‘Wheel of Fortune’ contestant reacts to mockery after horrific guess

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We all have our bad days. But unfortunately for recent Wheel of Fortune contestant Gishma Tabari, her bad day played out in front of millions of viewers at home.

The New York-native went viral earlier this month after flubbing a seemingly easy answer, with Wheel fans branding her response the “worst guess ever.”

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With just a handful of letters left on the board for the “Show Biz” category in the triple toss-up round, where letters are revealed one at a time, Tabari stunned host Pat Sajak when she was presented with an almost-solved puzzle, “TH_ _RITI_S _GR_E.”

“The British Ogre,” she blurted.

“Say it again,” Sajak, 77, asked. After Tabari repeated her answer, Sajak amusedly replied, “Uh, no.”

One of Tabari’s fellow contestants quickly swooped in with the right answer: “The Critics Agree.”

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But Tabari’s flub — naturally — quickly went viral, with Wheel fans having plenty of fun mocking her answer online.

“How about that British Ogre? That has to be the worst guess ever,” one person wrote on X.

“This girl guessed ‘The British Ogre’ on Wheel of Fortune and the second hand embarrassment was overwhelming,” another viewer joked. “She wouldn’t even look at the camera for a sec. I feel bad but man that s*** was funny.”

“This show never fails to LOL with contestants,” a third fan wrote, with a fourth sharing a screenshot of the nearly-completed board and writing, “‘THE BRITISH OGRE’ was an actual guess.”

The amusing moment was exactly what Tabari had hoped wouldn’t happen to her as she fulfilled a lifelong dream to appear on the show.

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“The funny part was, right before I went on, I went to my husband, Saman, and I was like … ‘My fear is that I’m gonna go on the show and I’m gonna say or do something stupid that everyone’s gonna laugh,’” she told Fox News Digital, reflecting on her experience.

“That’s exactly what happened.”

Tabari didn’t have a great reason for her strange answer, telling the website it came “from my imagination.”

“From the moment I was up there, and I saw the board, that’s what I saw,” she explained. “Now I look at it and I’m like… it doesn’t make sense.”

After her flub, Tabari remembers thinking, “Why did I say it again?” as she recalled Sajak asking her to repeat her response.

Tabari knew she had become an online sensation when friends started sending her social media posts.

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“I saw my picture and I was like, ‘Oh my God. That’s me,’” she said. But she was unbothered by most of what she read.

“There were some hurtful comments … but honestly, I wasn’t upset by it … People don’t know who I am in general. I have a degree, I’m working … I feel like I just had a hard moment that was on national TV,” she said, joking that she thinks of “The British Ogre” as a person now.

Tabari got the last laugh, pocketing $15,853 by the end of the episode and winning a cruise. But she said there’s one thing she’d do differently if she could relive her experience again.

“If I could redo it, the only thing I would do is just have more fun and be less anxious,” she told Fox News.

mdaniell@postmedia.com

X: @markhdaniell

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