Guelph trivia trio trounced in Pop Culture Jeopardy!

They didn’t win, but a trio of Guelph trivia buffs will always remember their time in the limelight.

George Hutchinson, Eric Sipkens and Tom Minard finished about 2,700 points short in the qualifying round of Pop Culture Jeopardy, and were eliminated.

The episode is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

It came down to the Final Jeopardy question, with The Bullpen down by 3,000 points.

All three teams answered the question correctly, and they didn’t wager enough.

“The team ahead of us, they did not bet optimally, so our bet looks very stupid in hindsight, which really was the best bet to maximize,” Minard said.

Hutchinson added a couple misses on Daily Doubles in the second round didn’t help their score heading into the final round.

“The question about Grey’s Anatomy, which none of us know anything about,” he referenced.

“And then Gloria Estefan, I don’t know who that is.”

“I feel bad about not getting that one, the Gloria Estefan one,” Minard added.

“But the Grey’s Anatomy (question), I can name a handful of characters on that show. I have never heard of that man before.”

The episode ran the gamut of categories, but none of them really stuck out as a specialty.

“I saw that the manga and anime category came up, and it’s not really my forte but I thought, compared to the other people there, that it’s something that I’d be good at,” Sipkens said.

“I feel it was just me and George battling that one.”

Sipkens’ stumper was in the songwriters category.

As for Minard, a category on Youtubers wasn’t his favourite to pop up.

“I think you’d probably tell, based on the look on my reaction in the episode,” he said laughing.

Hutchinson said he waited until this weekend to watch the episode with friends and family at a private get together.

The other two watched the episode multiple times in the first couple days.

“It didn’t really seem weird,” Minard said about watching himself on TV.

“I thought that it would be more of an out-of-body experience, but it seemed very natural. It wasn’t as weird as I thought it would be.”

Sipkens added it was cool to see the presentation on TV, after being at the podium.

Hutchinson said everybody was nervous backstage ahead of time, but chatting with the other contestants ahead of time helped a bit. They just weren't able to get a sustained conversation going for the most part.

"You'll start a conversation, and then somebody will come from hair and make up and call you into the back," he said.

"We met a few people, they were nice, it was fun."

Although they didn’t advance, the team will get $1,500 paid out later this year as a secondary prize.

“I think for me, when we finally – after waiting all day and all the prep work – we walked out of the green room and then on to the stage,” Sipkens said about his biggest memory.

“It was like ‘we finally made it,’ we’re on the big stage, they got the big screen, the crowd’s there, the big board.”

“I had the honour of saying ‘we’re going to make it a true daily double,’” Hutchinson added.

Minard admitted he was a bit jealous of that, but said he was happy to “somehow get some very obscure questions” right.

“My biggest takeaway is that studying didn’t help me at all,” he said.

“Everything I knew was only from latent knowledge that I already had. Nothing that I studied came up.”

“It would’ve been nice to win, but (the whole thing) was exciting and new,” Sipkens added.

“We got a free vacation in California (too).”