Hell hath no fury like a “Wheel of Fortune” fan scorned.
In Friday’s episode of the game show, fans were frustrated with the reply to a bonus puzzle query.
After netting the very best rating of over $15,000, contestant Julie from Wylie, Texas selected the “person” category, choosing letters P, G, M and O as her additional letters.
She was left to unravel a reasonably filled-in blank; “_O_N_ _ N G P _ R T N E R.”
The proper answer was “FOUNDING PARTNER,” although Julie was left stumped.
Host Pat Sajak later told Julie she had lost out on a further $40,000.
Fans immediately took to social media to query the authenticity of the winning answer, writing things like “Founding partner shouldn’t be a thing: founding fathers YES. Such BS.”
One other person wrote, “Founding Partner? The writers really phoned that one in!”
That tweet received a response, with someone adding, “Founding partner is an unfair terminology word usage and any such wordplay shouldn’t be allowed. #unfairwheel”
An extra person was much more critical, writing, “They’re just making up stuff now.”
In accordance with Capital.com, a founding partner is “the owner or owners of the initial company acquired by private equity buyers searching for to merge quite a lot of firms in the identical line of business right into a larger entity. As they were in initially of this consolidation, they’re called founding partners.”
One other fan tweeted their thoughts, sharing, “While founding partner is a business term, I don’t think lots of people would’ve gotten it. It really was quite a tough one. Just shows that WOF would use anything.”
The contestant Julie, who was accompanied by her brother and 9-year-old son on the taping of the show, was still in a position to take home $15,000.
It was a troublesome end to the week for “Wheel of Fortune” fans, as several local stations redirected programming to the NCAA March Madness tournament as a substitute of airing the sport show on each Thursday and Friday.
The show’s official Twitter account wrote, “When you are unable to see tonight’s episode of Wheel attributable to NCAA March Madness or other special programming in your local station, we are going to accept any puzzle solution or word of your selection (please keep it clean) submitted by 2:59 p.m. PT tomorrow (Friday, March 17) as valid for the Fun & Games $10K Giveaway.”
One fan took to Twitter to poke fun at the difficulty, writing “Somewhere, in Western Arkansas, someone’s grandmother is ticked that attributable to the NCAA Tournament she has to stand up at 3a to look at Wheel of Fortune.”
