Man, if you dopers thought regular Jeopardy! players were bad at betting, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! :smack:
In all fairness though, they are accomplishing far more in one single year than I have in any combination of about three. So due kudos to them.
But still, come on!
This thread shall be for all things College Jeopardy!. Old, recent or this particular tournament.
My most favorite college player is Rachel McCool. I was smitten by her lovely smile and half-lisp from the first day I saw her and still am very much smitten by her. No I am not a stalker! I’m a fan damn it!
I don’t usually pay much attention to the wagering because I’m more interested in the questions and answers than in who wins. There’s one wager I noticed in this tournament that I think was bad:
The Final Jeopardy betting strategy in the first round of the tournaments is different from regular-season games. There are four wild-card spots for the high-scoring non-winners. Last year the lowest score among the wild-card folks was $9,800, I think. That’s why I groaned when the girl on Wednesday’s show bet almost all of her $14,000 and lost. I thought she should have bet next to nothing and hoped for a wild-card spot.
Yes, first round, final Jeopardy tournament betting is a whole other animal than normal betting also.
And yes, I thought the same thing. 14Gs is way up there with regards to getting in as a wildcard.
Also, it’s not just Final Jeopardy that the betting is bad, but the Daily Doubles. It’s been pointed out before on these forums that a lot of J! contestants do not make the logically correct bet on DD and FJ! and it irks the shit out of me.
Holy Fudd! I surfed around that site for a bit. From your link, there are links to each game she was in. I checked one, and it had every clue (at least, the ones that were revealed), every response (even the wrong ones), and every wager. How far back does it go, and how complete is it?
Ah, but not quite complete. An incident a few weeks ago brought to mind a favorite clue of mine from the past. Someone was dissing the “Before and After” category, and I said there was one clue that made the entire category worthwhile.
Sure enough, there it is. From show #3184, June 4, 1998:
“The name of this band, heard here, combines a type of recreational vehicle & a composer:”
But it neglects to mention that they then played the chorus of Take the Skinheads Bowling.
The contestants on the show were stumped, but not me.Who is Camper Van Beethoven?
Did you catch the winner’s “how I figured it out” explanation of “Final Jeopardy!” answering strategy? It was similar to my method:
The clue referred to a Greek thinker who was known by a sobriquet which referred to his disc-like shoulders. I ran the names of several philosophers through my head and, as did the eventual champion, figured that “Plato” sounds like “plate”, a disc-shaped object.
In a normal game you can enter FJ in second place and end up winning by placing small to medium bets, but you need help from the first place contestant - they would have to get the question wrong, or bet incorrectly.
This strategy is still an option with Championship events, but there is also the wild card. And, if you think about it, you have to bet either zero or everything if you decide to go for a wild card spot.
If you feel your total is sufficient, bet zero. If you think it is not enough, you have to bet something AND you must get the FJ question correct. Given that, you might as well bet it all.
Betting a small amount just in case you get the question wrong will work out only if your original assumption was wildly off (the assumption that you felt you didn’t have enough to get a wild card)
For example, if you think $14,000 is not enough, how can betting $2000 and ending up with $12,000 ever work? I would guess that $14,000 is about one in four to start with. By not betting it all, you introduce another way to lose: getting the question right and still not having enough winnings to get the wild card.
Over the previous five College Championships that are archived on j-archive (seasons 19 and 21-24, all with modern point values), the minimum cutoff for a wildcard spot has been a median of 10,400 (standard deviation of 1,503, range of 9,800 to 13,500). Assuming the cutoff scores are normally distributed and that those 5 years’ of data are representative, the chance of any score over 13,900 being enough for a wildcard spot is better than 99 percent. (Considering this year’s results, those assumptions may not be warranted.)
Other than relying on previous years’ cutoff values, Elyssa had no way of knowing what she had to wager to have the best chance of beating out people from the other four games for the last wildcard spot. But she did know how she’d have to wager to have the best shot of a least beating out Eric (second place after DJ in her game), on the off chance that they would end up competing for the last wildcard spot. So I would have advised her to bet $201 to beat him in the case that she got the correct response and he didn’t.
I also believe Eric wagered too much. He wagered 400, but I think he should not have wagered more than 199, to ensure that if he and Elyssa both got it wrong, she couldn’t beat him for the last wildcard spot.
In the event, Eric got the correct FJ response and Elyssa didn’t, so no wagering strategy would have saved her.
One of the questions that I’ve always wondered about is this: In these tournaments, do the players in the later quarterfinal games have the advantage of knowing what transpired in earlier games, or do they keep them sequestered somewhere while the games are played? If they know going into, say, Friday’s game what the top four wild card scores are to date, it would give those players a huge advantage when it comes to wagering in Final Jeopardy. I think that they tape five shows a day, so presumably it wouldn’t be too difficult to keep them in a dressing room until it’s their turn to play.
