That happy young man in the above banner image is Skyler Hornback, a 7th grader from Kentucky and now one of the all-time biggest single-show winners in Jeopardy! history with his incredibly gutsy performance on tonight’s edition of Kids Week. Hornback fancies himself a bit of an expert and enthusiast when it comes to Abraham Lincoln, so as he pondered how much of his $36,600 in winnings that he’d be willing to wager on Final Jeopardy!, he felt pretty comfortable writing down $30,000 when he saw that the category was “Civil War.”
And the clue?
Abraham Lincoln called this document, which took effect in 1863, “A fit and necessary war measure”
That’s not even fair. Obviously, Hornback guessed the correct answer of the Emancipation Proclamation, and he cemented his place in Kids Week history with his $66,600 victory.
Alas, all was not well with tonight’s episode of Jeopardy!. We’re told by a tipster, as well as a buzz on the Tweeters, that one of the other two contestants was told that he had an incorrect answer because he misspelled Emancipation Proclamation. Now, I’m no big city slicker expert on the rules and such of Jeopardy!, but I was under the impression that if the answer was close enough, the judges would accept it. I may be wrong, but until I can find a good video of the entire Final Jeopardy! segment – you can see the dejected young man in the beginning of this rough clip – I think we should all argue about it as if it’s the most important issue in the world.
