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Who's Got a Match?

© Brooke E. Smith

Although prime time “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” will soon depart, trivia players still have a shot at the big money via NTN’s “Million Dollar Match Game”. Each Wednesday night until June 19, 2002, players have two chances to qualify for a trip to the finals by matching a particular score in games played right before Passport (8:30 p.m. EST/5:30 PST) and at 10:30 p.m. EST/7:30 PST.

Successful matching places the player’s name in a drawing for ten trips-for-two to Las Vegas on July 11-14, 2002. On July 12, 2002, the ten players will compete at GameWorks in two games. Anyone managing to match both times gets the million.

This is the second appearance for MDM, which several years ago brought another ten players together at NTN’s home in Carlsbad, CA.. Unfortunately for those involved, no one matched in either game. Around that time NTN also had going another contest whose payoff involved a trip to a Caribbean island, and a randomly-selected player (not the one who came closest to the match) received a vacation as a consolation prize. In this incarnation, if no one hits the number, the player with the closest score will receive one thousand dollars.

As veteran NTN players have discovered, doing well on MDM requires much more than knowing the answers. Each Countdown game consists of 15 questions covering the usual mixture of subject matter (entertainment, history, sports, geography, etc.). However instead of aiming for the highest possible score out of 15,000 points, the player must hit something considerably less. (At least so far the numbers to get have been in the 6 - 10K range). This allows some comfort to those who don’t regularly place in the plus 13K arena, but makes it possible for good players to overshoot the number. Fortunately, NTN brought back the -250 score for wrong answers, allowing people who go over the target to backtrack.

MDM games and regular Countdown also differ in the speed of answering. It is much, much more difficult to receive the full 1000 points on a question than usual, with some people seeing falloff even when they know the answer before the selections pop up. At the other end of the spectrum, players who deliberately delay putting in a number in the hope of picking up a small amount of points may find themselves stuck with zero, as the boxes often don’t register answers even when the board still shows points available.