Whoever said playing a bunch of games online would never get you anything hasn’t met Andi Moore.
The 50-year-old Everett resident turned her pop culture and puzzle savvy into a solid gold bar worth $100,000 on Friday by winning the seventh round of AOL’s online game show “Gold Rush” in Miami.
Moore caught a couple of breaks when her opponents slipped up, but she did it all on her own when it counted and became the first woman to win “Gold Rush.”
“Gold Rush” is an interactive pop-culture trivia and puzzle game created by Mark Burnett, the man who brought us “Survivor” and “The Apprentice.” In each round, players online try to complete a series of trivia challenges and puzzles as fast as they can.
The first three finishers are flown to that round’s featured U.S. city, where they take on each other for the $100,000 gold bar and a chance to win the grand prize of $1 million in gold. Moore’s shot at the million comes in the first week of November.
The Miami episode can be seen at goldrush.aol.com.
The win came just in time for Moore, who has been unemployed since July, when her job as a telephone banker was outsourced. Her reaction upon realizing she’d won the game was a clear combination of excitement and utter relief.
“Absolutely, it was both,” she said in a phone interview from Sea-Tac International Airport upon her return Friday afternoon. “Because I was down to my last hundred dollars in the bank and I didn’t know what I was going to do. As soon as I realized it actually was me going there and opening that safe (to reveal the gold), it was just complete relief.”
She looked as though the weight of the gold bar had been released from her shoulders.
“This is a start,” she said, with joyful tears in her eyes on the show. “It will help to get myself back on my feet and give me a little breathing room. Yesterday, I was poor as a church mouse and today I’ve got $100,000.”
Moore said she planned to pay off credit card bills that she’s racked up since losing her job. It was a story even her final competitor, Erik Best of Durham, N.C., could appreciate.
“I’m not really looking forward to calling my wife and telling her I didn’t win the $100,000,” said Best, a one-time $37,000 winner on “Jeopardy!” “But I think she’ll understand when she hears about Andi and what she’s been going through. I think she’ll be happy for Andi, too.”
Moore faced off with Best in the final challenge with $100,000 at stake.
With Miami as the backdrop, the final challenge asked the players to identify the order in which these Latin singers released their first English-language CD: Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Gloria Estefan, Shakira and Marc Anthony.
The task was to put the singers’ pictures in the right order, and Best took a faster approach, racing to finish as quickly as possible. But Moore was more methodical, carefully examining each photo and getting the order straight in her mind before moving any of them.
Best finished first but had the order wrong, which gave Moore all the time she needed to get it right. She did: Estefan, Martin, Anthony, Iglesias and Shakira.
The next step was to correctly answer a question about one of the five artists. Moore’s question: Which artist holds the Guinness world record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Latin Music chart?
Moore guessed Estefan, which was wrong. That gave Best another chance to finish his puzzle, which he did correctly. He then had a chance to answer a question for all the marbles: Which artist’s cousin was a contestant in the 2006 Miss Universe pageant?
His answer, Martin, was wrong.
Moore got another shot at a new final question: Which artist was the first to perform a song in Spanish at the Video Music Awards?
Moore’s answer, Shakira, had her doing her own little shimmy – to the tune of $100,000 in gold. And she began laughing all the way to the gold exchange bank.
“I don’t know why I went into this hysterical laughter,” Moore said. “But I just couldn’t stop laughing. All of the stress just released and I lost it.”
No, she won it. Big time.
Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
