No, that’s definitely not the right strategy if you want to maximize the chance that you come back.
Emma has to bet enough to cover them both getting it right, because both of them getting it right is by far the most likely outcome. But if she gets it right, he doesn’t come back at all, so he bets so that if she gets it wrong, he wins regardless of his answer.
People had dumb conspiracy theories about Ken Jennings throwing his final game too. He’s always said that it’s an extremely silly idea: If you had a fun job on TV that paid $150k a week, would you quit?
You are correct…James came back and took a thousand dollar lead, which lasted for a few questions, until Emma herself came back and retook the lead, and then found the second DD. After she correctly answered the second DD, her lead, while not insurmountable, was enough that James couldn’t come back, especially against two good players.
I still contend, however, that if James had found the first DD (or perhaps even the second), he has the lead going into FJ and wins the game.
Oh, yes, the deciding factor was definitely the fact that Emma found both Daily Doubles. Had James gotten either of them, he could have had the lead going into Final. He might not have had a runaway, but he would have had the lead, which would have ensured him a win as things shook out.
Emma seems to have prepped for the game just as much as James did. She watched the show obsessively for years, practiced ringing in using a ball point pen as a signalling device, kept a tally of her correct and incorrect answers, kept track of where Daily Doubles tend to fall–all those geeky things that the big-time Jeopardy champs seem to do. If you listened to her interview, you know that she even wrote her master’s thesis on trivia questions. If anyone was going to beat James, it was going to be someone like her.
FYI, Emma wrote a paper in grad school on “Predicting the Difficulty of Trivia Questions Using Text Features” based on Jeopardy! questions. So if anyone was ready to beat him, it was certainly her.
This is correct. In this game, he answered 25 correct to Emma’s 21. Normally, he answers somewhere in the mid 30s questions correctly, sometimes even lower 40s.
His close call (vs Nate) has similar numbers to this loss. James answered 26 correct, and Nate answered 24 correct (more than Emma, and almost as many as James.) There was another tight one earlier on (Game 18), where he hit 28 correct, and Adam had 20.
Actually, looking back to his second game, he only got 22 right on that one (to Satish’s 18 and Marshall’s 15), but finished miles ahead of the competition because of his betting strategy. Also, in game 6 he only got 25 right (and 2 wrong).
So he has had a few vulnerable games in there where he hasn’t answered his usual 35 or so questions.
I wished that he had beat Ken’s winnings total. Sorry to see him go, he was nice to look at! She is nice looking too but I like men! Wonder if Jeopardy will like more million dollar winners…if she is that good. I think sometimes the double jeopardy spots are in place when they want them to be.
It’ll be really interesting to see if that becomes standard practice, but I don’t think it’ll be successful for many players. James (and, as we discovered, Emma) have a fairly uncommon set of skills: extraordinarily smart, very quick with the buzzer, and no hesitation about betting big on Double Jeopardy questions (their intelligence gives them the confidence to do so). Some players have one of those skills, a few have two, but very few have all three of them. If Emma continues that practice (no spoilers for today’s episode, please), I could see her having a good long run as well.
And before that, another contributing factor to JH’s loss was that in the first round, he found the DD on the very first (IIRC) square, instead of later as he usually did to extend his already-sizable lead. As it was, he had $2,000 at the start of the game and the DD was gone from that round.
Oh, hell yes. I would shell out some coin to see that trio matched up. James is the young gun with the flashy numbers, but I still wanna see what happens.
If you’ve watched many episodes of Jeopardy, you know that the ‘standard’ bet for the money leader entering FJ is to bet enough to cover the amount that is twice the current total of the second-place contestant. And, indeed, that’s what Emma bet. And James surmised that she would bet that amount. So he bet small, hoping that she would bet big and miss, and thus he would win the game.
Had he bet all of his bank in FJ, and missed the question, he would have forfeited any chance of winning the game. His bet at least gave him an opportunity for the win.
Incidentally, this matter of “but what if the other players bet this way” can be carried many layers deep. One of the reasons why Watson’s bets looked so peculiar was that it was able to carry the reasoning to enough levels that it converged, something that no human ever does.
I only caught Final Jeopardy today, but defending champ Emma had an insurmountable lead. I was surprised that she and the third-place contestant both missed the question. Emma lives to fight another day.
I honestly don’t think James deliberately threw the game, but in recent episodes, there was something about him that made me think he was getting bored with the whole thing. Or maybe I was projecting.
Wonder if Jeopardy will like more million dollar winners…if she is that good. I think sometimes the double jeopardy spots are in place when they want them to be.