Again, the judges should rule based upon audio review. I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility for a game show that’s taped. And I’ve seen examples of cuts and edits (often involving Mayim Bialik) where immediate rulings were corrected.
Why have the hosts, who stand across the studio from the contestants, rule on mangled answers?
I agree with @Eyebrows_0f_Doom. Jeopardy has always done it this way. Trebek asked contestants to repeat themselves if he thought he hadn’t clearly heard what they said numerous times.
You’re asking them to have the host make a split-second decision, on every clue, as to whether or not there was any doubt about whether they totally heard them correctly, and if there’s any doubt at all, signal the producer to stop taping so the judges can review the contestant’s response. That’s not realistic.
Most of the objectors quoted in that article don’t seem to realize that, however bad this means Ken’s hearing might be, Ken asked Luigi to “say again?” because he didn’t think he had heard or understood Luigi’s response clearly, not because he just wanted to give him a chance to correct his clearly wrong answer.
In fact, after Luigi said “Constable,” the pause and then slowness and hesitancy with which Ken replied said “Constable… is correct, yes” indicates to me that he was looking to the judges for a signal and they were signaling to him to rule him correct.
The one thing I think you can criticize Ken for here is that maybe he’s not experienced enough yet and has too low a threshold for thinking he just misheard a response, instead of being able to think, in the heat of the moment, “wait a second, that wasn’t close enough to Constable to be a mere mispronunciation or lack of enunciation, I need to rule him incorrect rather than ask him to repeat himself.”
If he had bet more than $13,600 to beat Emmett and been wrong, he would have dropped below Melissa’s best possible score, $5,600.
That doesn’t explain the amount of his bet, though. I guess he didn’t feel confident about the category. But in his place I would have bet for the win, even if it meant risking coming in third instead of second if I were wrong.
So he’s not necessarily trying to finish in second place rather than third. Luigi couldn’t drop below Melissa’s score, so he only had to hope that Emmett would get the question wrong and then Luigi would win.
I wasn’t sure Ken was being serious about that. If he was, that makes Luigi’s bet even stranger, unless it was a mistake, like April’s earlier in the week.
Seemed pretty obvious to me it was just a joking observation about his getting the right answer. As Luigi’s response was being revealed, Ken said “did he know it was A Whole New World? He did! He’s a Disney fan!”
Apropos of nothing, is anyone else disappointed when they see this thread has a bunch of new posts, then click on it only to see they comprise yet another extended discussion of FJ betting?
I don’t feel that way. The answers-and-questions of the game are, perhaps, 90% uncontroversial. Betting for Final Jeopardy is much more often weird or inexplicable (and thus worthy of discussion).
Reasonable people may differ on this topic, of course.
I thought of Lorna Doones almost immediately. (Partly because I noticed the name in the cookie aisle in the supermarket and remembered there’s also a novel of the same name.)
As someone who may be the biggest culprit of discussing FJ betting, I should respond
As @Sherrerd mentioned, most of the game is answering the questions. But it’s the wagering on the DDs and FJ that is an integral part of the game, and a part that is fully in control by the contestants. If a contestant makes a serious error in judgment regarding a bet, then I think it is indeed worthy of discussion.
Otherwise, we’d only be talking about Ken versus Mayim. Or if we knew the FJ answer.
I thought of Lorna Doones almost immediately because the lounge at my workplace has a bin of those 100 calorie snack bags and one of the options is Lorna Doones.
I don’t know, maybe I’m getting dumber as I age, but frankly, trying to reason my way through those posts feels like more mental work than I want to be doing in my off time. I guess I sort of get it, if you’re really into betting as a topic, and obviously that pays off (see James Holzhauer,) and of course if I were going to be on Jeopardy I’d bone up on FJ betting strategies, but since I have never done so and am not into betting as a topic, such discussions feel to me a bit like having to do those logic puzzles on the GRE. When I read these posts like “see, Jane should have known that Fred knew that he had no chance to win, but did have a chance to vie for second, and therefore had to bet $2600, so she should have bet $4600 to ensure she’d beat him, so Mark should have known that Jane would know this, and therefore should have realized that if she got it right she’d wind up with $12801, so therefore there was no downside to his betting up to $9600, but he only bet $6000! He could have been $3600 richer! What a moron!” my eyes just glaze over. You guys might as well be writing “Mark should have realized that Jane had to integrate ln(x^2) from 0 to pi, so therefore he should have taken the second derivative of the arctangent of sqrt(1/(x^3-3x+4)).”
See the Lorna Doone discussion above. Discussions of FJ betting are only a minority of the posts in the previous threads. There’s plenty of discussion about whether a certain unexpected response should/shouldn’t have been accepted, whether the judges made the right ruling, how we can’t believe this or that clue was a triple stumper, how a certain clue was poorly written, how it seemed like this or that player actually knew their stuff but just wasn’t good with the buzzer, whether or not we liked Matt Amodio’s “what’s” response style, etc.