A stumped Wheel of Fortune contestant, who had $71,000 riding on a puzzle fans are calling ridiculously “easy,” came up empty Tuesday night.
Heidi Edwards, a mom who revealed she’d had a baby at 50 years old, was stumped by the puzzle, “MATT DAMON AND _ _N A_ _L_ _ _” during Tuesday’s show. Ben Affleck makes up the other half of the “famous duo,” whose names have been synonymous with one another since the 1990s. They worked together on-screen this year on their Netflix film, The Rip.
That information would have put tens of thousands of dollars into Edwards’ pockets on Tuesday, when she thought there might be a missing “H,” revealing that the two-time Oscar winner was not an obvious answer for the Virginia native.
Fellow player Jose Hernandez, from Visalia, California, could not solve the puzzle and was equally stumped, guessing “C” and then trying to buy an “I.”
“How did the two of them not know Ben Affleck?” asked one Reddit user reacting to the game.
It was ultimately returning champion Tyler Hall from Fort Worth, Texas, who’d just stepped into a puddle of bad luck when he went bankrupt and lost his Wild Card, guessed the right letters, asking for an “F” and “B” before solving the puzzle. Hall returned to the game show series as a champion on Tuesday, having won $58,411 in cash and prizes the day before.
Edwards still won the game despite the celebrity knowledge gap, however, and took home $26,390 ahead of her Wednesday comeback. She missed the opportunity for $45,000, though, when she couldn’t guess “_ _RMIN_ _ _ T_ THE I_E_.”
The answer turned out to be “Warming Up to the Idea.”
