I agree. She’s no where near the annoying level of say Austin Rodgers.
But I do find myself making “marionette” hand gestures at several points in each episode. 
I’d rather see players showing a little bit of personality rather than standing there like a stiff and responding in a terse monotone.
Mattea may be a bit too far to one side of that equation, but the alternative is just dull. I’m enjoying her run very much.
Remember that Matt Amodio was criticized for being too emotionless and robotic, with his relatively flat affect and his boilerplate “What’s…?” for every response.
Now Mattea is being criticized for not being emotionless and robotic enough.
Honestly, contestants can’t win.
It’s not emotional, it deliberate quirkiness, at least is seemed so for the challengers yesterday.
But do we need 15 seconds of Mattea explaining why she’s betting the way she is on a DD? Or babbling on as the other contestants are answering about how she made the wrong choice with her question? Who cares?
And “What’s…Amodio” was still annoying, but not because he’s emotionless, but because seriously, dude, use the definite article, learn the difference between what’s and who’s, and saying “true daily double” is OK once in a while. I’d almost say his lack of affect is in itself his affectation.
I’m with you on both of these (the Tuesday group was definitely a bit too “personality plus” for me).
Showing some human emotion at Jeopardy, with perhaps the occasional brief witty comment: good. Appearing to assume that we are all desperate to know your thought processes in detail: not my cuppa.
Is having the host recite a long list of Canadian stereotypes or things involving the number of wins going to be a thing from now on? I hope not.
I am not easily annoyed, and Amodio’s “what” or Roach’s hand gestures just aren’t enough to do it. Only seven or so players have done better, and I hope she keeps winning. She got a bit lucky today.
God, I hate this current champion.
I’m really annoyed by her wagering. She just doesn’t pay any attention to the numbers. Wednesday in DJ she was only slightly above the next player when she found the last DD. She said she was going to go big or go home, but she didn’t bet enough to put herself more than twice as high as #2. She got it right and the way the remaining clues played out, she ended up with exactly twice as much as him.
Then in FJ, she bet $1, leaving thousands on the table for no good reason. I’ve talked about this before. You’ll say, But she keeps winning! And yes, she does. But it’s just so infuriating because she doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing when it comes to wagering. She’s just muddling through and lucking out. And she could have won tens of thousands more.
Yeah, her choices for her FJ wager were basically $0 or all of it.
I wouldn’t have blamed her for taking her chances on a tie, and I wouldn’t have blamed her for losing big. (And I very much doubt she would have cared about the extra thousand for a second-place finish.)
But losing by $1 would have been stupid, and winning by $1, like you said, is just leaving a ton of money on the table.
BTW, I guessed James Joyce for FJ, which it turns out wasn’t a completely dumb guess. He was also an Irish poet and died only 2 years after Yeats. I forgive myself for not knowing he didn’t die in Paris, or what happened to his body post-partum.
No reason to bet all of it. The optimum, as I’ve said many times before, would be to bet so that, if she’s wrong, she ends up $1 over 3rd place’s best bet.
My first thought, too, but Joyce isn’t really known as a poet.
Post-partem he grew up from being an infant to child to man. 
My recording quit just as her answer was to be revealed! I had to go search for the Jeopardy recap. Betting $1 was dumb, I agree.
Jeopardy! is probably easier to play at home than in the studio. True, it was not the best bet. This isn’t the player’s strong point. So what?
The $1 bet is what I’ve seen almost every recent contestant wager when there will be a tie. (I think once they bet $0 to go for the tie-breaker question.) I have never seen a contestant in Mattea’s position wager more than $1.
Yeah, Ken going off on these long-winded rambles about…whatever make me miss Trebek. And I don’t miss Trebek.
Not only did Mattea give us another long winded recitation of her thought processes vis-a-vis betting, but then she bets wrong! And then betting ONE DOLLAR [insert Dr Evil emoji) in FJ is just wrong. If you get it right, you win one extra dollar, instead of ten thousand. That’s not chump change. But if you get it wrong, you either lose by one or by $10K, but you still lose. Who cares by how much.
Forget the new host debates: if they are going to make Jeopardy! more personality driven, more “quirky”, I might quit. What next - loud music, dancing, a in-house band, flashy lights, Ken kissing all the contestants during the meet-n-greet?
Yeah, I’ll be glad when she’s gone.
Keep in mind Mattea has won almost $400k, the difference between a $1 bet and an “optimal” bet is almost a roundoff error for her total.
Brian
I have $400K in the bank. If you want to give me $10,000, I wouldn’t say no.
Honestly, that’s a poor argument. Who here couldn’t use a cool extra ten g’s?
Besides, she’s not doing the betting because she’s cool and winning is the only thing, but because (I believe) she doesn’t understand Jeopardy wagering strategy.
One doesn’t have to be a money grubber (or have the mindset of the somewhat reckless Holtzhauer Vegas-style all in wagering) to like larger winnings.
I’m getting a vibe that she’s very happy to be winning, but feels conflicted about winning a lot of money. She’s almost deliberately not “running up the score” other than to have enough to assure victory.
And she almost blew it yesterday. Bad wagering left her vulnerable. I didn’t know the FJ question (poets are one of my weak areas), so runaway wins are of course the desired situation going into FJ. If she’d have bet that one more dollar on the DD, she wouldn’t have needed to worry.
eta: but yeah, she does seem “polite” about winning. She should adopt a more aggressive strategy, “Go, confront the problem. Fight! Win! And call me when you get back, darling. I enjoy our visits.”