Meh. Just as I expected: standard, ordinary play, no different from 98% of the games of the last 35 years. (Including the two I played back in 1991.) I have more interesting stuff to watch.
Someone drop me a note when the next Holzhauer comes along.
What? They jump around a lot, not just going top to bottom. The daily doubles went like this:
- True daily double
- 5000 out of 8200
- 6000 out of 9000
That’s not normal, boring Jeopardy.
Agree with this. Before James, it seemed to me that the most common DD bet in the Double Jeopardy round was 2000. Players would bet as if they were afraid they’d miss the question. Ahead 8000 to 6000 and hit the DD? Bet 2000. Trail 4000 to 8000 and hit the DD? Bet 2000. The 2000 bet on a second-round DD was very predictable.
Hopefully James has changed the DD strategy.
Okay, they’re being a little bolder, and not slavishly running from top to bottom of the board. (But that hasn’t been SOP for years, has it?) Still not all that thrilling, IMHO. YMMV.
I was hoping to see action much closer to James’ play. Nobody else has just tried to run the bottom row. That’s exciting!
At one point Alex asked a dopey question about whether James would use some of his winnings to help his parents. James kind of laughed and said “No the Holzhauer clan will be just fine” or some such, leading me to think he comes from a wealthy family. Can anyone comment?
How is ‘slavishly adhering to a formula that was successful for exactly one person’ exciting?
Just stopping by to mention that I know Emma in real life. I’ll be expecting her to pick up a round the next time we hang out. 
Ummm… he took command of the game with a previously unseen strategy, set more than a dozen one-day records, is second in the show’s history in regular game play winnings and shows won, attracted a level of nationwide attention that the show hasn’t seen in over a decade, spawned hundreds of news reports, spiked the show’s ratings, inspired the creation of this thread…
Was that a trick question?
And having all three contestants still in the running through DJ and FJ is a more interesting game than having one contestant blow out the other two such that the game is already decided halfway through DJ (if not sooner). I think even James was getting pretty bored by his own domination of the game.
Was James’ betting strategy in final Jeapordy wrong?
From my buddy Tim Urban @ Wait but Why?
First of all, you didn’t actually answer the question asked.
‘It worked for him’ is not a response to ‘how is it exciting to have everybody roboticly repeat his strategy?’.
Second…
The excitement was because of James’ success, not his strategy.
Nobody was watching because James worked from the bottom. That he bet big more often than most was only exciting because he had the knowledge base to back it up more often than not. If he’d gotten them wrong as often as he’d gotten them right, nobody would be talking about how exciting it was to watch him play, he would be laughed at as an idiot for betting like he did.
It’s great for James that he managed to make that kind of money, and the spike in viewership for the show was great for the producers, but the latter wasn’t sustainable.
James was exciting the first week or so that he was dominating. He was exciting the first few times he beat single day records. He was exciting when it looked like he might beat Ken’s records… The only way that heat could have transferred to Emma, or whoever else might have beaten him, is if they immediately started picking off his records.
Which would not have come from following his strategy - James didn’t solve Jeopardy! any more than Arthur Chu did - but by having the same unique combination of buzzer skill, luck, and a ridiculously large knowledge base that James did.
And if James hadn’t been defeated?
‘How long can he keep this streak going?’ would give way to ‘ho hum, another predictable game’ before too long.
It’ll be another month or more before we see contestants that have studied James’ televised games.
I’m not sure how many have the trivia knowledge to copy that strategy. A disastrous wager on a daily double can easily wipe out a player chances of winning.
Oh wow! I’m jealous: she seems super cool.
I love this, which dovetails with something I posted earlier:
But Urban went even further with it. Highly recommended if anyone hasn’t checked it out yet.
Okay, I’ll get to that below.
I disagree, and at the very least they are intertwined, aren’t they? You seem to think that strategy had almost no part in his success or the excitement it sparked. I think it was very important.
In this thread, it seems that we mostly agree that James’ success was based on four pillars: knowledge, reaction time, bold bets in the DDs, and strategy. Of these, James’ unique contribution was the “sweep the bottom rows” strategy. Jennings and most other previous players had gotten by mainly on the first three, along with some Chu-hopping and DD seeking.
IMO, James was exciting because he realized that working the bottom rows early (and getting them right, of course) could give him an insurmountable lead very early on. AFAIK, no one else had seen how effective that plan could be. Or if they had, they didn’t have the knowledge or the guts to try it and make it work.
Why not? I didn’t see any sign that viewer excitement (in terms of ratings) was falling, and ISTR that Jennings’ ratings were pretty consistently high for twice as long as James’. (Someone can correct me if I’m wrong.) I agree that the same thing over and over can become monotonous, but in my personal experience, and I think that of many other viewers, the monotony was overcome by questions like, what new records will he set today? And the big one: is today the day he loses?
I agree that that would have been exciting, and for a while it looked to me like Emma was going to use his strategy herself. But she didn’t
Again, I think you’re significantly underplaying the importance of strategy.
But to answer your original question: “How is it exciting to have everybody roboticly [sic] repeat his strategy?” First, I think your use of “robotically” is merely pejorative. In 1968, when Dick Fosbury examined the physics of the high jump and came up with the Fosbury Flop, a brand new style of jumping no one else had ever conceived of, he smashed existing records and won gold at the Olympics. Other competitors didn’t take it up “robotically” because it was stylish, but because it was successful. It’s how all high jumpers have jumped ever since.
I think the Holzhauer strategy is analogous to the Fosbury Flop, and potentially more revolutionary than you’re giving it credit for. I believe it could become a new standard because, with a little luck, it may give players with less voluminous knowledge than James, Brad, and Ken enough of an edge to have longer-than-average runs. I strongly suspect we will start seeing this when players who have watched most or all of James’ run on TV get their chance to play. We may not see lots of people winning 30+ shows – that takes the one-in-a-million level of knowledge – but I think we’ll see more people winning between 10 and 20 games by following the Holzhauer method.
Considering enalzi’s discovery that only eight people have won more than ten games, I think that would be a game changer.
Yes. but we’ve already seen that strategy. What made it interesting was that it was new.
Any strategy becomes boring over time if it is repeated. That is why the best game shows don’t lead themselves to one dominant strategy. That way different players will have different techniques.
Saying you want everyone to start doing what this one guy did is weird. It’s like saying you want all comedians to start telling the same one joke that you found hilarious the first time.
And the idea that longer runs of one person winning would be better is weird. It works for this guy because he was doing something new. Same reason why Ken Jennings was interesting: his winning streak was something new.
If everyone starts going on winning streaks, then it’s no longer new.
Pick any innovation in history. Once it becomes a common everyday occurrence, it becomes boring. How many people who fly all the time are amazed by airplanes. It’s just human nature to get bored if something repeated.
If everyone does it, it becomes boring.
It might be possible for the producers of the show to engineer long winning streaks—and supposedly, higher ratings—without running afoul of legal restrictions on game shows. Namely, they could pass through the test/audition process, a larger number of less-able players than they do now.
Then they could schedule two less-able-players for every traditional player to report to the studio for potential show-filming.
I suspect that they couldn’t actually explicitly choose two poor players (to face an existing champion) without getting into legal trouble, as that would probably constitute ‘fixing’ the game. But if they had a pool of ten players reporting to the studio, and three were able while seven were poor, the result (by chance, if that’s how new duos to face an existing champion are chosen) would often be champions who would have long winning streaks, because they were facing a lot of less-able players.
I’m certainly not suggesting this, but if the show’s producers DID want to encourage long runs for champions, it might be possible to do so, without getting into legal trouble.
well she didnt last very long, or did they start reruns?
I’m puzzled by this statement. If you were talking about games like chess, poker, or go, then yes, individual players’ techniques can vary significantly. I will admit to not being an expert on TV game shows, but let’s limit this to Jeopardy! Are there really that many different strategies and techniques to playing Jeopardy!? Is that what makes it interesting to you?
The modern (Trebek) version of Jeopardy! has been on the air for 35 years, with over 7,700 shows broadcast, and by my estimate, around 20,000 players. I haven’t been a regular watcher for years, but do you really think there have been that many perceptibly different strategies to playing it? Apart from the few I mentioned above, can you name or describe some of the other strategies and techniques you have seen used on Jeopardy!?
(BTW, I realize now that what I called “Chu-hopping” should more properly have been called the “Forrest Bounce,” after 1980s contestant Chuck Forrest who was the first to try it. Chu followed his lead.)
ISTM that, at least in the first decade or two, roughly 98% of all players started at the top of a category they thought they would do well in, and worked their way down. That monotonous plan (recommended by the show’s staff) is what made innovations like the Forrest Bounce revolutionary. Then it became a more common technique.
So you think a continuous run of shows with nothing but one-time winners would be preferable? More interesting? Less monotonous? I call **that **weird.
For every show a player wins, the more she sets herself apart from the average player. The longer the streak, the more extraordinary the performance, and the greater the tension about how long it will continue. I think most people perceive it that way, and I think that’s why Ken and James attracted so much attention. You may not care for it; that’s your privilege.
I think you’ve made your point. We apparently disagree about what we find interesting in game shows.
My point is that I believe that Holzauer’s strategy may revolutionize Jeopardy! play for the same reason the Fosbury Flop revolutionized the high jump: it has the potential to help even lesser players improve their performance over any of the other techniques. It may not become as ubiquitous as the Fosbury Flop did it its field, but I expect to see a lot more of it.
If it turns out not to be all that helpful, if really strong knowledge is more important, then maybe it won’t become as common as I am predicting. We shall see.
As long as we are not “shitting” on it, I had no idea we couldnt go off a bit on topic.
Such a small part of the total post.
Kind of like, if you dont have something nice to say, dont say anything, sort.
Restricting off topic comments is going to be hard to come by for me, I imagine for others too. Or is this an isolated situation because of whatever reason?
At the risk of going a little off topic …
I stopped recording the show. I enjoyed JH’s run, it was very entertaining. But today as I channel surfed a bit, I watched Jeopardy! Live, not DVR’d.
And the commercials after DJ and before FJ are sooooooooooooooooooooo looooooooooooooooooooong!
I think I am JeoparDONE for a while now. Wake me when another Brad Rutter or Ken Jennings or James Holzhauer show up.