First, I make it onto Jeopardy. I’m 0-for-about-90 in tryouts, but it’s gotta happen sometime.
Then, I talk with my two fellow contestants before the game. I don’t exactly know if this is allowed, but I’ll figure out a way, watch and see if I don’t. When I do, I fill them in on The Final Jeopardy Plan:
When setting our final wagers, whoever is in third place will bet nothing. The other two will bet exactly enough that if they get it wrong, they will tie the third-place place. We will all get Final Jeopardy wrong.
Every day, a three-way tie. Every day, we all win the same amount. The temptation to fudge your bet in order to pull in a bit payday will be nullified by the guarantee of our continued slow-churn to millions. We will never be dethroned! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
There is a fatal flaw in your plan: Jeopardy is not a mindless money engine that can be exploited ad infinitum. It is controlled by people, people who will object to your conspiracy and the consequences if it is left unchecked.
What makes you so sure that there’s not even an existing rule to deal with this? Isn’t there a limit to how many times a champion can return? So even if all three of you count as champions and thus get to play again, won’t that run out?
One of the compatriots doesn’t go along with it. Probably the one that has twice the score of the second place contestant.
The jeopardy judges throw you out after the second game you do this, never air those episodes, and report you to the cops for conspiracy to commit fraud.
I thought only the show’s winner got to keep the money. If so, on your plan no-one will win anything except those donated consolation prizes the losers get.
I believe they changed it a while back so that the first place winner gets whatever money they won, second place gets $2,000, and third place gets $1,000. (You can, in fact, get less than the second place person if you win with less than $2k.)
I don’t know what the prize rules are if there’s a tie, though.
Short of this conspiracy, I’ve often thought that the best strategy is for the leader to not aim to beat the second-place guy by $1 if you get it wrong, but to tie him. You already know you can beat that guy, so he’s a safer opponent for the next game than some unknown.
Well, I was on “Jeopardy!” a while back. Going into Final Jeopardy, I had $12,000, the 2nd place person had about $13,000 and the returning champ had about $14,000. Now, if the leader had told us earlier “Let’s arrange it so we all end up tied at $12,000,” there’s no way I’d have gone for that. Why on earth would I trust him to settle for $12,000 when, if he knew the right answer, he could get a LOT more than that?"
As it is, we all knew the correct response, and we all finished well over $20,000 (but I finished last, and only won the minimum $1,000 consolation prize). He made MUCH more money than he would have by conspiring with me.
And why would he have trusted me to bet nothing? The final category was “Great Novels” and he had already seen during the game that Literature was my strongest category. Could he really trust me to bet zero and settle for $12,000 when I could double cross him and make $24,000?
Cracked once ran an article about unconventional game show strategies. For Weakest Link, the best strategy is to never bank. That way if the group gets 8 in a row right at any point, they get far more money than they could by banking. Even if they get a whole bunch of questions wrong, as long as they hit that magic number 8 at some point, they’ve made a killing. The next best strategy is to bank after every correct answer, thus ensuring that they never lose anything.
The problem with the first strategy, as you can imagine, is getting everyone else to go along with it. Check that, not a problem, what’s going to prevent the strategy from being used by anyone, ever, at all. (The second strategy, alas, will make you a target, and as they have several votes and you only one, you’ll get shown the door in short order.)
Your plan hinges on convincing two people who are not your friends and don’t owe you anything to follow a specific strategy to avoid anyone coming out on top, and that you’re way better than them (otherwise why not just beat you and win a lot more money?), and that the show runners are both too stupid to sniff out a conspiracy and utterly powerless to stop it. Hell, if you have that kind of Devil’s luck, Deal Or No Deal is more your game.
The rules for ties for first have always been, the tied players all get the money and all come back the next day - unless they’re tied with zero, in which case none of them return.
There is a problem with the strategy; what happens if one of the players finishes Double Jeopardy with zero or a minus amount? The remaining two players can use a similar strategy to generate another tie, but then you have to try to talk the new contestant into going along with the plan.
Of course, the producers could just make all of the answers $2000-level difficulty, but of course, the way around that is, once you have a positive amount, you don’t buzz in, in which case, the show’s rules would change and there would be a tiebreaker at the end of the show (similar to the one used occasionally in the tournaments).
