Have You Seen This? Watch the first ‘Jeopardy!’ tiebreaker

(Jeopardy!, YouTube)


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GAME SHOW LAND — History was made Friday and Alex Trebek barely blinked.

In case you don't sit around at home on Friday evenings to catch new episodes of "Jeopardy!", I'll fill you in. During the night's episode of everyone's favorite trivia game show, two contestants ended the game in a tie. Or, almost ended it in a tie. You can see it all go down in this video.

As the video starts, the final round of the game is underway with host Trebek asking the contestants, "Once known as the Norman Isles, per the British Govt., this group is 'not part of the U.K.' and has 'never been colonies.'"

If you're not familiar with how "Jeopardy!" works, before the final round, each contestant determines how much of the money they've already won they're willing to place on the line. They write that number down and no one else can see it. If they get the question right, they win the amount they've written down. If they get the question wrong, they lose that amount.

Pretty basic stuff, right? Well, unfortunately, none of the contestants on Friday's episode knew the answer to the geography question and (dun dun dun!) a tie resulted.

Ties are super rare in the "Jeopardy!" world. So rare, in fact, that none have actually happened since the rules changed a few years ago to allow tiebreakers. According to the show's website, this was the first ever tiebreaker played in a regular game.

Yesterday's Have You Seen This?

"When it comes to tiebreakers, 'Jeopardy!' takes a cue from the world of sports and sets up a 'sudden death' match," the website says. "The tied contestants are given a single clue from a new category and the first person to respond correctly wins the game."

I'll let you watch the video to see how the tiebreaker works out for contestants Laura and Sarah, but I do have to say that "sudden death match" seems like a pretty strong way to describe the almost non-event that this tiebreaker ends up being. After seeing the scores, Trebek moved on so seamlessly to the tiebreaker question that if you didn't know better, you probably would never have guessed that this was a history-making moment.

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