It takes a lot of confidence and courage to wager a “True Daily Double” on Jeopardy! Whether it goes right or wrong for the contestant at hand, that outcome will almost certainly change the game. Unfortunately, for one of Wednesday night’s contestants, it was for the worse.
The contestants of the April 17–– episode were Alison Betts — a four-time champion who walked onto the stage with $107,700 in cash winnings under her belt — along with attorney Jeff Plate and business executive Vidya Ravella.
The first round proved it was truly anybody’s game, even if Betts had the edge with the intimidation factor of being on a hot streak. After getting one-third of her answers wrong (with 10 correct, and five incorrect), she still led the pack with $3,600. Both Plate and Ravella were just behind her, though, and with much better statistics to boot: Plate got six right and one wrong, while Ravella got eight right and two incorrect answers. They both tied at $2,200 at the halfway mark.
Things really took a turn in the Double Jeopardy round, however, when those dual Daily Doubles came into the mix. Ravella, who’d gotten a first-round Daily Double correct, found another in the second round. This time, she decided to risk the entire house, putting all $6,000 on the line and unfortunately got it wrong (to be fair, how many of us actually knew aegis is the term for a shield or breastplate of the gods that now means the protection of any powerful entity?). Meanwhile, Betts found the other Daily Double of the round and got it right, correctly identifying St. Petersberg as the city with “white nights” with 19 hours of daylight where bridges are raised on the Reva at night. Betts also made it a True Daily Double, but in her case, it was just the ticket to start moving towards a runaway.
Betts ended the round too far in the lead for anyone to catch up (with $12,800), while Plate was in a distant second place (with $5,400), and Ravella was disqualified from Final Jeopardy due to a negative balance (-$1,400).
For Final Jeopardy, Betts still made good on her surname and bet a little something — $1,000 — and correctly guessed that it was the March of Dimes that “the press called… a silver tide which actually swamped the White House” after the organization’s 1938 founding. Plate, meanwhile, incorrectly answered the final clue with “What is the Salvation Army?” and dropped his final prize winnings to $4,196.
With that, Alison Betts is now in the elite five-time champion club and advances to the next round.
Fans on Reddit reacted to Betts’ win by saying, “Congrats to Alison on being the second official qualifier for the 2025 TOC!” and “For context, they usually tape 5 episodes per day–3 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon… So Alison deserves huge kudos for making it through the extra-long tape day, and I would hope/expect her to come back well-rested and sharper in tomorrow’s game.”
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