Like a great many Dopers, some of whom appeared on the show, I enjoy and have watched Jeopardy! for many years. Many Dopers have been aggressively collecting knowledge their entire lives. I have too, in many domains. Yada yada.
I have enjoyed watching Canadian Mattea Roach and her impressive and unlikely streak. Jeopardy! involves lots of luck but ample skill. You don’t streak without great talent. There are many games when I do better than reigning champions. But this is perhaps easy to do from home. Maybe you remember the right answers and forget the wrong ones. Maybe there are tough game segments they sail through, while you struggle.
And this is one of the keys. Lots of people who win have moderate to high levels of right answers, but very few wrong ones. In some games, Roach has answered 97% of attempted questions. Few players are so restrained, and losing points often is not a successful strategy.
Of course, it is unlikely I would be a Jeopardy! Champion. Even make it to the show. But humour me. Assume my knowledge base and reflexes are good enough. Here’s what I want to know to help me win. Even in theory.
What are the highest yield categories to learn? Seems to me learning the very basics of opera or classic music, common categories, could pay big dividends for little time spent. Are there other similar categories? Where would you focus reviews given little time?
Buzzing in first is huge. I assume it is a simple electrical circuit. But what do you really need to know about it? How to practise? Is it that crucial?
What other things would be really important?
To succeed on the show? During the application process?
Why have there been so many long winning streaks this year? Weird. Are the best just getting better?
Shakespeare
U.S. colleges (state, team name, etc)
U.S. states (capitals, motto, nickname, etc)
U.S. presidents, vp’s, first ladies
Bible (big topic, but the Pentateuch especially)
Several contestants have written books on “how to win” that answer these questions. Strategy evolves so they might not be current. They still go into enormous detail.
I’ll also bet there are numerous Jeopardy message boards with obsessives who live to parse the smallest advantages.
Specific questions may or may not ever be reused, but categories are too general to be discarded. 12 categories a day, five days a week, 40 weeks a year. That’s 2400 categories a year. Tens of thousands over the last decade. Of course, they repeat and repeat and repeat.
One repeat champion used this understanding to figure out what to study and memorize as well as how to quickly eliminate stuff to make a good guess. He put in hundreds of hours studying. He also built a buzzer system at home to practice. Getting thousandths of a second off reaction time can be the difference between first and second answered.
And if your personality doesn’t sparkle, nothing else matters. They don’t choose plodders even if they get every question right in the tests.
They’re pretty easy. But classical music and opera are topics that have a lot of depth.
Some facts used in Jeopardy that I remember:
Aida took place in Egypt
Carmen worked in a cigarette factory
Handel worked most of his career in England. His “Water Music” premiered on a barge excursion on the River Thames
Beethoven’s 3rd symphony was originally called “Heroic” and he intended to dedicate it to Napoleon.
I know. My brain is loaded with cubic carloads of trivia but I have the general demeanor of a science teacher watching you confuse atoms and molecules. That don’t work on the teevee.
Seems to me, mastering the buzzer is a good idea (I got no idea how this could be done). You can know every answer and not score a dollar if you never get a chance to give them.
Yes. The one thing I would have done differently is to build a buzzer simulator and practice on that.
I played the Computer game, which was trivial, but was useful in helping me with betting strategies for Final Jeopardy. I was happy with what I bet.
Knowledge is fine, but you can’t start now and accumulate a lifetime of knowledge. I was great on presidents and state capitals, neither of which were of any use. More important is figuring out how to decode the questions and look for the clues that make an impossible one really easy to figure out.
I had no trouble performing before the camera, but the whole situation is good for focusing you - and I don’t get stage fright. Going from 0 to 60 is harder. We sat in the green room, got marched out to be in the audience doing taping, got marched to lunch, then suddenly “you’re on” and you get a few seconds to practice and get some makeup before taping begins. I don’t know how Covid affected that. My biggest worry was about tripping as I went up to my position.
Nitpick: Beethoven’s Third Symphony is currently called “Heroic” (“Eroica” in Italian). It was originally to be called “Bonaparte,” and be dedicated to Napoleon. He changed his mind, and tore up the first page of the score, when he learned that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor.
Many would-be contestants try to practice with the buzzer in some way. Some people use a retractable ballpoint pen to substitute for the buzzer. The main thing is, you can’t ring in until the host has finished reading the question. So you want to practice timing it so that you can start pressing the button as soon as the host stops reading, but not before.
This kind of practice might also help with another thing: figuring out how to hold the signaling device in a comfortable way. This is going to vary from person to person, but since you’re going to be holding it for a long time, it makes sense to hold it in the way that’s most comfortable for you. Some people hold it in the air. I did that briefly, then settled on resting the hand that was holding it on the lectern. Some people press the button with their thumb, some people with their index finger. Experiment to see what works best.
How exactly would you describe the signalling device used on the show? If it is a button, which may or may not be attached to a wire, how big is the button? How much force does it take to activate it? Would it ve easy to activate it accidentally?
This article on Jeopardy.com describes how the device works, and has a picture of it at the top. The device is a plastic tube, a bit thicker than the average ballpoint pen, with a button at one end and a wire at the other.
I wouldn’t say that it takes a whole lot of force to push it. Activating accidentally shouldn’t really be much of a problem because, as the article describes, most of the time the device isn’t active. Nevertheless, I held it so that my thumb was resting on the button, but tried to keep my hand mostly relaxed so that it would take a definite, deliberate movement to activate it. That’s where resting my hand on the lectern helped; my hand didn’t get as tired as it probably would have had I been holding it in the air.
