Wheel of Fortune Contestant Solves Puzzle, Loses Anyway

There are few certainties in this life: death, taxes, and some poor soul on Wheel of Fortune getting absolutely hosed by the puzzle board. Last night, America got to witness the third one in spectacular fashion, and the internet is still picking its jaw up off the floor. Here's the setup. A contestant named—and I swear I'm not making this up—Dale, lands on the $3,500 wedge, buys a vowel with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything, and proceeds to solve the puzzle. Correctly. Flawlessly. A clean sweep. Except he didn't say the answer. He *asked* the answer. The puzzle, under the category "Phrase," read: "DON'T COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY HATCH." Dale, riding high on vowel-purchasing adrenaline, looked Pat Sajak dead in the eye and said, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch?" Now, for those of you who have never watched this show—first of all, what are you doing with your life—the rules are brutally simple. You solve the puzzle by *stating* it, not *inquiring* about it. Sajak, a man who has hosted this program since before most of us were born, did that thing where he tilts his head like a confused golden retriever and says, "Well, you phrased that as a question..." The studio audience made that collective *ohhhhh* sound. You know the one. It's the same noise people make when they watch a video of someone slipping on ice but not quite falling. Sympathy, but also, like, a little bit of enjoyment. Dale, realizing his fatal grammatical error, tried to course-correct. "Don't count your chickens before they hatch," he said, this time with the flat affect of a man who just watched his mortgage payment evaporate. But Sajak, bound by the ancient and merciless laws of game show bureaucracy, shook his head. "I'm sorry, we needed that the first time." The puzzle went unsolved. The next contestant—a woman named Brenda who had been quietly minding her own business—solved it on her turn like a sniper taking a single shot. She didn't even look happy about it. She looked like she'd just watched a car crash and was now being handed the keys to the wreckage. Social media, as you might expect, had a field day. One viral tweet read: "Dale didn't lose Wheel of Fortune. He lost a grammar contest disguised as a game show. RIP king." Another user wrote: "The way Pat Sajak said 'you phrased that as a question' had the same energy as your dad explaining why you can't have dessert." And my personal favorite: "Dale is every guy who's ever been absolutely certain at a bar and absolutely wrong." For the record, this isn't the first time Wheel of Fortune has destroyed a human being over semantics. In 2017, a contestant lost a trip to Hawaii because he said "flamenco dance lessons" instead of just "flamenco." In 2021, someone solved a puzzle but mispronounced a word and got dinged. The show is less a game show and more a psychological experiment on how quickly the human spirit can be crushed by a spinning wheel and a man in a suit. Dale walked away with whatever consolation prize they give you—probably a ceramic dalmatian and a gift card to a restaurant that closed three years ago. But he also walked away with something more valuable: a permanent spot in the pantheon of game show fails, right next to the guy who guessed "fish" for every answer on Family Feud and the woman who thought the capital of France was "F." So the next time you're feeling down about a mistake you made at work, just remember: at least you didn't solve the puzzle, only to lose because you added a question mark. Dale, buddy, we hardly knew ye. **The Takeaway:** Wheel of Fortune is a show where you can be 100% right and still be 100% wrong, which honestly makes it the most realistic depiction of American life currently on television. Dale didn't lose a game