Should Jeopardy! change its procedures?

Cafe Society
1

As we have noted elsewhere in CS, on the last semifinal game of the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament this week, the player who was leading going into Final Jeopardy lost because he miscalculated his wager. As I said in another thread, this is a Jeopardy! contestant’s worst nightmare. Major life-altering humiliation. I feel really sorry for the guy.

As those of us who’ve been there know, you’re left to yourself to figure out your wager in FJ. No calculators, just a piece of paper.

But the wagers aren’t completely secret. The contestant coordinators take them down during the last break so the scorekeeper can put up the final scores instantly and so Alex doesn’t have to do the math in his head.

So in a situation like the one on Wednesday, why not have someone just say to the nervous and confused player, “Ummm, you might want to check your math”? Not to help them strategize, or anything, just to prevent an obvious and tragic error.

I think that they started giving contestants the lead-in to the FJ response (Who is, Where is, etc.) after a few notorious losses because a response wasn’t in the form of a question. This would be the same kind of thing.

I don’t think it would affect the purity of the game. Do you?

BTW, does anyone else recall someone screwing up like this is such a major way, or in a tournament?

2

I look at it as part of the game. Why stop making them think on their feet when it’s crunch time?

3

Here’s an old thread devoted to Wheel of Fortune screw-ups. Some of them are just incredible.

Oh, and I agree with Operation Ripper that figuring out your wager is part of the gameplay and contestants should not be helped in any way. I wouldn’t be averse to them having a calculator, but there should be no advice about how much to bet and no hints that “you might want to check your math” if a player wagers poorly.

4

If you can’t do five-figure arithmetic in your head you shouldn’t be on Jeopardy! anyway.

5

I agree. When I practiced on the computer game before I went on, the only really useful thing I went over was making bets.

As for screw ups, they told us that some in Final Jeop had gotten the question wrong, so they told us the first word (like what is or who is) before revealing the answer, so that we could write it. That’s okay, being a typo, but betting is part of the game. Should they say bet more or less on Double Jep also?

6

The other aspect of this is, sometimes the betting can get very complicated. Not complicated as far as the arithmetic, but as far as the game theory. For instance, suppose that going into FJ, player 1 has the highest, followed by 2 and 3. Simplest case, player 1 bets enough that he has twice as much as player 2, plus one dollar. But player 2 knows that player 1 is going to do this. Now player 2 has to try to figure out whether 1 will get it right or not: If e thinks 1 will get it right, then 2 is fighting for second place, and he’ll bet enough that he’ll get twice as much as 3, plus a dollar. But if he thinks 1 might get it wrong, then he wants to keep his bet small enough that if 2 also gets it wrong, he’ll stay ahead of 1. Meanwhile, maybe 3 will bet everything, which might bring him above the amount that 1 would get if he got it wrong.

But now suppose that 1 figures out that 2 will try this. 2 probably doesn’t actually have any motivation to bet everything, so 1 doesn’t actually need to bet enough to get double-plus-one of 2. Player 1 might, in fact, want to bet smaller, based on the amount he thinks 2 will actually bet, plus one dollar. This might be a good idea, if that keeps his possible losses small enough that 3 can’t catch up.

But now, if player 1 changes his bet based on this information (or if 2 and 3 think he might change his bet), that changes the strategy for them, too. Which in turn changes the best again strategy for 1, and so on. If you take this Sicilian reasoning far enough, for some values of initial scores, it’s probably possible to find a “logical” justification for any particular bet amount.

And this isn’t even considering the amount of knowledge the players have of a subject: If I’m on, and the FJ category is astrophysics, I’m going to bet my full amount, no matter what the scores are, since I know I’m going to get it, but if the topic is American Idol, I’m going to bet zilch, because I know I won’t.

So with all this going on, it’s possible that any given wager could be the “right” wager, given the (very complicated) circumstances. So how would the coaches working for the show know whether to nudge the players or not?

7

Chronos, I’d agree with your analysis of bidding complexity in the first and final rounds of the “special” Jeopardy! tournaments (e.g. the Teen Tournamant): in the first round, a non-first-place finish may be sufficient to advance to the semi-finals as a “lucky loser” if the dollar amount is high enough, and in the two-day Final the contestants get to keep their dollar amounts (with guaranteed minimums for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places).

However, in the “regular” Jeopardy! games – and in the semi-finals of the Teen Tournament – IMHO winning is the only desirable option; the 2nd and 3rd place prizes are not sufficiently valuable to make it worth too much to factor the differential into one’s wager as long as a first-place finish is possible.

Although I didn’t see Wednesday’s show, if indeed the kid was ahead after Double Jeopardy! he absolutely should have bet enough to guarantee a win. It’s the only way to get from the semi-finals to the 2-day final round of the tournament. At that point, 2nd or 3rd place is not what one should be aiming for.

I’m still against the OP’s suggested rule change, however.

Jeopardy! categories aren’t always so cut-and-dried, so one can always stumble on what would appear to be a “gimme”:

… and one can get a lucky in one’s “weak” category:

Never bet all of your money in FJ unless you need to in order to win! Don’t forget Cliff Clavin!

[sup]*[/sup][Made-up examples, not based on fact.]

8

Wha?

9

I agree with the consensus. Your wager is a part of the game. I’m not sure it would even be legal to warn a contestant about that.

10

I still think that the chance that I’d get wrong any question tagged as “astrophysics” is sufficiently small, that it would be prudent for me to bet as much as possible on it. Likewise, with a pop culture question, though I might take a gamble there to try for the all-expense-paid trip to Des Moines, instead of the two week supply of instant noodles.

11

You folks are all pretty hard on the poor Jeopardy! contestants. As Voyager could tell you, it’s not the same being there under the lights as it is sitting on your sofa at home.

And although Chronos is right about the complexity of the betting (I discuss my own tricky situation here, I think it’s fair to say that in 99% of the cases, the player going into FJ with the highest score is going to try to beat the best score the second place player can reach. Anything just a little short of that (especially when it’s exactly $100 short) is almost certainly a mistake that could be pointed out.

But I suppose the fact is that this is rare enough not to be a real problem, and that most people involved agree with the consensus here: You’re so smart, you do the math!

I just feel really sorry for the guy. For the rest of his life he’s going to be the Cliff Claven of real life for making a dumb math mistake under pressure.

12

To me, that final wager is definitely part of the game. It may seem silly to make people who know all there is to know about astrophysics or quantum mechanics solve a simple arithmetic problem, but it’s silly in the same way that the answers must be phrased in the form of a question: it’s part of the game.

13

Exactly, and they give the players a little help with that in FJ, so why not the math, when they can see a trainwreck coming?

(I suppose an answer to my own question is that, in the case of the question opener, all players get the same help, which wouldn’t be the case with the math.)