Was anyone else watching this dude Alex Jacob on Jeopardy recently? He was a six-time champion who racked up over 150K in winnings.
The interesting thing about him is that he’s a former poker champion. He used the unorthodox strategy of jumping around the board in order to throw off his opponents and find Daily Doubles. He bet huge in Daily Doubles and seemed to pull correct answers out of thin air at the last second. By the time Final Jeopardy rolled around, he was often uncatchable.
Of course Jacob took some heat for this aggressive strategy and he’s not the first contestant to do so.
Why are contestants villainized simply for trying to play the game better than their opponents? Is the problem that some people see this as a trivia contest while others see it as a game of strategy? Is it more to do with how Jacob came off as super intense and joyless? Personally I thought he was entertaining as hell.
They are placed randomly but very rarely in the lower dollar amount spaces. So people using this strategy never pick the low dollar spaces until the Doubles are gone. It’s annoying in that some categories have a progression or learning curve that gets thrown off by starting in the middle.
IME, DD’s are never in the first row and most frequently in the 3rd and 4th row of the category. But scrolling down recent episodes in the J-archive, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
It’s not just starting with the higher dollar values, it’s the hunting - doing every 500 dollar one across the board. Not playing the categories top-bottom pisses some people off. (I swear, not starting from the left pisses some people off.)
It’s like those “unwritten rules” in baseball that cause fights, but people “violate” them because they don’t know about them.
I have no problem with playing to win. I’ve seen discussion on this board about deliberately playing to a tie, and nothing seems more stupid. To win is the thing. This isn’t pre school. This. Is. Jeopardy!
I don’t mind betting $1 in a DD if it is a category you don’t know. You’re playing defensive to keep the DDs away from the other players. A DD can turn a game around in an instant - look at Alex-true DDs late in the game! The man has balls of steel! But they made the games runaways. Awesome play!
I wonder if there isn’t other biases going on - like Arthur Chu, Alex was a bit “off”. He always seemed stiff, maybe even “autistic”. He didn’t come across as a friendly type. So jackass viewers pick on him. There’s nothing as bad to some people as an unlikeable winner. Haters gotta hate.
I don’t enjoy the show as much when the players jump around the board, because there is a progression to each category that gets lost, and it’s also more difficult to recall the specifics of each category. This is what makes it a good strategy for the players as well, so I don’t begrudge those who use it, as they are there to try to win. But I’d be happy with a rule change so that categories are always gone through in order.
This is probably a hijack, but the idea with playing for a tie is that you win more money. It’s not a charity thing for the other players, or at least not only that.
What’s the point of having contestants choose the next category/value if you’re expected to just go down the line? If they just ask questions in order, it might as well be Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
I always assumed it was to ensure that you’d be playing the next game against at least one person you felt reasonably certain you could beat (again), versus taking the luck of the draw and risk facing two Ken-Jennings-level savants.
Right, that’s part of it, although there’s the counter-argument that the player you’re saving is gaining experience and will be likely to play better in the next game.
There’s also the point that if other players know you’re playing for a tie, it changes their betting strategy in ways that benefit you. Also, in a tie they pay out the full amount to both players, rather than splitting it between them. So ties increase the total amount of prize money, which should benefit all the players.
It seems that when people do use the strategy of jumping around the board and starting with the higher amounts, they usually do win more money. So, they do it because it works.
I really liked Alex for having the guts to bet big on Daily Doubles. So often people are afraid to bet a lot, even when they get the DD near the beginning of the game and only have a few thousand. Why *wouldn’t *you bet it all (unless you knew it was a category you were unsure of) when it’s still the Jeopardy round and you have like 3000!?
I think the odds of you successfully completing a DD would go up if you have had at least one previous clue in that category. Some of the categories are a little weird and it takes at least one clue to get the theme.
This is by far my biggest complaint about Jeopardy contestants, and game show contestants in general. I yell at the TV: “It’s not your money! Why not bet it all??” If you’re any good at trivia – and you should be if you made it to Jeopardy – why not have the confidence to put your money where your mouth is? And you’re risking literally nothing! At worst you walk away with what you brought and a nice memory of being on TV. Not only does more confident betting result in better television, it seems to be more successful too! :smack:
I think we have some posters here who have actually been on the show. Maybe they can confirm whether, even though they are free to pick anything, the contestants are *strongly encouraged *to pick from top to bottom by the show ‘handlers’ because that’s how the audience at home likes to play along. It’s usually not an issue because it also seems like the contestants find it easier too.
I think it was his first day on the show; he hit a Daily Double, and when asked for his wager he just stood there. Alex (Trebek) had to press him again and ask for an amount. It sort of felt like Alex (Jacob) was stalling. I can see how that is a sound strategy if you’re in the lead, but as a viewer I don’t like it.
Apparently the Jeopardy! Powers That Be got sick of paying out two contestants per show when ties started to become more frequent last year. There is a new rule (never announced on the show by Alex, but revealed by contestants on the J-Board) that in the event of a tie there is a tie-breaking question to determine a winner rather than declaring co-champions. Which explains why we haven’t seen any ties lately.
Hmmm, I didn’t see that episode. But for some reason deliberately stalling in order to eat up the clock feels a lot more below the belt than the other strategies.
If the Jeopardy Powers that Be really didn’t like it, they could just announce that DD would be randomly placed on the board. That would kill the incentive to jump categories.
Stalling for time seems more problematic. There isn’t any obvious rule change to combat it, and its pretty hard to tell if its even what the person is doing (Alex’s mannerisms were a little weird to start with, so it was hard to tell if he was really delaying or it just seemed that way).