Again, contestants in the lead going into FJ almost always bet to win by $1, rarely do they bet the maximum amount. This is nothing specific to Mattea.
Also the category was Poets. She may have thought it would be a tough question that no one would get right and if they all missed it by her betting $1 she’d still win with basically whatever her current total was instead of a tiny amount. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to risk losing that much money on that category.
We had the exact same discussion exactly two weeks ago, when, again, Mattea had exactly double the second-place contestant. And then she also bet 1 dollar. I argued that she should have bet enough to cover 3rd-place doubling up. Here’s my post:
Other posters disagreed with me back then. Good to know that more people agree with my strategy.
I’ve noticed many instances where I’ve known an answer but Mattea didn’t (and of course, the converse) … but I think I might actually be better at trivia than she is.* I’ll track tonight’s show methodically and post the results.
*which is not the same as being a better Jeopardy player.
In general, true. But she’s acknowledged that she bets poorly (go big or go home, didn’t she say yesterday?) and she bet bigger in the DD than her normal conservative wager. So she was willing to lose, and so she should have bet more in FJ (or even as it turned out, the DD).
Especially as the fact is, if she bet 10K and lost she only would have got $2000 for second place, not the ~16K she would have been left with.
She didn’t even bet aggressively in the recent game in which she was the only player in Final Jeopardy.
I missed that. Must have been exciting.
If betting $1 on Final Jeopardy is sub-optimal, then so is betting an extra $1 on a Daily Double. All of the clues in Double Jeopardy are multiples of $400. For the last Daily Double, there is no strategic difference between betting $1 and $399.
When she does that, i remember that she’s Canadian … just trying to be polite
five seconds of her writing the answer, and 25 seconds of her standing there awkwardly with the camera on her the whole time.
I get more questions right than Mattea. But I also get more questions wrong. She has a lot of patience and does not ring in unless she is very likely to know the answer. But she was slower on the buzzer than another contestant last game. You could see her getting frustrated, and falling behind for a while. Overall, she kept her cool. She does not bet optimally. Her daily doubled reflect conservatism more than her knowledge of that subject. Still, I once read in GAMES magazine questions are supposed to get harder with dollar value - so if uncover a DD on highly places squares “bet the bank”. However, I have bot found this observation to be true.
I believe the original intent was for contestants to work their way down the category, and while the difficulty level goes up, they get “grooved” in the category as well. Especially the ones like “before and after” and words within words.
the other advantage, from the show’s point of view, is that the drama builds towards the end as the final questions are worth the most money and can really shift the positions of the players. The way many play now, the last few questions are $200 or $400.
Holzhauer’s strategies: get an early lead, big dollars, find the daily doubles work. But without his talent, they probably increase the chance of a loss.
The thing about Mattea is that she’s good (obviously), but it’s not like she’s scary, eye-of-the-tiger, intimidatingly good like some of the other champions.
Maybe it’s an act, but it really seems like she’s making lucky guesses just in the nick of time. She’s really good on the buzzer, though.
I’ve complained before how the change in approach ruins these “gimmick” categories in which the top clue functions as a sort of tutorial by being an easy example of how the clues/responses in that category work. It’s really frustrating when a contestant goes straight for the $1000/$2000 clue in such a category, and then it’s a triple stumper with dead silence as all of them stand there dumbfounded, not ringing in, with no idea how to even process the clue.
Not a huge fan of these gimmicks. But I am good at them, once the first clue provides insight into “guess what I’m thinking”.
I won’t give away Thursday’s result, but I didn’t get a chance to note the bets in FJ for the top two players. Both bet big - one got FJ correct; the other didn’t. Did the winner bet a small enough amount to end up with more than the other player in case they both got it wrong (or right)?
That was a pretty tough FJ, imho.
By this time of day the day’s game is up at the Jeopardy Archive.
It was, but at least when the correct response was revealed, I thought “oh, that makes sense,” unlike, say, that FJ about Thor Heyerdahl a few months ago, which left me going “who the heck is that and why was I supposed to have heard of him?”
She bet enough to win in both cases.
Although I didn’t really understand the bet of the second-place player. But it wouldn’t have made any difference.