Alberto Izquierdo (Alicante, 1975), the computer engineer who completed the donut of Pass word in 2012, a success that reported almost half a million euros, has once again conquered another eight thousand of television contests. This month you have entered the exclusive club of the participants of To know and to win that reach the top of 100 programs. Only 15 contestants have achieved it in the more than 20 years that the TVE space has been on the air. Izquierdo returned home with more than 90,000 euros and the next day he was at his job at Villarreal CF’s Ciudad Deportiva, heading the club’s IT department. “Here I have a double pleasure: as a worker and as a fan. I am proud to help the team from my field,” he says.
Izquierdo discovered television contests at the age of 12. “I saw The time is gold and got a lot of questions right. That was when I thought that when I grew up I wanted to be a contestant”. His debut came at the age of 22, in 1998, in Who wants to be a millionaire, where he got 300,000 pesetas. He has been working for Villarreal for eight years and is now one of their most popular employees. The younger players ask him to take photos with them and even the relatives of a first team player, whose name he does not want to give, follow him.
Last summer, the club made him relive his great moment in Pass word when he proposed to him to star in the presentation video of one of his signings. Izquierdo had to guess it playing the donut… “With the O, name of the new signing of Villarreal”, he is asked at the end, when there is only one letter left. And Izquierdo answers: “Pasapalabra”. Ontiveros was presented to the fans.
The contest fan takes care of the connectivity needs that arise in an elite team. “These are issues that cannot fail: a football club works permanently with cameras, programs, touch screens, GPS, medical equipment,” he says. “Just for the first team we need 30 computers.” He makes sure that everything works correctly, with the same meticulousness with which he studied books, encyclopedias and dictionaries to accumulate close to a million euros between all his contests.
Izquierdo has found his place at Villarreal CF’s Ciudad Deportiva. “It is a very familiar club, with a very jovial atmosphere and where I open the door of my office and I can meet real soccer stars who pass through here,” he says. He never thought of leaving it. I couldn’t do it. “People are very wrong about the money in contests. A large part is taken by the Treasury”, he clarifies. “You buy a house and you’re left without a penny, but come on, it’s not bad!” he jokes.
Left drags the ability from small. “I was good at memorizing things and in the encyclopedias of the time there were many. My sister says that when I was three years old I knew all the capitals and that I spent hours reading the atlas. It was a way of traveling,” he says. For Pass word The formula is simple: read the entire dictionary until you are close to learning it by heart. That is perhaps why he got the last letter right, the D: “Exemplary of a species that possesses its own qualities in the most complete way. Sampler”. It’s a skill that at work serves you for something entirely different: remembering URL addresses, IP numbers, or passwords more than any other.
Without doing it on purpose, the parallelism between the donut and the present day of the Yellow Submarine is obvious: “It is very difficult to complete Pass word. I had been very close several times, but between doing 24 or 25 there is a huge jump. A leap that the club where he works took a few decades ago. If there is something that Izquierdo does not betray, it is memory: “We must value what we currently have a lot.”
Of the club’s players, who could compete with him in a contest? Andres Fernandez [portero del Villarreal] it is a phenomenon. He studied Computer Engineering. It is a unique case. How many players can reconcile such a difficult race with training and competitions”, says Izquierdo. He, however, could not get on the pitch. “I’m so bad! What I was not bad at all was basketball. I was federated for several years.” Until he was 25 he was the escort of the city team, Vila-Real.
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