A woman who found a smart trick to beat her husband at Jeopardy! kept her strategy a secret for three decades, leading him to believe she was incredibly cultured throughout their marriage.
Grace Arnpriester, 21, of Phoenix, Arizona, took to Twitter earlier this month to reveal how her mother made her father believe she was better than him at the game show.
Back when Grace’s mom Sue and her father Jonathan got married, they got into the habit of watching Jeopardy! together in the evenings, which in the 1980s meant they had to dial into the proper station.
Trick: Grace Arnpriester, 21, of Phoenix, Arizona, took to Twitter earlier this month to reveal how her mother made her father believe she was better than him at Jeopardy!
Clever: Sue (pictured with her husband Jonathan) found out she could watch the show ahead of time if she dialed into a nearby city’s station
But one day, Sue found out she could watch the show ahead of time if she dialed into a nearby city’s station — which is how the trick was born.
‘My mom used to watch Jeopardy! early on a different city’s channel so that when she would watch it with my dad later she’d know all the answers,’ Grace wrote in her tweet.
‘She’s still never told him so he’s been under the impression that she’s a genius this whole time.’
While Sue didn’t tell her husband about the trick, she did confess to her children last week when Grace moved into a new apartment, BuzzFeed reported.
Sue explained the trick to Grace and to her brother, after which Grace told the platform she ‘couldn’t stop laughing’.
Big reveal: Jonathan (pictured with Grace) only found out about the trick when his daughter tweeted about it earlier this month
Back when Sue first devised her strategy, she and Jonathan would compete against each other while watching Jeopardy! together after coming home from work.
‘He always bested me on the history categories. That guy has an incredible memory for names and dates,’ Sue said.
One afternoon, she dialed into a different city’s channel and saw that the game show was on. When Sue and Jonathan watched Jeopardy! that night, she realized the episode was the same she had just watched — and took advantage of it.
‘I didn’t remember all the answers, but enough to quickly call out many more answers than usual,’ she told the website. ‘I remember him being pretty impressed, which made me feel kind of guilty about my deception.’
Amused: Grace said she ‘couldn’t stop laughing’ when Sue told her about the trick
Sue pulled off the trick ‘several more times over the next couple of years’, until she got tired of it and she and Jonathan moved to a different house where she could no longer dial into a different location’s station.
Amazingly, Jonathan didn’t find out about the trick until Grace tweeted about it last week.
Sue was ‘worried’ that her husband would see her message, but according to Grace, he found the situation ‘hilarious’.
‘He’s really a great guy with an incredible sense of humor,’ Sue said.
Grace’s tweet has been shared more than 33,000 times and has attracted more than 305,000 likes.
Hundreds of people have also left comments, many praising Sue for her ingenuity.
‘She clearly is a genius though,’ one person wrote in response to Grace’s tweet, while someone else tweeted: ‘This is so next level I can’t even.’
‘This is the kind of genius you have to be on the look out for,’ someone else chimed in. ‘They hide in plain sight!’