(MONEY Magazine) – The lights are hot, the TV cameras are turned on, but Leslie Frates, a college Spanish teacher from Hayward, Calif., is too excited to be nervous. Standing on a Hollywood soundstage, wearing pancake makeup and a 1,000-watt smile, she's about to engage in 24 minutes of mind-to-mind combat with a pair of equally eager trivia freaks to determine who'll be smart enough, or fast enough, or perhaps lucky enough to win $100,000 on Jeopardy!, America's brainiest game show. It's the moment Frates, 36, has hoped for ever since she was nine years old and began watching the popular quiz program after school. ''I was a weird kid,'' she says, recalling her childhood habit of memorizing maps and browsing the encyclopedia. ''For a person like me, this is a dream come true.'' Frates' adventure is the envy of every couch potato who's ever envisioned winning big money in front of an audience of 17 million and then laughing while writing checks to pay off every last creditor. Unfortunately, only a chosen few ever get a chance at experiencing that thrill. While the average Jeopardy! winner takes home $11,500 each show, the odds of someone actually getting a shot at the $100,000 jackpot are about the same as they are for a high school basketball player making it to the NBA. Out of the 17 million Jeopardy! wannabes who play along at home, tens of thousands inquire about getting on the show each year, 20,000 actually take the qualifying exam, and a mere 450 or so make it onto the program. Even snaring an appointment to take the 50-question qualifying test is tough. ''The biggest hurdle,'' quips one player, ''is dialing enough times to get the producers on the phone.'' Those who do ultimately appear before the cameras field factlets shotgunned by the show's host, Alex Trebek, and then score points by firing back answers in the form of questions. Sample factlet: ''This leader, not boxer Cassius Clay, founded the modern Egyptian kingdom in the 1800s.'' Answer: ''Who was Muhammad Ali?'' ''You can't be just a nice, funny person,'' says contestant coordinator Susanne Thurber. ''You've got to know something.''

If sheer enthusiasm could determine the outcome of today's competition, Frates would have a lock on the 100 Gs. At home, her telephone answering machine serenades callers with Jeopardy! theme music, and her 1984 Honda Civic station wagon sports vanity license plates that read jepardy. But enthusiasm will not be enough. This, after all, is no ordinary edition of the program conceived 27 years ago by game show mogul Merv Griffin. This is the 1991 $100,000 Tournament of Champions, an annual brain-o-rama, scheduled again for next month, that features the previous season's biggest winners in taped elimination rounds to be aired over a two-week period. The 11 men and four women assembled here in Hollywood for the big event have already won an aggregate $819,651 (before taxes) during previous appearances. Since then, to improve their chances, they've been boning up on their Shakespeare and honing their reaction times.

In Leslie Frates' case, it helps that she's fluent in seven languages, possesses a photographic memory and has a passion for looking things up. She's also been practicing for hours at home with a buzzer contraption built by her lawyer-husband out of a 49 cents shampoo bottle and an electronic button from Radio Shack. She has used it to compete against hypothetical opponents from her file of videotaped Jeopardy! shows. The other contestants are no slouches either. Lou Pryor, a 57-year-old Yale- educated tax lawyer from New Canaan, Conn., has systematically worked his way through The World Almanac, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Mark Pestronk, 43, an attorney from Washington, D.C., solicited advice from a professor of neurology in an effort to get his buzzer finger to work at the same speed as his brain, and then spent hours improving his reaction time by playing his son's Nintendo. Jim Scott, 22, sharpened his skills on the University of Virginia's College Bowl team that placed eighth in the nation. These are all smart people who have already beaten steep odds simply by getting to compete for money on TV. After all, there are only five big giveaway programs still in business -- Jeopardy!, $100,000 Pyramid, The Price Is Right, Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune. The many others -- like Hollywood Squares -- that air during the wee hours or on cable channels are reruns, meaning the money has long since been awarded. All of the tournament contenders have ideas about what they would do with the $100,000 prize. Frates, for example, would like to remodel her family's 34-year-old, 1,250-square-foot ranch-style house north of San Jose. Then she'd buy a redwood deck for her parents' vacation home and two round-trip tickets for a first-time tour of Spain. She knows from declaring her previous winnings that the IRS will treat all her Jeopardy! payouts as if they were ordinary earnings, even though the $56,099 in prize money was, in her words, ''the most extraordinary ordinary income I've ever had.'' After paying about 35% in state and federal taxes, she had $36,464 left and parked about $20,000 in a credit union account as a college fund for her son. Lou Pryor paid off the bulk of his second mortgage with his $26,601 in prize money. If he wins the tournament, he plans on financing a trip to Europe for an archaeological dig. Jim Scott won $49,300. After Uncle Sam and tax collectors of California, Maryland, and his own Howard County collected their share, he had $33,000, which he put into savings. As a new college graduate, he envisioned investing the $100,000 grand prize in short-term certificates of deposit to establish a financial cushion before he'd even succeeded in finding a job. Who will get to realize these big dreams? Only after 10 games and numerous surprises will the competitors here at the Hollywood Center Studios on Oct. 14, 1991 find out.

In its sheer unpredictability, the 1991 tournament turns out to be close to a replay of the 1990 championship, when formidable competitors dueled right down to the final buzzer. That year the odds-on favorite was Frank Spangenberg, 32, a New York City cop, who had won more money in five successive games -- $102,597 -- than anyone in the show's history. Spangenberg was one of those unconventional contestants that game show producers love. A transit police officer from Queens, he was well versed in Latin literature and liked classical music so much that his dog was named Fafner, after one of the singing giants in Wagner's Das Rheingold. Thus Spangenberg was a welcome contrast to the many lawyers, professors and full-time students who excel on the program. Spangenberg applied to become a Jeopardy! contestant after repeatedly winning a daily pool set up by co-workers who enjoyed playing along with the contestants while watching the show during their dinner break. Spangenberg was unbeatable. ''It got so bad,'' he recalls, ''people wouldn't ante up if I was competing.'' Figuring correctly that he could improve his odds of getting on the show if he auditioned outside the huge New York City area, the six-foot, six-inch bachelor responded to a contestant search while in Scranton. The visiting producers gave him the standard 10-minute qualification exam. Next he took a ''personality'' test, which includes playing a trial game, and then talked for a while to demonstrate he had the right stuff for the show. He was later invited to Los Angeles at his own expense to play on TV. He did as well on the air as he had done in his office, winning $71,997 in the first four games he played back-to-back during one 5 1/2-hour taping session and $30,600 in the fifth and final one the next day. The total was roughly $20,000 more than any contestant had ever won during a single week. It was also $27,597 more than the $75,000 allowed under the rules then prevailing at the ABC network. Accordingly, he lived up to the agreement signed as a condition of appearing on the show and donated the excess to a worthy cause. A religious man, Spangenberg telephoned Sister Dolores of the Missionaries of Charity in New York City, an order of nuns that runs a hospice in Manhattan, a branch of the one in Calcutta administered by their colleague Mother Teresa. ''I've just won too much money on a game show,'' he explained, ''and you're going to get it.'' Sister Dolores, however, was from India and never watched TV, so something got lost in translation; Spangenberg felt she thought he was a crank and dismissed him. From what he was told later, the nuns had been praying for a new roof for their hospice. Within a few days a divine check from Jeopardy! arrived.

What Spangenberg did not give to the sisters, the IRS considered to be ordinary income. So, for tax purposes, his $75,000 winnings were added to his $39,500 salary. And since he had ''earned'' his prize money in Los Angeles, the State of California demanded 5%. What's more, his hometown, New York City, claimed approximately 3.9% in income taxes in addition to New York State's 7.9%. In all, he handed over about 40% of his game show winnings to the government. Eventually, with the money he had left, he made a $60,000 down payment on a house in Queens. He then decided to register for graduate school to get a degree in theology. At the tournament, his main rival turned out to be Bob Blake, a 51-year-old insurance company actuary from Vancouver, Canada. Blake's name was one of 250 pulled out of a barrel containing 110,000 entries for a local Jeopardy! audition raffle in 1990. He too went on to win more during his initial five- day run than the allowable $75,000. So at his direction the producers gave his $7,501 in excess winnings to Oxfam Canada for international good works. They also informed him that even though he was a Canadian citizen, the IRS still felt entitled to 30% of his winnings because he had earned them in the U.S. In addition, California demanded another 5% -- this despite the fact that in his own country, game show prizes were treated like lottery winnings and were therefore exempt from any tax. Blake's style was low-key but deadly. Host Trebek had written that the rapid-fire Jeopardy! format favored the under-40 player. ''I took issue with that,'' said Blake, and indeed he was unbeatable. Scoring highest in the 1990 finals, Blake gave quick answers that enabled him to buy a $258,550 townhouse in Vancouver and a $10,000 two-week cruise in the Mediterranean.

Now, in the 1991 tournament, Leslie Frates wonders if she can duplicate Blake's feats. She's already spent a total of $1,864 preparing for her appearances, including $1,000 for dresses, $200 for three perms, $350 for air fares, $40 for lodging, $150 for reference books, $10 for her practice buzzer and $114 in lost pay. However, she quickly falls behind. The producers have altered the game-board electronics and, as a result, her timing is off. Even though she knows the name of the Pacific island atoll that was once known as Escholtz, she can't get recognized first to blurt, ''What is Bikini?'' Fortunately, she gets her rhythm back: Within minutes, her total goes up from $1,100 to $11,700. She is able to identify Cicero as the writer from ancient Rome with the greatest number of surviving works, and she wins the quarter-final round with $13,000. Her reaction: ''My two years of college Latin were not in vain.'' In the next game, however, she is not as formidable. Jeopardy! competitors place bets from their stake. A correct answer wins the amount of the wager, but a wrong answer loses it. They have to bet enough money so that they beat their rivals but not so much that they blow all their winnings on one wrong response.

Going into the stretch of the semifinals, Leslie is leading her two opponents. Then she bets $5,501 of the $6,900 she has at this point. All three of the players get the answer wrong, but she had bet the most and winds up with only $1,399. The winner, with a mere $1,750 left, is young Jim Scott, the recent college graduate, who advances to the finals. There, in the first game, the category posted on the board before the commercial break is ''U.S. Presidents.'' Jim figures he can bet the ranch because from the time he was five he's known the names of the American heads of government in chronological order. He wagers almost all his money -- $9,100 now -- on being able to identify the first two consecutive Presidents (Jefferson and Madison) who were from the same state (Virginia). He does, and wins the first round of the finals by $9,600. He brings his $9,600 lead into the second -- and last -- game. In Final Jeopardy, he misses the big question, but his rivals do too. Since Jim has bet modestly this time, he wins by default. His $9,600 lead has sustained him. His jaw goes slack. He emits an involuntary giggle. Suddenly, he's the one with the enviable tax problem. Trying to recover his cool, Jim feels like the luckiest unemployed recent college graduate in the world. ''The $100,000,'' he confides, ''will keep the wolf from the door.'' Jim Scott will now have approximately $63,000 after taxes to put into his nest egg, plus an offbeat achievement for his resume. As for the also-rans, Leslie jokes, ''Guess I'll just have to go back to being a Spanish teacher.'' But she has no intention of complaining about her investment. ''I spent less than $2,000,'' she says proudly, ''and won $61,000. I don't consider that a bad return for the money.''

BOX:

A kid right out of college made a fortune before he got his first job.

A transit cop from Queens was now able to buy himself a new home.