He may take such a risk on an early Daily Double when he would have time to work his way back but he wouldn’t do it late in the game. If he has a lock (enough to guarantee a win) he calculates his wager to keep the lock even if he misses the question. He has left quite a bit of money on the table because his DD wagers are often less than they could be.
Do you have any facts to back this up? Everything I’ve read says the ratings are through the roof. Personally, I’m much more interested in the second half of the show. That’s when the other contestants have the best chance at overtaking James. They are more used to the buzzer, the dollar amounts are higher and There are more chances for DDs.
As Gus Gusterson pointed out, as soon as another contestant is ballsy enough bet big at the right time, coinciding with bad luck for James it could be a horse race.
He doesn’t do that. He bets aggressively, but not stupidly. In the shows I’ve watched, ISTM that he will go all in for the DD in the Jeopardy round, because if he drops to zero then, he has enough time to build back up. But in Double Jeopardy he never “makes it a true Daily Double,” and once he has more than twice his closest competitor he never bets enough to drop into the range where a competitor could catch him.
On preview: What Gus Gusterson said.
My brother did an interesting experiment. He paused the show after each answer was read. If he knew the answer he gave himself the points. If he didn’t know the answer but James did, he gave James the points. I don’t think my brother would qualify for Jeopardy, but he nearly beat James. The people who actually get on the show would surely beat James if they could play that way. So all it may take to beat him is someone who is fast enough on the button.
7 clicks of the Fast Forward skips on my DVR. Each skip is approximately 30 seconds
His bets on the last Daily Double look riskier than they really are. He usually tries to leave himself enough even if he loses the wager that he still faces little risk of losing the game.
For example, in this game, he had $28,400 and bet $15,000 on the third daily double, which seems like a lot. If he missed, he still would have been left with $13,400. Gabby, his closest competitor at the time, had only $2,800, and there was only $4,000 worth of clues left on the board. With his wager, he was only at risk in Final Jeopardy if: (1) he missed the clue, (2) Gabby got all five remaining Double Jeopardy clues right, (3) she bet it all in Final Jeopardy and got the answer right, and (4) he missed Final Jeopardy. If you start assigning independent odds to all those possibilities, you see that his real chance of losing that game despite his big wager were vanishingly small. (Though, had he bet just $201 less, Final Jeopardy would have been a lock for him no matter what happened in the rest of the round. His bid wasn’t quite optimal from a risk perspective but it was pretty close given that he has a few seconds with tens of thousands of dollars on the line to make that decision.)
Here’s another big bet of $25,000 on the last Daily Double. Theoretically, he was at risk here too. Had he missed it, and had Samantha got every question right for the rest of the game while James missed Final Jeopardy, he could have lost. However, he only needed to get $1,600 of those remaining clues right to guarantee himself another lock. His calculated bet meant he made an extra $50,000 in Final Jeopardy one he doubled down on that Daily Double wager.
Does anyone think producers are rearranging the board to lower James’s earnings? It seems there are more Daily Doubles in the $1,000 row, which means that James is more likely to pick them early in the round before he has built up a huge pot to wager. This reduces his potential winnings a bit (though it doesn’t interfere with his streak). I wonder if producers will start making the FJ questions tougher just to reduce his daily winnings further.
I pointed this out earlier. And while I agree with you, it’s akin to saying all someone needs to do to beat Usain Bolt is be faster to the finish line. That’s a big “all”. 
I don’t think they are doing any of this. Pretty sure that daily double locations are random and they won’t manipulate the game because of one player. The whole scandal with Twenty-One is still remembered.
As others have mentioned before, it would be a violation of Federal law if they made any changes to help or hinder a specific contestant.
They start every tape day with multiple sets of “material” (the answers and questions, including which clues are Daily Doubles), and the set used in each episode is selected randomly just before taping starts, to prevent any form of cheating.
I haven’t heard anything about how the writers/producers decide in preparing the material which clues will become Daily Doubles. But apparently the placement of DDs on the board is **not **strictly random, because there are hot spots, and a couple of places that have **never **had DDs. (Someone on Reddit made heatmaps of DDs. Jeopardy DDs. Double Jeopardy DDs.) I assume that if it were purely random, after more than 7,800 games every spot on the board would have received 3.33% of the DDs. Is my grasp of statistics incorrect? And if not, why is it not random, and how are the places selected, if not randomly? Anyone?
In any case, if it could be shown that they were in any way changing their normal procedures in response to Holzhauer, they could face Federal charges.
They don’t want the Daily Doubles to be too easy so they are placed in the lower rows more often and have an appropriate difficulty to that row
I can see how the Daily Double placement can be random but weighed more heavily towards the lower rows.
Here is the actual law to which you and others are presumably referring: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/509
In effect, the law makes it illegal for Jeopardy to do three things: (1) give away “special and secret assistance,” (i.e., giving someone the answers), (2) use “persuasion, bribery, intimidation, or otherwise,” to get someone to throw the game, or (3) “To engage in any artifice or scheme for the purpose of prearranging or predetermining in whole or in part the outcome of a purportedly bona fide contest of intellectual knowledge, intellectual skill, or chance.”
Paragraphs (1) and (2) don’t apply to what I’ve suggested. My question for you is whether rearranging the board and tweaking the difficulty of the questions constitutes an “artifice or scheme” prohibited by paragraph (3). It doesn’t involve any scheme between any of the players and the producers. My suggestions don’t prearrange or predetermine the outcome. Jeopardy continues to be a bona fide contest of intellectual knowledge. Anyone could come on the show and beat James. It requires no changes to the rules or unfair advantage to any player even if it might have the effect of reducing James’s winnings. So what law does it violate?
For what it’s worth, it looks like the locations of Daily Doubles over James’s run line up pretty closely to historical patterns so I don’t think producers are playing with James that way.
This is really interesting. The author says it’s a heat map for all 34 seasons, and there are some distinct disconnects within the same rows, particularly for $1000. ETA: more specifically, if I’m looking for a daily double, I’m going to the first column.
I think the problem is that once you remove the psuedo randomness of DD and have some Jeopardy producer put it in a specific spot, it’s just a short hop to “You put that DD in a category because one competitor would do better at it than another.”
Isn’t that the same heatmap previously linked to? (Two posts above the one from me that you quoted.)
Whoops, I didn’t see that link!
OK, it makes sense to me that it’d usually be in the fourth (or maybe fifth or third) row. There are sound reasons for that.
But why on Earth should some columns be favored over others? They can put the categories in any order they want, and I’d have expected that the order of categories would be random (and hence, the DD which is in a particular category should be equally likely to be in any column).
An image search of “Daily double heatmap” gives quite a few different examples from various periods of time----and amazingly consistently, the 2nd and 6th categories (columns) are much less likely to contain a DD.
This is bizarre. Someone must have asked a show producer about it at one time or another–I haven’t found anything about it, but will keep looking.
But paragraph 1 would be invoked against the producers if they started moving Daily Doubles into the bottom row as a means of lessening Holzhauer’s earnings—because that would be giving “special and secret assistance” to Holzhauer’s opponents. Paragraph 1 isn’t limited to giving answers or advance knowledge of questions to contestants. Assistance can take other forms, such as changing show components in a way designed to harm one particular contestant (thereby helping his opponents).
(my emphasis)
That’s cool. Interesting that he went from a bit of an ugly duckling as a kid to a good looking guy now.
That would make sense. And while IANAL, I can’t remotely buy that their having a meeting and declaring “we have been consistenly blowing up our prize money budget lately, so we need to make Daily Doubles harder and/or less valuable” could qualify as “special and secret assistance” to his opponents. It’s just facially incorrect IMO to characterize it that way.
Hopefully your wink means you don’t really think it’s akin to that. The fastest clicker in the world would not beat Holzhauer if he didn’t have a copious knowledge of literature, history, pop culture, etc. And you can see by his performance in the clicker-free DDs and FJ that he is superior in that knowledge. He would have done very well on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” if that were still on (although I always assumed they were careful to not invite on Jeopardy-level brainiacs).