Mina Kimes won the first semifinal game of Celebrity Jeopardy! on May 12 after turning a rough Final Jeopardy round into a victory with a sharp wager. She played against Lisa Ann Walter and Katie Nolan, missed the final clue in the AI category, and still advanced to the finals.
Kimes entered the last clue in second place with $8,000. She wagered $2,210, finished with $5,790 and moved ahead after Walter, who had $9,600, bet $7,000 and dropped to $2,600. Nolan, with $5,100, bet $0 and ended with the same total. The correct response was “Alexa,” while Kimes answered, “What is Claude?”
The result mattered less for trivia than for timing and math. Kimes said afterward that she won despite playing “a pretty awful game,” adding that her brain “completely glitched” on Final Jeopardy. She said she had been asked about the wager because the finish looked unusual, and she wanted to explain why she made it. Her point was simple: in second place, especially when the game is more than two-thirds over, the safer play is often to bet little or nothing and force first place to make the costly choice.
That is what she said she expected Walter to do. Kimes said first place will almost always try to cover second place, and that if second place bets nothing and gets the clue right, it wins if first place misses. If both miss, second place can still win because first place had to risk so much to cover it. She said Nolan could have won by betting it all and answering correctly, but Nolan had no reason to expect Kimes to use that strategy.
The semifinal also carried a familiar cast. Walter was the Season 2 winner, and Nolan was the Season 2 finalist, which made Kimes’s win feel less like a lucky break than a case study in how Final Jeopardy is often decided before the clue is even read. The category was AI, but the decisive move came from game theory rather than expertise.
Kimes’s own explanation underscored the tension at the heart of the finish: the best-known answer was not the one that mattered most. She missed the clue, Walter missed too, and Nolan had the only correct response. Yet Nolan’s zero wager left the door open for Kimes, whose smaller bet protected her lead and sent her on to the final round. In a game built around knowledge, the semifinal showed that the last move can matter more than the right answer.
