Poor Ken Jennings, but was Jeopardy rigged?

He had a good run, but his Jeopardy streak ended tonight at 74 consecutive wins and $2.5 Million. Congratulations to Nancy Zerg for winning.

The best part was that I knew the final Jeopardy question that Ken missed.

Here’s the Final Jeopardy question in the form of an answer:

Category: “Business and Industry: Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.”

Read on for the answer in the form of a question and speculation of why the show might have been rigged against Ken.

At first I thought it might be the IRS, but the category was “Business and Industry” so then I thought “What is H&R Block?”

I was right, and so was contestant #2. Ken’s response of “What is Fed Ex?” was way off.

I knew ahead of time this was going to be his last show because of the posts over at kottke.org, so it definitely had been leaked on the Internet. There seemed to be a little too much promotion going on for the upcoming Seinfeld Seasons 1-3 DVD in the opening round of Jeopardy. They devoted an entire category to it full of extremely easy questions and all the other category names had Seinfeld references like, “No Soup for You” and “The Contest.” It seemed odd for that much product placement to be there and to have Ken’s streak end on the same day.