Larissa Kelly can stop looking over her shoulder. Local Jeopardy! champ Emily Thorsley was defeated by freelance journalist Greg Lindsay in her second game. We asked her a few questions about her experience.

Are you going to carve "Jeopardy! champion" on your tombstone?
I hope to live a long life full of accomplishments, so that winning on Jeopardy! is a mere footnote. On the other hand, it's pretty clear I've had my Warhol-mandated 15 minutes. It will definitely be a story to tell the kids and grandkids, should they one day exist.

You defeated a five-time champ in your first appearance, only to be defeated yourself on your next show. Do you believe in a "giant killer curse"? (See: Nancy Zurg.)
I'm not a superstitious person, so I don't believe in curses. There's a lot of skill in Jeopardy! but a lot of luck as well. If the questions don't go your way, or the others are faster on the buzzer, you could be in trouble quickly. I had four very tough opponents in my two games, and either one could have easily gone the other way.

Final Jeopardy was your undoing, when both your opponents correctly responded "Galileo." Did you consider Galileo yourself, or were Loyola and Richelieu the only names that came to mind?
I'm pretty sure if Galileo had even crossed my mind, I would be considerably richer today. My mistake was being too focused on the category (The Vatican), and thinking only of religious figures. I realized halfway through that Loyola was about a century off, and that Richelieu was in the right time period, but even then, I was pretty sure I was wrong.

What was it like having your two appearances on the show separated by five weeks of reruns?
The shows aired several weeks apart, but they actually taped three months apart. I had an advantage in that I had a lot of time to prepare for my second appearance, but "buzzer memory" had faded. Unfortunately, by the time of the second game, my high from winning the first one had faded significantly, so the defeat felt worse than it would have had the tapings been a few minutes apart rather than a few months.

How did you prepare for your original appearance? Did you do anything different before your second show was taped?
I remember from Ken Jennings's book Brainiac that U.S. presidents and vice presidents ... and Shakespeare almost always come up. I was fairly confident on Shakespeare, but I made up index cards on presidential facts. It turns out they didn't help much. What did help was discovering the website www.j-archive.com, which is a fan site with nearly every Jeopardy! Game ever aired. My husband David would read through practice games with me. There's a very low turnover rate for Jeopardy! writers, so the same type of questions do tend to reappear. For my second appearance, I didn't do much that was different, except more crosswords and word puzzles, as vocabulary was kind of a weak spot for me.

Any insight on making it through the audition process?
I had a couple of friends who had made it on to Jeopardy! earlier. Their advice was to be quick about following direction from the production staff. The show's been on for twenty-five years now and they run a pretty tight ship, and they want contestants who they won't have to baby-sit. Also, if you've passed the test, they know you're smart enough, so they're looking for people who the TV audience will find engaging.

Any words of advice for someone once they're on the show?
Each game tapes in approximately thirty minutes, and it seems much faster. So try to enjoy it while you can.