Wheel of Fortune is making up for a mistake they made in 2021.
When Debbie Jacobson first appeared on the show, she and her opponents were tasked with solving a Same Letter puzzle in the second round. As the name suggests, these puzzles consist of several words that start with the same letter. If a contestant calls the letter that begins each word in the puzzle, they earn a $1,000 bonus.
Debbie was supposed to get this bonus, because the puzzle was SALMON SNAPPER SQUID & SHRIMP, and she called the letter S right away. However, she was not awarded the extra money, most likely because she landed on the mystery wedge on the same spin. After revealing four S’s, she decided to pick up the wedge, which turned out to be worth $10,000. Unfortunately, whoever is in charge of keeping score forgot to add the same letter bonus to her score. Instead of receiving $1,000 in spendable money like she was supposed to, Debbie’s score for the round remained at $0.
To be clear, this scoring error may not have affected the result of Debbie’s first game at all. She lost her turn after calling an incorrect consonant (T), which allowed her opponent Joe Wetherbee to solve the puzzle instead. By the end of the game, Debbie had only won $2,000, which put her in a distant third place.
However, there is a scenario where this scoring mistake massively affects the results. Since the S’s were the first letters to be revealed, Debbie hadn’t earned any spendable money at this point in the round. If she’d been awarded the $1,000 bonus, she would have had enough cash to buy up to four vowels. As it turns out, all five vowel letters were in the puzzle, so going on a shopping spree would have revealed many extra letters.
In this case, Debbie may have never called a wrong consonant in the first place, because the additional information may have affected her decision making process. Since she also had the $10,000 mystery wedge on standby, solving the puzzle would have substantially boosted her score. Unlike many other game shows in this day and age, Wheel of Fortune contestants keep whatever cash and prizes they earn during the main game, even if they lose. If Debbie’s score was calculated correctly, she would have had a chance to go home with at least $12,000.
When game shows make a mistake, they have a tendency to err in the contestants’ favor. Even if the mistake in question didn’t affect the ultimate outcome of the game, they’ll still often make it up to the contestant who got shortchanged. We can’t know for certain how Debbie’s 2021 appearance would have turned out without the scoring error, so Wheel decided to invite her back out of fairness.
Even though it took 5 years for Debbie to return, it appears that Wheel of Fortune caught the mistake much sooner, because they made a subtle modification to the game very shortly thereafter. Starting with season 39 (which premiered in September 2021, 6 months after Debbie’s first game), the mystery round category will almost never be Same Letter. This means that whoever is in charge of scoring won’t make the same mistake again, because they never have to worry about the same letter bonus and the mystery wedges at the same time. The only exception to this rule occurred on May 13, 2025. In all likelihood, they made this exception because the puzzle (SURROUND SOUND SYSTEM) was meant to replace a round that had to be thrown out.
Debbie fared much better in her second appearance on the show. She won $21,662 in the main game, thanks in part to a close call during the speed-up round. She solved the puzzle RASPBERRY LOLLIPOP, but the host Ryan Seacrest had to double-check her solution with the judges. They confirmed that she began saying the right answer before her 3-second timer ran out, which sealed a decisive victory. Alongside a chunk of cash, Debbie also won a trip to Italy. Unfortunately, she failed to solve the bonus round puzzle (AN OBVIOUS POINT), so she wasn’t able to add to her winnings any further.
Since Debbie first appeared on Wheel of Fortune with Pat Sajak, she has the distinction of playing the game under two different hosts.
