Who are the “we” that you’re referring to and what’s with the “should” and “shouldn’t”?
Have you contacted the producers and let them know how they can make more money by following your suggestions?
The current buzzer system hasn’t always been as it is. This is where it has been refined to. And it’s good.
Are you also suspicious of people who think cross-country skiing is an important part of the biathlon but that we shouldn’t increase its value?
Jeopardy is a biathlon of sorts. By definition it requires both skills. Full stop. There is no need to remove buzzer speed.
Otherwise, you could just hand out a printed quiz to the contestants at the start and at the end of the half hour have them graded. Pure knowledge, very “fair” and boring as shit.
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Society? People having a not-very-consequential conversation on the message board? I was responding to the poster who mentioned the NFL and seemed to dislike the idea of making games more fair.
This feels like an appeal to authority couched in a slightly condescending way. Apologies if I misinterpreted, but that’s what you were going for, right?
Note that it’s also a bit of a shifting of the goalposts. I haven’t argued that this change would make the producers of Jeopardy more money. I… have no idea if it would do that? I think it probably wouldn’t, since as mentioned earlier people going on big runs like this make people excited about Jeopardy, and this change would likely result in shorter runs by removing some of the returning champion’s advantage.
But surely you don’t think that every change to Jeopardy should be judged solely by its impact on revenues, right?
I was not aware of that. Can you point me to more info?
A little, although certainly less than in the case of Jeopardy.
I think the difference is that the biathlon is unabashedly a blend of two skills. No one would describe it as “a shooting” competition" or “a skiing competition”. It’s clearly both. Skiing and shooting are both essential to it.
I think that Jeopardy is quite different. The way the buzzer rewards reaction time seems like a weird side effect more than an essential part of the competition. You may disagree with this, but I’m clearly not alone in this feeling.
I absolutely agree, and I have pointed out in this thread to several others that some other proposed changes would make for bad TV. I don’t think my proposed change does, though.
Think of it this way: if Jeopardy implemented my rules change, how many viewers could even tell that anything changed?
Thank you, although I can’t take credit for the basic idea, which comes for market design attempts to limit the influence of high speed trading.
If you think about it, they’re solving a similar sort of problem. They want to incentivize quick trades for people with new information that affects price, because that’s how the market remains liquid, but they don’t want to incentivize the massive arms race in faster communications so you can beat out the other traders by 0.0000001 seconds.
So what they do is treat all orders that happen within some fairly small threshold of each other as happening at the same time and use other methods to determine which ones get filled. And it works pretty well. The markets are still very liquid, and no one wastes huge amounts of money trying to eke out slightly faster comms.
With Jeopardy, if you want to incentivize knowing the answers quickly, but you don’t want to incentivize being able to press a button slightly faster than other humans, well, this is a great way to do that with minimal impact on everything else.
Anyway, it’s an idea. It’s not perfect, it might not even be better, but it’s pretty well targeted at the thing that I think is not great about Jeopardy. I’ve taken up enough of your thread, so I’ll let anyone who wants to point out other flaws in it have the last word.
“In the early days of the show, contestants could ring in at any time and that led to a lot of quick guesses, negative scores and general confusion.”
From the horses mouth:
Also:
“Hopefully, it helps them to relax a bit,** knowing that lightning reflexes and flexible thumbs are just as important** to the game as having staggering amounts of knowledge about a vast array of subjects.”
I think that if you have a different idea about how best to run a quiz show, it’d be best to create a new quiz show that uses that different idea, and leave Jeopardy alone. Yeah, Jeopardy is a bit of an 800-pound gorilla, but there have been many other trivia shows that have run concurrently with it (Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The Chase, Win Ben Stein’s Money, etc.).
Are the Teachers done and Holzhauer back tomorrow?
Anyone still going to watch?
Yes and yes.
Gawd, I thought his only game show connection was as a panelist on To Tell the Truth…
I remember there were a couple of times way back when there were only 2 people on final jeopardy because people were minus at the end and I think only one guy was left once or twice but he had to go through it anyways to see how much he was going to carry over for the enxt show … …
Yes! It resumes tonight. Finally.
Planet money did an episodeon James Holzhauer. It was by Kenny Malone who is a brother in law (I think?) to James. They talk to Jennings, Roger Craig, and Holzhauer.
They discuss most of the tactics mentioned here, but it is couched in a competition of who is the cooler uncle.
Is James good or bad for ratings? Seems like this would be easy to confirm. (I think the answer is Good.)
Well, James did win again. If he kept winning at the same rate, for the same 74 games Jennings played, he would have more than twice the money Jennings did, and that would not count tournament winnings.
From what I saw, it looked like the competitors finally tried to get to the higher paying squares first. Not that it affected the final scores any.
Hear, hear.
How about when both teams have the chance to possess?
I would actually like to see them do something more like in college football.
Anyway, I don’t see the problem with trying to make games better by tweaking the rules. As you have indicated, the NFL does this with some frequency, and they are obviously very successful.
Are they supposed to whack Holzhauer with a stupid stick? That’s the only thing that will slow him down.
Once in awhile, a very smart person with fast reflexes gets on Jeopardy. They’ll dominate the game until they make a dumb mistake. The pressure gets to them and their concentration slips.
It’ll happen to Holzhauer eventually. I’m going to enjoy his incredible run while it lasts.
He’s still weeks away from challenging Jennings 74-game winning streak.
The challengers need to get the Daily Doubles before James does if they have any hope of beating him. Or he needs to mispronounce a few answers…
He bet $40,000 on Final Jeopardy. Is that a record?
It would be, except he bet $60,013 on his 10th game. Previous record was $38,314 (also by James). Before that it was $34,000 by Austin Rogers.
Also, his average score is now over $77k, which was the previous single game record.