“Grand Slam” Roster Announced
Today at the TCA announcements, GSN announced the roster for Grand Slam, a word, math, and trivia competition that sees who is the best of the best for $100,000. Here is the list with player names, shows they appeared on, and dollar totals won. Players were seeded by how much money was won.
1- Brad Rutter: Jeopardy!: $3,255,000
2- Ken Jennings: Jeopardy!: $3,020,700
3- Kevin Olmstead: Jeopardy!/Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: $2,207,000
4- Ed Toutant: Jeopardy!/Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: $1,871,000
5- David Legler: Twenty-One: $1,765,000
6- John Carpenter: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: $1,250,000
7- Rahim Obserholtzer: Twenty-One: $1,120,000
8- Nancy Christy: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: $1,000,000
9- Ogi Ogas: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: $500,000
10- Phyllis Harris: Card Sharks/Scrabble/Trivia Trap/Wheel of Fortune/Super Greed/Millionaire?: $497,150
11- Thom McKee: Tic Tac Dough: $312,700
12- Frank Spangenberg: Jeopardy!: $269,596
13- Leszek Pawlowicz: Jeopardy!/Win Ben Stein’s Money/History IQ: $194,700
14- Michelle Kitt: Weakest Link: $107,500
15- TBA
16- Amy Kelly: Lingo: $20,500
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The first episode will see Ken Jennings battle the 15th seed on Saturday, August 4th, at 7PM ET and rerun at 10PM ET. Two matches will take place each show. After the Jennings/TBA match-up, it will be Kevin Olmstead VS Michelle Kitt. August 5th will be Brad Rutter VS Amy Kelly and Ed Toutant VS Leszek Pawlowicz. August 11th contains Rahim Oberholtzer VS Phyllis Harris and John Carpenter VS Thom McKee. Finally, on August 12th is Nancy Christy VS Ogi Ogas and David Legler VS Frank Spangenberg. The quarterfinals will happen on August 18th at 19th at the same time as the rest of the episodes. The semi-final will be august 25th and finals will be August 26th. The show is hosted by Dennis Miller, Amanda Byram, and Pat Kiernan.
Methinks whoever wrote this is jipping tioutant a boit..he won $1.86 mill on WWTBAM
My mistake. I flipped the 1 and 7, and his total is fixed. I think I might have problems, lol.
I went to one of the tapings for this show, and I saw three of the quarterfinal matches. But, bing a good sport, I won’t reveal any spoilers to you guys.
It will great to see Pat Kiernan work on another show. He is fast becoming the best of the new generation of hosts.
It will also be great to see some of the Twenty-One winners go down hard…
Why the negative feelings about Twenty-One players? I’ve played against Dave Legler in multiple games at the last two Game Show Congresses. He’s a very bright individual with great anticipation skills who is laser fast on the lock-out.
Several of the Grand Slam participants are at GSC6 this weekend. (No less than seven of Grand Slam’s players have attended a Game Show Congress in the past.) A friend called me to tell me there were some epic games of Jeopardy! going on with some Grand Slam’s contestants. I wish I could’ve witnessed it. It sounded like a great prelude to Grand Slam, or a postscript for the contestants.
How the hell did that Lingo winner get on there? Oh thats right Lingo is on GSN and Grand Slam is on GSN.
Well that was a dull Summer TCA. So it looks like no new shows anytime soon except the renewal of Thats The Question.
BTW Alex did Cronin say anything about his departure.
I would just like to say the following:
lol Amy Kelly
Kevin Olmstead and Ed Toutant were on Jeopardy? I never knew that.
And why are John Carpenter’s winnings 1.25 million?
Because he came back for the Tournament of Champions in 2000 and won $250,000.
Good looking roster!
I can name about 100 or so people not on there that would be good for this competition. On the other hand, if this does real well, we may see more tournaments. And of course, with every new season you get more champions, so there are endless possibilities.
Should be some interesting first round matchups, particularly the 4 v 13 (Legler vs Pawlowicz) and 6 v 11 (Carpenter vs McKee).
Edit – meant to say Toutant v Pawlowicz, not Legler v Pawlowicz
This is looking like it’s going to be the best game show GSN did since Russian Roulette (NOt to mention the first time they’re giving away 100K since RR). Altough The brackets make it obvous were going to have another Rutter vs. Jennings showdown at some point, I still cant wait. I was sure the brackets were going to be nothing but Lingo And Chain Reaction Champs, with a few Whammy and RR champs thrown in, but with only one competitor from a GSN based show (Not to mention the fact she’s probably going to be gone by the end of the first show), this REALLy looks promising.
I think the best match-up to look forward to in the whole tournament will be in the first round when Carpenter faces McKee, and for some reason I thin they will be closely matched and we will get the most exciting game from that match-up.
Methinks Russian Roulette is still a better show, but anyway…
Any word on who the 15th seed is yet? Or will that be announced when the tourney starts?
Only glaring missing link I see is John Hatten from blockbusters ($120k) given how many times that show is run…I’m pretty sure he’s still around.
Phyllis Harris? Oh so we can’t use randy west anymore since he’s a “professional” LOL ;) Nice acculmlated total but I think she will go down since the shows she was on (aside from Greed) dont seem to require much brain strain. I guess we’re lucky they didnt dig up a match game contestant :-P
As for lingo…it could be worse…given that defending champions arent on that show it could always be worse…it could be a whammy contestant or worse…SKYLER!!!
I’m disappointed that we won’t see any of the first big-time winners (Michael Shutterly and Doug What’s-his-face from Millionaire, etc). Also, why does no one ever mention Dan Blonsky? He was the second million-dollar winner, and in my opinion a much more entertaining guy to watch than John Carpenter.
I’ve heard the “TBA” is one of the players from the eventual winning team on VH1′s 2007 World Series of Pop Culture..
Other People Who Could/Should Be There:
- Curtis Warren (Greed/Sale of the Century/Win Ben Stein’s Money), won over $1.5 million combined
- Dr. Tim Hseih, won over a million on “It’s Your Chance of a Lifetime”, NOT an easy show to win that much on given the format
- Catherine Rahm, won half a million on the glorious mind trip that was the Winning Lines bonus round, and (perhaps more impressively) took home the $50,000 top prize on WinTuition (HARD show, and hey, it is a GSN Original!!!)
Well GSN just put out a press release on their site saying that the winner of WSOPC Victor Lee, will be going against Ken Jennings.
I believe Curtis Warren has shunned publicity following his victory on Greed, so he’d turn down an invitation to Grand Slam.
Here are my predictions:
First round:
#1 Rutter over #16 Kelly
#2 Jennings over #15 Lee
#3 Olmstead over #14 Kitt
#4 Toutant over #13 Pawlowicz – Although this is the first one I could see as an upset. Pawlowicz is lowly ranked because he wasn’t on any big money shows, but, has a more impressive series of wins than Toutant
#12 Spangenberg over #5 Legler – I think the “21″ contestants are vastly over-rated by being on a big money show with fairly easy questions
#6 Carpenter over #11 McKee – For whatever reason, I think Carpenter has a slight edge, but, I think it could go either way and will probably be the best game of the first round.
#10 Harris over #7 Oberholtzer
#9 Ogas over #8 Christy
Other than Spangenberg, I could see it going either way on any of the matches other than the top 3.
Assuming they do this bracketed instead of “lowest seed vs. highest seed” in the next round, we should have:
Rutter vs. Ogas
Jennings vs. Harris
Olmstead vs. Carpenter
Toutant vs. Spangenberg
I’ll go 1,2,3 again, with Spangenberg being the George Mason of the tournament.
Which leave Rutter vs. Spengenberg and Jennings vs. Olmstead.
I’ll just say I’d pick Jennings over Rutter in the final, but, with those final 4, I wouldn’t be surprised with any finals matchup and result honestly.
I also have to say I’m surprised “Catherine Rahm” wasn’t involved here, but, we don’t know who was approached and might have turned it down (like many speculate Warren might have)
This is a good roster, I have to say. I’d really like to see a 21 champ up against a Millionaire at one point. IMO, they’re the easiest to win a lot of dough on. I just wish that they wouldv’e used a more scientific system for ranking the competitors. I have 2 ideas. The first one, just a regular written quiz, with questions similar to those they’ll have to use against their opponents. The other is a bit of time for the contestants to chat with one another, all 16 rank the other 15, not counting themselves, and they base the rankings on that. Because with this system, Thom McKee in particular gets shafted. But besides that, I have no complaints about the show.
Since this is about Grand Slam I’ll say that it looks promising, but the real reason I’m writing is because I saw Greed mentioned quite a bit and I was wondering for what years did Greed actually run on regular TV (not the reruns on GSN)
A. Responding with a vulgarity is not allowable.
B. If you really are Amy Kelly, using such language on a public bulletin board isn’t the best publicity for you or potentially for the show. You could’ve gone about this many different ways without resorting to expletives.
lol Amy Kelly indeed.
I just reread the article and figured this out: The 2 first-round matchups I’m most interested in are going to be on my birthday!
Wat about the guy from PYL? The one who “cheated”