Watson the IBM computer on Jeopardy?

Last night through wednesday Watson is going up against Ken Jennings, who won 75 jeopardy games a few years ago, and other top players on jeopardy. Watson is wired to 15 some trillion bytes of memory and like 10 750 powered servers; however, Watson actually got some answers wrong, or wasn't quick enough to buzz in before the other players. I don't know exactly how algorithims work, I think it's like a code or somehting, but can a computer not answer certain phrases or idioms? Is Watson rigged to allow the other contestants to answer questions because I noticed last night that Watson tied with another contestant both with $5000 and Ken Jennings lost with $2000. How does this compare to the computer game of jeopardy on a regular disc, because when I play Jeopordy at home or when my dad plays it, and we don't buzz in and the computer buzzes in, sometimes the computer contestants will get it wrong on the CD Rom game, and I think that is rigged or there is some kind of pattern on the CD Rom disc game? I don't know if Watson is actually rigged, or if I'm using the right words, but why did Watson get certain questions wrong during the show, and other times the contestants were able to buzz in before Watson? One time, Watson said the same answer as Ken Jennings did, and they both were wrong. I'm thinking Watson is like a speech recognition program or text to speech recognition program on a computer because when ever you talk into a speech recognition program to give it a command on the computer it will not always interpret what you say correctly. I'm far from being a programmer, I have decent knowledge about computers, I don't really know how to use programming language at all, so any info on how Watson works on Jeopardy will be helpful. These are just my opinions.