Last night, Peter Guekguezian had a roller-coaster night on Jeopardy! While he recovered to win the game, he certainly did not have a good night on the Daily Doubles, going 0-for-3 and losing $11,400 of his score in the process. Jay Johnson, one of TJF’s Patreon supporters, said to me after the game, “That’s got to be some kind of record of (Daily Double) futility in proportion to his score at the time of wager.”
Guess what? It was.
To quantify this, I will introduce a metric called “Daily Double Efficiency”. It can be quantified on a single Daily Double level as well as to combine them over an entire episode. Here’s how you calculate it for a single Daily Double:
Net Earned on a Daily Double ÷ Maximum Possible Bet on that Daily Double × 100
Because Net Earned will be negative on an incorrect Daily Double, and the Maximum Possible Bet will never be lower than $1000 in the Jeopardy! round ($2000 in Double Jeopardy), this metric for an individual Daily Double will go from -100 to 100. To look at efficiency for an entire episode, we just add the individual Daily Double Efficiency numbers together to get a total that will be between -300 and 300.
Here are the 10 lowest Daily Double Efficiency scores in all regular-play episodes since October 4, 2004:
-291, July 18, 2018 (Ryan Fenster vs. Kyle Adams vs. Caitlion O’Neill)
-271, February 4, 2020 (Travis Gaylord vs. Kathryn Flucht vs. Nipun Tulshian)
-267, October 5, 2020 (Phillip Howard vs. Garrett Marcotte vs. Melissa Smight)
-267, June 19, 2017 (Peter Guekguezian vs. Jeremy Fassler vs. Barbara Fox)
-260, July 6, 2021 (Courtney Shah vs. Alex Stubblefield vs. Laura Hatcher)
-255, January 16, 2020 (Veronica Vichit-Vadakan vs. Shanu George vs. Priscilla Drobes)
-240, December 3, 2015 (Joyce Hshieh vs. Jarrett Cabell vs. Kelly Wright)
-230, January 21, 2011 (Scott Harris vs. Sandy Hollimon vs. Amanda Sonmor)
-229, October 28, 2011 (Sunny Stalter vs. Helaine Greenfeld vs. John Jordan)
-224, October 23, 2015 (Dennis Golin vs. Becky Sullivan vs. Sean Anderson)
And here are the 5 lowest when 1 player played all three Daily Doubles (also, since October 4, 2004):
-267, June 19, 2017 (Peter Guekguezian)
-267, October 5, 2020 (Phillip Howard)
-255, January 16, 2020 (Shanu George)
-214, March 1, 2018 (Scott Krzywonos)
-186, October 23, 2013 (Bill Tolany)
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On the flip side, here are the 10 highest Daily Double Efficiency scores (all regular-play episodes since October 4, 2004):
300, August 3, 2021 (Matt Amodio vs. Christina Leone vs. Harry Hannigan)
300, June 8, 2020 (Morgan Wilbanks vs. Lindsay Madejski vs. Tonya Schaan)
300, April 20, 2015 (Alex Jacob vs. Monica Lott vs. Todd Lovell)
300, January 12, 2015 (John Schultz vs. Ricardo Pineres vs. Lauren Gambier)
300, April 4, 2012 (Joey Falco vs. Jesse Tow vs. Michael Tvaruzka)
300, June 24, 2008 (Sven Sinclair vs. Tom Koch vs. Dorothy Farrell)
296, September 30, 2011 (Chris Fleitas vs. Rob Landolfi vs. Donna Laux)
290, January 17, 2017 (John Avila vs. Andrea Keppers vs. Pete Tachibana)
288, December 14, 2010 (Jonathan Corbblah vs. Judy Arnold vs. Tom Nissley)
285, March 15, 2016 (Philip Tiu vs. Kristen Bancroft vs. Sean Cauley)
And the 5 highest when 1 player played all three Daily Doubles (since October 4, 2004):
285, March 15, 2016 (Philip Tiu)
253, April 9, 2019 (James Holzhauer)
222, January 12, 2010 (Jason Zollinger)
221, December 5, 2017 (Kyle Becker)
220, January 31, 2019 (J. B. Evans)
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I got to give Peter many props he had the guts after going 0/3 on the daily doubles yesterday after big waters and still going big on them. I hope he goes on a long run he never gives up. Really good spirit!