Jeopardy! Match Ends in a First-Ever Three Way Tie

By P.J. Bednarski -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/16/2007 11:09:00 PM

 
Friday's episode of Jeopardy! ended with a weird twist. For the first time in the show's 23-year history, the game show concluded with each of the three contestants having exactly the same winnnings--$16,000. That means all three contestants--Scott Weiss,  an assistant  professor of computer science from Maryland; software engineer Anders Martinson from California and James Kirby,  a humanities teacher from Gainesvilla, Fla.--will be back Monday, when only one will win.
On Friday's show, all three competed closely throughout the game, and then correctly responded to Final Jeopardy round clue,  "One of the men who shot her realized when he saw her body that she'd often waited on him at a cafe in Dallas." The question that all the guys gave was "Who is Bonnie Parker" of Bonnie & Clyde fame.
Being too careful probably cost returning champ Scott Weiss, who didn't up his wager much for the "Final Jeopardy!"  round. The other contestants essentially doubled their earnings up to that point.
 CBS Television Distribution, which syndicates the show for Sony Pictures claims a statistician they hired calculated the odds of a three-way tie on the show as one in 25 million.