There is nothing to prevent the other players from beating him to the buzzer, providing the correct question, and keeping him from hunting the Daily Doubles.
Of course it’s also worth noting that the days of getting Rice-A-Roni for losing are over; you do pick up a consolation prize of $2000 for second place and $1000 for third. I am pretty sure I could get myself to Los Angeles and find a decent hotel for a thousand bucks if I really needed to. Even if you have to come back, at least one of your trips will be paid for.
Just about.
I “won” $23,000 on my episode but still finished last. Three months after the show aired (about 7 months after it was taped), I got my $1,000 consolation prize.
Get a cheap airfare and stay at the suggested hotel, and you’ll probably spend about $550 to get to L.A. (Don’t bother with a car rental- the hotel and studio are VERY close to the airport, and you might as well take the shuttle.) You’ll still have to pay income tax and about $50 in California state income taxes.
So, if you don’t win, you’re working cheap!
Don’t get me wrong, it was a LOT of fun! The staff treated us wonderfully. Don’t pass up the chance to play, if you ever pass the test. But only the winner really profits.
Exactly. You hate Chu and the way he plays? Then BEAT him. Simple as that.
And if you CAN’T beat him, smile and congratulate him for being a dang good player.
You can go to JBoard.tv • View topic - Haters gonna hate, I suppose, but… and join some others.
Off topic: Does Chu remind anyone else of the teen genius who bested Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory?
Great interview with Chu from the AV Club. He explains why he comes off as such a weirdo.
Watched Chu for the first time tonight. I have to admit, I turned on him pretty quickly. Every time he lost on th Jeopardy Weapon, he seemed to give that person a dirty look.
The same sort of issue exists if you don’t have double their total.
Go read post #23 by borschevsky again.
Betting for the tie opens up valid avenues of play for your opponents that make it more likely that you will get to come back the next day. If you play for the tie and your opponent knows you’re going to and also bets for the tie, then you both get to come back the next day if you both get it right and if you both get it wrong. If you bet for the win and the opponent knows you’re going to, then you only get to come back if you get it right.
The expected value of coming back another day (and possibly another day after that) is way bigger than the extra $1 you get for playing for the non-tie win.
Betting for the tie on the first show doesn’t have any particular gain, but it does set up the pattern, which leads to future expected gains.
I thought betting $5 on the DD was hilarious. Reminded me of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy where one of the contestants bets $0 on a DD. Will Ferrell’s “OK… for zero” delivery was awesome.
$5 is the minimum daily double bet. you can’t bet 0
I understand what you’re saying here, but I don’t think it’s applicable on Jeopardy! The contestants that the winner faces ‘today’ have no idea how he bet ‘yesterday’, even if there is a break in taping because of tournaments, end of season, etc. In the case of a tie, the new single contestant would only know that the previous game ended in a tie. He/she has no idea the play and strategies that led to that tie when he/she comes onstage to begin taping.
Obviously this cannot literally be true unless the score is tied going into Final. If one player is ahead you can play for a tie only in one direction, correct or incorrect.
If Arthur has $23000 and I have $16000, he can bet for a tie by betting $9000; assuming I bet everything and we both get it right we’ll both have $32000. He has a slightly lower chance of losing, is guaranteed to win money, and ensures another day on the show with at least one opponent he knows he can beat. But if we both get it wrong he will win $14000 to zero; he cannot tie in that direction.
Of course the counterargument to the “opponent he can beat” argument is that while he now knows he can beat me, he is giving me a shot at him having gained something I didn’t have before; the experience of playing a live match, which is quite visibly nerve-wracking. By allowing me back he might be inadvertently bringing back a player who is in fact more dangerous than the average new player by giving me experience in live play. That counter has been floated quite a lot. However, having said, it, I still think playing for the tie is smart and the “Experienced opponent” threat isn’t that great, because
- At this point, having won 6-7 games, his level of comfort’s going to be higher than any opponent no matter what, and
- Experience can’t help THAT much or else we’d see far, far more long runs. While we tend to remember the Arthur Chus and Ken Jenningses, most champions are one or two-night wonders and it’s quite often visibly the case that a person who wins a few games in a row is just lucky. Experience cannot confer THAT much of a benefit or there wouldn’t be so much turnover. A few months ago they had a multi-night champion - she was in the Armed Forces, don’t remember her name - who was plainly a mediocre player and whose Final bets were stupid, but she got a string of bad opponents and lucked her way into three or four wins. Once she was up against a reasonably good player her ass was grass; experience didn’t help her at all.
- At least to my eyes a person is either comfortable up there or is not, and is easily rattled or isn’t; I don’t think experience has a lot to do with it. We’ve all seen people who didn’t seem like the sharpest player up there win just because they were persistent and didn’t give up, while the brighter player gets a Daily Double wrong, gets rattled by it, and then blows three questions and seems to lose heart. Some people are just sharp with he the button and some are not; some are strategically smart, like Arthur (or Ken Jennings, who while very smart, employed the unbeatable strategy of just ringing in on almost everything and trusting himself to figure out most questions in time to get it right.) Some people bet on Daily Doubles intelligently and some appear to pick numbers wholly at random in a way that obviously hurts their chances of winning. I’m not sure a lot of that stuff can be gained through the short experience of one game.
This is basically why Arthur does it (which he couldn’t last night as the game was a blowout.) The best strategy for winning money is to play again… usually.
The exception would be if the Final category is an Absolute Certainty category. Everyone has an area of personal interest where every Jeopardy! question in that category is child’s play, so you should bet it all if you have a lot of money, as the expected return would actually be larger than the EV+ of coming back the next day. If I’m winning and the Final category is Baseball, I bet everything; the EV+ on that bet considered my odds of getting it right and coming back are way higher than the EV+ of playing it safe and winning less but eliminating the .01% chance of getting it wrong.
When I was on a quiz show (just a local academic thing, not anything near as big as Jeopardy), I found myself going through a two-stage process when buzzing in: First I asked myself “Can I answer this?”, then buzzed in, then figured out what the answer was.
The problem with the “opponant I’ve beaten before” is the randomness of categories and variations in individual skill.
Yes, but it’s still often the optimal strategy because players are more likely to get the FJ question correct than incorrect, and the answers of the top two contestants are pretty strongly correlated. It’s more likely that they both get it right or both get it wrong than a split. The jeopardy archive on last season’s final jeopardy results
Among just the first two scorers:
RR: 47 + 27 = 74
RW: 28 + 13 = 41
WR: 22 + 14 = 36
WW: 51 + 21 = 72
(I haven’t looked at all seasons, but the few I spot-checked showed this pattern. RR > WW, and both RR and WW are much bigger than WR/RW)
When deciding what to wager, 2nd place can safely ignore the WR/RW cases. No reasonable wager will make a difference. If he thinks that 1st place will play for the shutout, then his only sensible wager will be a small one to win in the WW case. If he thinks that 1st place will play for the tie, then he has a choice between playing to win in the RR case or playing to win in the WW case. His expected value is better if he goes all in, so it makes sense to do that.
Now, look at what 1st place has gained by convincing 2nd place to go for it: He now wins in the RR and the WW cases, but playing for the solo win he lost the WW case! Sure, he has to play against a more experienced player in the next game, but he just greatly increased his chance to come back the next day by giving 2nd place a very small increase in expected value.
That WOULD be a great approach, IF you were allowed to ring in immediately.
In my case, I knew 98% of the answers instantly or nearly instantly… but had to wait for Alex to say the last syllable of the clue. I rarely timed things just right. I’m STILL not sure if I was always a fraction of a second too fast or a fraction of a second too slow. And it’s incredibly frustrating to have to wait when you KNOW the correct response!
I agree, but it seemed as it you were saying the leader could make a bet that would cause a tie in both the RR and WW case; I was merely pointing out that that is not possible. You said “then you both get to come back the next day if you both get it right and if you both get it wrong.” Well, no, if you both get it wrong the leader wins (or third place could win - the position of the 3rd place player can be a complicating factor here.) Playing to tie as the leader means playing to tie in the RR case; you win outright if the result is WW.
Yeah, I can’t remember the buzzer-timing rules from the show I was on.
IDK; it’s pretty big news here because he’s from a Cleveland suburb. I’m almost positive he was in my audition group, but he didn’t do anything to bring attention to himself, and he wasn’t any better than I was. I’m still wondering how a guy from the Western Reserve missed a question on John Brown. :smack:
Ah, yes. That was a mistake on my part. I misunderstood your correction.