing plans: He had to get ready for two different watch parties—one in person in New York and one virtually, where all the fellow contestants and trivia buffs he’s befriended and played with over the 24 years it took to get to Jeopardy! can join and celebrate the long-awaited victory of H-Bomb.
