Let’s run a few numbers.
Every day there are three contestants on Jeopardy!; each has a one-in-three chance of winning. (1/3)[sup]5[/sup] = 1/243. Thus for every contestant who comes on, there’s approximately a 1 in 250 chance that he/she will win 5 in a row, just randomly. You figure 250 shows a year, usually two new contestants per show (because one sticks around from the previous day), and you can pretty much expect to have two people a year win five times in a row.
But Jennings won, what was it, 74 times in a row? The odds of that happening randomly are, according to my Windows calculator,
1________
202,755,595,904,452,569,706,561,330,872,954,000
That’s 4.932 x 10[sup]-36[/sup].
That’s "one in a million billion billion times the number of peope who have ever lived on Earth. "
Granted, most of those five-time champs were obviously smarter than the average bear; no doubt many of them would have gone on to win more games, and some even to rack up lengthy winning streaks.
I’m not trying to take anything away from the five-time champs who went on under the old rules and were forced to step down after five wins. I’m sure it must be galling as hell to have been forced to quit and then to watch Jennings winning over and over again. But the fact that past winners were forced to stop after five wins does not even remotely suggest that they could have done what Ken Jennings did.
For fuck’s sake, the guy did something really astonishing; I will never understand why everyone seems to hate him so much. I suppose it’s a way of trying to hold onto some kind of superiority, but all it does is make you look petty and jealous. Show some class and get over yourselves.