Fil-Am nurse figures out perplexing Wheel puzzle; bags US$45000 in bonus round

Screen grab of De Leon’s bonus round puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.

A Filipino-American nursing student from Daly City, California recently bagged  the $45,000 jackpot after having correctly cracked the bonus round puzzle on American TV game show “Wheel of Fortune” on its March 19, 2014 episode.

Viewers were left in awe as Emil De Leon correctly guessed the item with only two letter clues to go on:  N and E.  The puzzle phrase consisted of three words, with only the first two letters of the first word revealed as clues. 

“This looks tough to me… You’re a very good puzzle solver, but I don’t know. You have 10 seconds. Keep talking. Maybe the right thing will pop out. Good luck,” TV host Pat Sajak told De Leon, who was visibly nervous in the face of  the challenge.

All the sudden – and to everyone’s amazement – De Leon exclaimed, “new baby buggy!”, the correct answer.

The audience went wild, as Sajak jokingly frisked the contestant to check if he was concealing anything that aided him with the guess.

Sajak took to Twitter after the show; his tweets read: “(It was the) most amazing solve in my 30+ years on the show. No kidding,” and “What made last night’s solve amazing was the generic category. Could have been “new anything.” But ‘baby buggy?!’ Wow!”

A nursing student at the NCP College of Nursing in San Francisco, De Leon said that he had recently studied a course on pediatrics, and had babies on his mind when he correctly guessed the puzzle.

De Leon was then invited to appear on the “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” where he explained how he solved the puzzle.

Screen grab of Emil De Leon with host Pat Sajak, jokingly frisking the excited contestant.