Those who tune in to the Game Show Network at 10 p.m. on Thursday night are guaranteed two things. They will see an Atlanta native competing for $10,000, and they’ll hear the word “idiot” — a lot.
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Jessica Sams, who was born and raised in Atlanta, will be featured on the popular game show "Idiotest." This is her first time appearing on a game show.
“I’m a decent fan of game shows,” Sams said. “I grew up watching them with my grandma, but it was my partner (Chelsea Ireland) who was a game show fanatic. We do trivia together, so she knew we’d be a great team, and she convinced me to go try out for our first game show.”
"Idiotest" is a high-pressure game show where teams of two compete to solve brain-teasing challenges as quickly as possible. The concept for the puzzles is based off of the titular series of successful apps. The longer it takes to correctly answer a question, the less money that team makes.
“Speed is key, and you have to be able to make sense of things that don’t seem like they would make sense within a very small time frame,” Sams said. “You might think 30 seconds is a long time, but it goes by so fast, especially when the answer isn’t immediately coming to you.”
The show features two teams competing against each other to get the most money (and seem the least idiotic) by the end of the show.
On top of competing against each other, the two teams also represent different warring fandoms or groups. The episode Sams will appear in is a battle between the two biggest boy bands of the 1990s: N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys. Sams and Ireland were team Backstreet.
“They played a little bit of music for us, and it was a fun time,” Sams said.
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The winning team goes on to the “Smart Money Round,” where the team could win up to $10,000 if both contestants individually answer a tricky test correctly.
“We definitely watched episodes of the show (to prepare), and we amped up our trivia,” Sams said. “We began going to trivia more and more.”
Sams added that the part of the show that surprised her the most wasn’t how stressful the questions could be but the way commercial breaks break up the high pressure of the being on the show.
“It’s high stakes, high stakes, high stakes,” Sams said. “Then it’s cut, take a break and chill out. Then you’re thrown right back into the game show five minutes later.”
For those who want to compete similarly to how Sams and Ireland did, check out the online version of "Idiotest" at idiotest.gsntv.com. In addition to watching episodes of the show and trivia nights, this test was one of their main training tools before appearing on the show.
“They have a little game on the website that you can play,” Sams said, “So we played that until we exhausted pretty much all of the questions.”
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