Regarding the daily double, how do they decide where to place it?
I know they usually put them in one of the the last two spaces. I understand the DD needs to be somewhat of a mystery but since Arthur Chu has been winning and obviously searching them out it appears the producers seem to be trying to hide it from him. Today they wiped out the whole bottom of the board before it turned up in the 600 dollars spot. Same thing for Double Jeopardy.
Back to my OP, is the show purposely trying to keep the DD from contestants as long as possible? if so, why?
It is definitely random (except for not having two in the same category in DJ), but I believe it’s weighted towards the higher-value questions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the top row.
It is highly unlikely that the producers are trying to screw with Arthur Chu. For one thing, his strategy is not especially novel; lots of winners have employed a DD-hunting strategy instead of trying to go on runs throughout a category. Secondly, ever since the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, American game show producers have been extremely uptight about ensuring fairness, secrecy, and integrity when it comes to question sets. I would not be surprised if the questions and DD placement are written months before anyone knows who’s actually going to be on an episode.
I think the producers put the daily double in the lower section of each category to give the players a chance to get more experience with the category (and also to ensure that there’s more money in the game by the time it’s uncovered). If everyone starts jumping to the ends of the categories, I would imagine they could respond by having a more even distribution of where the DD’s are.
Yes, it’s either random or not, and if it’s not random, then it’s entirely determined by measurable factors other than chance.
‘Random’ does not necessarily mean that each of the choices (each spot on the Jeopardy board,) has an equal chance of showing up. That would be random and balanced, as opposed to random and weighted.
Which is what it appears they are doing currently. My question is to what end? I understand why it makes sense to put them lower down, if players work their way down a column (as Alex prefers) they understand the category better and accrue more money to bet with. But if a player chooses to ignore that, what motivation would the producers have for trying to make it harder to find?
To mess with that strategy. They want it to be randomly found later in the game but if some guys are going to spoil that then it’s better to give up on the “let them gain some money” part rather than the “make it hard to find” part. If they go totally random, that strategy dries up and players might as well go back to the traditional choosing of clues. ISTM that generally the audience would prefer the players start with the easier questions.
When I was on, I’m pretty sure that I remember a randomization of the set if questions before each episode taped. And of course the board is written long before any show, so there is no way of designing it for a player.
While lots of people run categories in order of worth, if you know a category well it might make sense to run it in reverse order, to maximize your money even if you lose control in the center of the column.
However in my game there was one DD in the most expensive spot and two in the next most expensive spot. However the next episode had 2 in slot 2 and 1 in slot 4.
Anyone wishing to do an analysis can visit the Archive which is where I got information about my show.
If they wanted the DDs to not cause players to change their question selection strategy, they could just preselect the number of questions into the round that the DD will be, rather than the placement.
They might have to change the structure of DD questions slightly, since some of them appear written with the idea that only one person will be answering, and using this method would require that any question can be a DD.