Hello!

Today, a couple of online snippets that I wanted to draw your attention to, and a special announcement regarding our next EXCLUSIVE interview for www.howtowingameshows.com.

Host Phil Keoghan congratulates Amy DeJong (left) and Maya Warren (right) for winning Season 25 of “The Amazing Race.”

First up, for those of you interested in competing on reality TV shows in general, or on The Amazing Race in particular, here’s a great article with some hot tips on how to win The Amazing Race, from someone who’s actually done it; Season 25 winner, Maya Warren…

Among her very best tips (in my opinion) for getting the edge on this globe-trotting juggernaut of reality TV are:

“Study the race. Watch as many old episodes as you can and analyse them. Figure out how you’d tackle the challenges.”

That’s something of a mantra here at HTWGS; no matter what show you’re thinking of appearing on… do your homework! Watch the show, study it and get to know it inside and out. It just might give you the edge over those contestants who haven’t done that prep.

“Make sure you have all the skills you might need, like driving a stick shift. Practice driving with maps and without maps.”

“ Pack light. My backpack weighed 25 pounds. If I did it again, I’d try to keep it about 10 pounds”

“Don’t show the competition your weakness. That makes you seem vulnerable.” For Warren and DeJong, that included playing down DeJong’s injury, which caused her to limp.

“Don’t show your strength, either. We didn’t mind people underestimating us. We never talked about being Ph.D. students, and the show just identified us as food scientists who make ice cream and candy.”

“Have a plan in advance for challenges. We had decided that if it was a physical challenge, I’d do it. I’m small, but I’ve been athletic all my life and run marathons.”

“Be diligent about getting directions. As soon as we got a clue, we tried to find someone with a smartphone to get turn-by-turn directions. On the show, you could see me reading off the directions and Amy writing them down.”

“Write things down. We took notebooks and wrote everything down.” The finale often calls for remembering details about earlier legs of the race. “We also took clickers in case we need to count things; we took a measuring tape and a calculator, and our watches had a stopwatch function in case we needed any of that.”

And there are even more Amazing Race winning tips in the full article, which you can read here.

Next, with Oscars Fever still among us after yesterday’s ceremony, here’s an article from NPR on some of the most serious Oscar trivia buffs there have ever been. They’re a team of former quiz show winners (Jeopardy!, Sale of the Century, Joker’s Wild), but in their weekly get-together for trivia nights at their local pub, the stakes aren’t quite so high. Even if the questions are super top-end. Here are a couple of examples:

Who was the only adult person to receive an official Oscar statuette from the academy (not an Academy Juvenile Award) which was other than the standard size? 

What is the only Bond song to win ‘Best Song’?

For the answer to these brain teasers, and many more Oscar-themed head-scratchers, see the full article here.

And finally today, I’m really pleased to announce our next EXCLUSIVE interview for www.howtowingameshows.com. Recently I had a chat with a woman who is an actor, a

writer, a game show host, a reality show contestant, and – and this is actually official – Australia’s Brainiest TV Star ! Yes, it’s the one and only Julia Zemiro!

With all those achievements in the TV game show / reality show oeuvre, Julia’s in a unique position. We discussed her tips and hints for competing on a quiz show, all the things she’s learned from hosting a game show for the past 10 years, and her whole reality show contestant journey. I’m very grateful to Julia for sparing me the time, and I’m certain there’ll be a lot of information in our chat that you’ll find really useful.

That’s next, right here, EXCLUSIVELY, on www.howtowingamehows.com !