Players should still be able to category-jump. After all, it might turn out that a category you thought might be easy is actually harder than you thought. You’d just have to jump to the lowest open clue on your new category.
Fair.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. As Alex says, “You are in control of the board.” The player has carte blanche to choose a category and the amount of money they are going for. This allows for strategizing, even if most players pre-James never realized the power available to them. James figured it all out and now others are following in his footsteps. I find the way people play now to be far more interesting. Take away the ability to jump around the board and it’s like every other game where you only pick a category and you have little to no say in what is at stake.
I agree with this.
So wait… when you speak of “‘quant’ types like us,” are you saying you’re okay with the Holzhauer strategy, you just think that the the showrunners at Jeopardy! might be concerned about ordinary fans not liking it? I assumed that *you * didn’t like it and were hoping they’d change the rules. If the latter, do you have any reason for believing (an article or something) that they might do that?
AFAICT, Ken Jennings, James Holzhauer, and other big champions like Jason have been very good for the game, creating huge publicity and boosting ratings. I seriously doubt that TPPTB at Jeopardy! have any desire to change the game to prevent players like them from succeeding. I don’t believe that they are originalists who want only “pure” (read: “boring”) play at the price of higher ratings. I don’t have any cite, just basic human nature (“greed is good”).
Also, the previous rule changes (removing the five-game limit and instituting tie-breakers) did not change the basic game play, but only addressed very rare occurrences. (As noted above, since eliminating the five-game rule, fewer than a dozen players have exceeded five wins!) IMO, those changes don’t establish a precedent for a change as sweeping as the one being proposed in this thread. Although I’m quite confident the rule change will not happen, we will all see if the Holzhauer strategy becomes as common as some of us expect, and if the rules are changed to address it in some way.
I’d be interested to know if any of the Dopers who have appeared on the show in the last few years could tell us if the contestant coordinators were still recommending the top-to-bottom strategy. Even more on point, are they doing it post-Holzhauer? I suspect it was a holdover from the early days, when (I suspect) the progressive clues were more common, but had little good justification beyond that. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they stopped this season, if they hadn’t already.
[BTW, SlackerInc, thanks for letting us know that Jason lost. I record the shows, but haven’t been watching them on the same day. As it is, I’m taking a long weekend trip, and probably won’t be able to watch again before next Wednesday.]
I believe that I may be the most recent Doper to appear on Jeopardy!, unless someone has snuck in after me that I don’t know about. I recorded my shows on February 21, 2018. They aired June 27-29 and July 1, 2018 (3-day champ, baby, woo-hoo!).
Anyway, at that time, the contestant coordinators were still encouraging people to take the categories in order. What’s more, Alex said that was the best strategy during one of the commercial breaks, when he was talking to the studio audience. The reasoning being that it lets you get a feel for the category, and there may be information in the earlier clues that will be helpful for the later clues. Of course, that was before James Holzhauer. I have no way of knowing if they’ve changed that advice at all.
I don’t know how much of a game-changer James’s strategy will be. Even when I played, the so-called Forrest Bounce (going from category to category almost at random, to prevent your opponents from getting into a groove) was already a well-established strategy, and Arthur Chu had recently won 11 games using it. Nevertheless, it didn’t become a regular practice for most players. Of course, Arthur had nothing like the success that James did.
Jason’s strategy isn’t quite the same as James’s. Jason also started at the bottom of categories, but he didn’t usually sweep through all the $1,000 clues, then all the $800 clues, and so on, as James did. Rather, Jason tended to start at the bottom of a particular category and move upward. It still let him get a healthy total quickly, but not near as big as James did. He also didn’t usually bet nearly as big on Daily Doubles. As a result, his daily average totals were much less than James’s.
Jason is closer to a “normal” multi-game winner, in the class of an Austin Rogers or a Julia Collins. Someone who dominated the game for a few weeks, but then lost and made way for the next champion. As mentioned above, if not for some poor wagering on his opponents’ part, Jason’s run might have ended at 12 games. While undoubtedly a great player, he had some good luck as well, and didn’t seem quite as invulnerable as James often did. He also seemed to have more weak spots than James. There were several triple-stumpers during Jason’s run, and a few games where not all of the clues were uncovered. That almost never happened when James was on.
I am agnostic on whether they should make that rule change. I primarily enjoy the game as a test of my own trivia knowledge, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me what order they read the clues in, except that it’s a little more disorienting if they don’t go through the categories in order.
I don’t want the show to be canceled, so I want them to adapt the rules to whatever their TV audience prefers.
I agree with this and most of the rest of your post. Clearly players like Jennings and Holzhauer are once-in-a-decade phenomena, mostly because of the extraordinary depth of their knowledge and quick button fingers. Jennings didn’t have a distinctive strategy, so subsequent players couldn’t emulate his play without being a smart as he was.
Holzhauer, OTOH, showed us a new method that others can try, and although it’s risky and works best with top-level smarts, I think we’ll see more players like Jason, who wasn’t as *quite *smart as James, use it and do better than they would have using more conventional techniques.
I’m with you on not wanting the show to be canceled, and I’m fairly confident we won’t see any rule changes wrt strategy.
I think the biggest challenge the show will face will be the retirement or death of Alex Trebek. It’s great he seems to be doing so well, and I wish him a long life, but he’s 79 now, and won’t be around forever. I haven’t followed the ratings of other game shows, like The Price is Right, that lost long-time hosts, so I don’t know how this usually pans out. But the question is, will Alex’s successor be able to maintain the show’s popularity?
IIRC, there was a category that each sebusequent clue built upon the one above it. If you revealed the clues in order, the clues below it made sense But if you went for the bottom clue, it wouldn’t make any sense because you hadn’t seen the clues revealed above it
It was cleverly done, but I wouldn’t know how to search on it.
I remember seeing it happen a number of times when I was a kid in the 70s. Once I went off to college, though, my viewing became more sporadic.
It’s my impression that they used to do it more than they do today, perhaps because they recognize, since the Forrest Bounce was introduced, that it impedes play. Can a more regular viewer confirm or refute this perception?
The number of ties in general seems to have been pretty small. I tried to search on “tie” at J!Archive, but got mostly clues referring to men’s neckware. I was only able to find a handful of tie games before I gave up. It would be nice if someone had a record of all the tie games. Was the frequency of tie games the reason behind the introduction of the tie-breaker?
My conspiracy theory is that it was added after Arthur Chu started the strategy of specifically betting to end the game in a tie. Chu’s episodes air January 2014, the rule was added later that year.
As conspiracy theories go, it sounds pretty reasonable. He did that several times, although it only paid off once, AFAICT.
What’s conspiracy theory about that? Of course they wouldn’t change the rules unless someone were doing it.
What was Chu’s reason for trying to tie?
But the Forrest Bounce was rarely used from the time he did it until James did, and we have evidence that they have at least as of pretty recently continued to suggest that contestants go through the clues in order. If they prefer that, they are not going to be reticent to impede someone from “bouncing”.
I believe the idea is to bring along someone you know you’re better than. He would win but not in a runaway. So he would bet enough that if 2nd place doubled their money it would end in a tie.
Good question. As enalzi suggests, maybe he felt that competing against a player he knew was better than taking a chance on someone new? Except that I think I noticed at least one game in the archive in which he tried for a tie when he was not in the lead going in to FJ. 
That’s not my impression. Although I have admitted to not being a very regular viewer, ISTM that in the old days (through the mid-1990s, at least) people were more likely to choose the top clue in a category and work down, perhaps switching to a preferred category, but otherwise generally not taking higher-value clues before the lesser ones were chosen. Chuck Forrest appeared in 1985-6 and may not have immediately inspired others to follow his lead, but hunting for the DDs seemed to become much more frequent in later years, IME. Arthur Chu (2014), who mimicked Forrest’s play, may have been more influential in that regard.
I suppose someone with access to the data at J!Archive might be able to write some code to characterize how frequently players went top-to-bottom vs. bouncing or hopping, but absent that, we can only state our perceptions in that regard.
I believe that’s true. I can remember when Arthur was on the show, and there were a lot of news stories at the time noting how much money he was making, and mentioning his “unusual” strategy of board-hopping, as though no one had ever done it before. As I recall, Arthur himself usually credited Forrest, but people didn’t always pay attention to that.
I think two things brought Arthur to more popular attention. The first was that he himself had a personality that some people found rather off-putting, so there was a certain amount of Love-To-Hate-Him (or just plain Hate Him) going on. The second was that when Arthur was on, social media had become much more prominent. Interesting contestants–good and bad–would get talked about on Twitter a lot, and clips of Arthur being “annoying,” if you found him so, could easily go viral.
Chuck Forrest was on the show in 1985, only its second season on the air. There was no Twitter or Facebook then. Successful as he was (and he held the record for most money won for a few years), he was mostly known only to true Jeopardy aficionados. Arthur Chu became well-known even to people who were only casual viewers.
Good points. I myself, in a previous post, credited Chu with the hopping technique, because I think I saw his shows, and certainly knew his name. But I’m 99% sure I never saw Forrest play.
Is it just me or has Final Jeopardy been a lot harder this season? I usually get 3 or 4 right a week, but I’m struggling to get 1.
Haven’t noticed. I usually get 2 per week, sometimes 3. I have noticed that for the past couple of weeks I’ve been like a deer in the highlights during regular and double J.