Jenning notes in his book about his Jeopardy experience that he needed to decide to buzz in before he knew the answer - so he had to be very good at knowing which questions he could expect to know the answers to *by the time he was called on.
*
There’s a lot more strategy to the wagers in Daily Doubles/Final Jeopardy than most people think, too. Another factor that gave Watson an edge over us puny hoo-mans was that it was able to follow all of the wagering reasoning all the way to convergence, not just one or two layers deep, which resulted in it making wagers which looked very strange to us.
Well, from our point of view, its wrong answers seemed way off, while our mistakes seem only natural. But from its point of view, our wrong answers are probably just as ludicrous. It’s important to remember that regardless of how well it thinks, it doesn’t think like us.
There are a lot of (intelligent) people here who take great pride in not knowing anything at all about popular culture within the past 50-60 years. So I imagine, despite being otherwise intelligent and able to reason well, many would run into problems. I haven’t watched the show much in the past decade or so but I’ve seen some clips of contestants struggling on very well known facts about things like sports, too.
BTW, how old is an “old guy”? That song is over 25 years old, so I’d be more surprised if any youngsters knew it.
This was 21 years ago, so it was new then. I was 45 at the time, and way older than the target audience. I did know the song, just not the artist - until I had to buy it, that is.
They were just beginning to do heavier popular culture questions that year. The FJ question was around Miami Vice and the new show that the star of Miami Vice was in. Neither of us got it. It was only the second week of the season, and they hadn’t got the new style questions down yet.
I’ve noticed that many are very bad at betting Final Jeopardy. They only seem to think one level, with very little consideration for ‘what if?’ scenarios. I usually freeze the frame that shows the final scores prior to Final Jeopardy, to figure out everyone’s optimal final bet. I’m not saying that my opinion is perfect, but many games have been lost by poor betting strategy.
How many of us here that are Jeopardy participants (or aspire to be) are also involved in Learned League? There’s a lot a crossover between Jeopardy folk and LL in general, so I imagine there are at least a few of us here as well.
FYI, that link is to the start of the thread I created more than 13 years ago to list all of the Dopes on Jeopardy! Here is a link to the most recent version of the list. I’ll add Mr AtoZ after his show airs.
Just to circle back to this, having just seen Alex Trebek in person in late February, he looks and sounds fine. If I hadn’t known about it, I never would have guessed he had recently had surgery.