Today’s Final Jeopardy – May 30, 2019

49 Comments on "Today’s Final Jeopardy – May 30, 2019"

1. Howard | May 30, 2019 at 9:51 am |

   I know you can bring us the final jeopardy question as soon as The New York Times is available. I’m curious – where is the game played so early that you can post the recap for us in the Eastern time zone by 1 or 2 pm? I LOVE that you do!

   • Paul | May 30, 2019 at 10:11 am |

     He mentioned this in some previous comment, some time ago. There’s a TV station in Alabama that plays the episode at 9:30 CST.

     • Howard | May 30, 2019 at 11:30 am |

       Thank you Paul. As you may have guessed, I just discovered this web site a couple of months ago. Is there a Frequently Asked Questions column on here,do you know?

     • MarkO | May 30, 2019 at 1:54 pm |

       Technically, this time of year it’s broadcast at 9:30 CDT – an hour earlier than 9:30CST.

       • Elizabeth Harris | May 30, 2019 at 8:04 pm |

         And in Japan they play it t 5:30 p.m. Mon-Fri which is 4:30 a.m. EST

2. Matt Rose | May 30, 2019 at 10:00 am |

   IMO, I think you should update this front summary page for James.to 30 games and second on this list, especially as once clicked on, the backup brings up all of James 30 games… Also as Ken and James are probably the 2 that most people are interested. They should be listed 1 and 2.

   Through April 18, 2019, 8 players have won 10 or more games on Jeopardy!:
   Ken Jennings (74 wins)

   Julia Collins (20 wins)

   David Madden (19 wins)

   Matt Jackson (13 wins)

   Austin Rogers (12 wins)

   Seth Wilson (12 wins)

   Arthur Chu (11 wins)

   James Holzhauer (11 wins)

3. Sean L. | May 30, 2019 at 10:33 am |

   The clue today is wrong, though by just 1 year. The anthem was adopted on Oct. 22, 1946 and not in 1947. Composed by qa compatriot and contemporary of haydn, None other than Mozart, part of the “Freimaurer Kantate”. Was never intended to be a national anthem and that work was the last one Mozart completed before his death. That particular song is K. 623(a) = Koechelverzeichnis #623(a), the entire work is K.623. The Koechel catalogue lists the works of W.A. Mozart in chronological order with some pertinent remarks if applicable.
   I am surprised that J. makes such a blunder, especially in a FJ clue. It is just 1 year, but still. A player who gets it wrong could say he was “mislead”…….
   Btw, I AM Austrian by birth and came to the States in 1984. History and classical music are hobbies of mine, in addition I have a doctorate in history from the University of Vienna. My dissertation or thesis was about Austria from 1900 to 1955, from the “golden” years of the Habsburgs (yes, the name is spelled with a “B” in German) to when Austria became a free, independent and neutral (after the Swiss role model) country again, the 2. Republic and the ONLY country EVER the the USSR gave up volintarily.
   This should be a solve by all 3 players (or 2 if only 2 should be left for FJ).

   Most of all I was really happy to hear the news about Alex onCNN yesterday!!! He will beat this pancreatic cancer and all the prayers and of course thye treatment seem to work, despite this being one of the nastiest things one can get.

   • Andy Saunders | May 30, 2019 at 11:01 am |

     Sean:

     The Austrian government’s website disagrees. https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/bundeshymne

     The clue is correct.

     • Sean L. | May 30, 2019 at 11:23 am |

       No, it is not. They have been changed to be gender neutral (thus the melody is slightly different by a few bars) but not accepted by the people. Most still sing the old version of “Heimat bist Du grosser Soehne”, leaving out the daughters.
       And the anthem was published in the “Bundesgesetzblatt” in 1947 but already declared as Austrias anthem on 2. October 1946. In theory its only law when it is published in
       1. the Bundesgesetzblatt
       2, die “Wiener Zeitung”, the official government newspaper.
       The de facto adoption happened in 1946, but laws are usually published a few months later, especially in Austria. Everything is “gemuetlich” there and my old country is known for many things, speed not being one of them.

       • Andy Saunders | May 30, 2019 at 11:26 am |

         Primary sources give 1947 for the date of official adoption, and primary sources are what Jeopardy needs to confirm its clues.

       • Sean L. | May 30, 2019 at 11:34 am |

         Plus, it would not be the first time that the Austrian government was wrong and it will not be the last time. Right now they did not even have a government until yesterday, since the vice chancellor resigned, the minister of the interior was canned and then President van der Bellen dismissed the entire government because of the Ibiza scandal. New elections will be held in September, until then Austria has a temporary chancellor, for the first tima a woman. Used to be the first female President of the Constitutional Court since 2018, her name is Brigitte Bierlein. Funny enough, Bierlein is a diminuitive of “Bier”=beer, so her name translates as “small beer”….😊

         • Lucy Erickson | May 31, 2019 at 1:41 am |

           Well that’s the government’s fault, not Jeopardy’s fault

         • Karl | June 1, 2019 at 2:33 pm |

           It’s no one’s fault. Preferring a “de facto” date as opposed to an “in theory” date (in other words, the beginning of a legal process instead of its conclusion, when something’s officially adopted) is purely idiosyncratic. The definitive legal date is clearly the latter; Sean L. chooses to proclaim the former, for reasons of his own. Jeopardy! doesn’t share those reasons, so has no grounds or impetus to contradict the official date.

4. Steven | May 30, 2019 at 10:45 am |

   https://www.yahoo.com/news/alex-trebek-says-apos-apos-133704744.html

   Great news today about Alex’s health

5. Lecrecia Wilson | May 30, 2019 at 11:24 am |

   I don’t understand why there is so much made of James maybe surpassing Ken Jennings, when that Brad R. made twice what Ken did??

   • Andy Saunders | May 31, 2019 at 7:37 pm |

     Most of Brad’s winnings came in touranments where the prize was $1 million+.

     • Karl | June 1, 2019 at 2:15 pm |

       Plus, it’s not even close to twice as much. In regular games: Ken won $2,520,700 in 75 games; Brad won $55,102 + a couple cars in 5 games. Brad won his Tournament of Champions while Ken skipped his. Brad has continued winning lucrative Tournaments over the ensuing 19 years, but even so has won only 139% of Ken’s total on Jeopardy!, not 200%.

       Their accomplishments aren’t comparable, whereas James Holzhauer’s is directly comparable to Ken’s. 20 years down the road, when James has won 500 games, 8 tournaments and $450M on Jeopardy!, a page comparing him to Brad Rutter will maybe make some sense.

6. Matt Rose | May 30, 2019 at 11:35 am |

   Maybe others do this well also, but James seems to do this perfectly…

   James 3rd DD bet shows how good and smart he is, with a DD3 bet of $5,000. Enough for a good DD win of $10,000. But also enough of a cushion if he missed the 3rd DD. 9400+9400= 18,400 to 31412-5000 = 26412

   So an 8,000 $ cushion, if someone runs a whole category,

   Daily Double locations:
   1) WORLD FACTS $800 (5th pick)
   James 4000 +4000 (Megan 0 Rob 0)
   2) WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA? $1600 (4th pick)
   James 16800 +9812 (Rob 3200 Megan 1400)
   3) FILL IN THEIR DATES $800 (18th pick)
   James 31412 +5000 (Megan 9400 Rob 7600)
   Overall Daily Double Efficiency for this game: 174

   • Noumon Munir | May 30, 2019 at 1:53 pm |

     yeah exactly he has the game all played out in his favor

   • MarkO | May 30, 2019 at 2:07 pm |

     I kind of followed you, but I get your gist. But if he did miss the DD, and ended up with 26,412, Megan only needed to add $3,806 to her $9,400 to be within striking distance and one wrong final jeopardy answer from winning. Not an 8K buffer.

     • Matt Rose | May 30, 2019 at 2:44 pm |

       Yes, you are correct as it would have been a 4,000 cushion at FJ. Not 8,000.

       I think I got confused as his starting DD3 # of $32,412 was much lower than usual. So there is less play and guarantee.

7. Matt Rose | May 30, 2019 at 11:40 am |

   Place your bets….So what do you think, 1 or 2 or 3 games for James to break the Ken Jennings record…with $138,117 needed…

   Per Andy thoughts above >> James is $138,117 from Ken Jennings’ all-time regular-season total of $2,520,700.

   • Howard | May 30, 2019 at 1:41 pm |

     I hope 2 but I’ll bet 3. His totals of late seem a bit below his average. I just want to see him surpass KJ. Fifteen years is long enough to reign supreme. And it would be crushing for James to get SO close and not make it now.

     • Steven | May 30, 2019 at 2:38 pm |

       I say two more games. That would mean around $69,000 per game, which is totally doable, even with his “lower” scores of late. I think he’s been playing it safer so there will be no chance of him NOT beating Ken’s winnings.

   • Elizabeth Harris | May 30, 2019 at 6:20 pm |

     I think he is NOT worried about 2 or 3 – he is going to play the game the way he always has. He bets big when he knows he can nail an answer and smaller if he is in doubt. I don’t really think it has anything to do with ‘fatigue’ or ‘playing it safe’ – he’s a big boy who has been gambling for a long time and I’m pretty sure his reasons are known only to him. Maybe we’ll find out why he played a certain way in later interviews. Of one thing I’m sure, this is the first time he has had the pressure of almost the entire world watching and commenting!

     • Glenn Benfield | May 30, 2019 at 8:52 pm |

       You forget, Elizabeth. This drama already happened months ago before the world became interested.

       • Elizabeth Harris | May 30, 2019 at 11:52 pm |

         I read somewhere – maybe incorrectly – that the shows we are watching now are ones when the public first saw him in action. Also – many of us have known him in other shows like The Chase in which he was AMAZING, but that never got the attention that J! has. (But maybe the J! producers saw him in that and that is the reason they finally let him on after trying for years and also put him late in the season.)

8. Sean L. | May 30, 2019 at 11:47 am |

   Plus, it would not be the first time that the Austrian government was wrong and it will not be the last time. Right now they did not even have a government until yesterday, since the vice chancellor resigned, the minister of the interior was canned and then President van der Bellen dismissed the entire government because of the Ibiza scandal. New elections will be held in September, until then Austria has a temporary chancellor, for the first tima a woman. Used to be the first female President of the Constitutional Court since 2018, her name is Brigitte Bierlein. Funny enough, Bierlein is a diminuitive of “Bier”=beer, so her name translates as “small beer”….😊
   Long story short: “Land der Berge “became the national anthem by resolution of the parliament the anthem on 22. October 1946, it was elevated to being a “law” when that resolution was published. But by then it had been already the anthem legally since October 1946.

   • Sean L. | May 30, 2019 at 11:55 am |

     PS
     A little subtlety lost on J, one could make an argument for both years. But since we are talking Europe, unfortunately only one – James- got it. Haydn should have been a dead giveaway.

     • Elizabeth Harris | May 30, 2019 at 6:26 pm |

       From the information above…” most scholars believe now that it is written by Johann Holzer.” (Whether or not it was Mozart, the debate over Johann Holzer is awfully close to James’ name.) Is anyone remembering also that James’ father is German? I’m sure he has been schooled in differences between things German and Austrian!

       • Richard F Rolwing | May 31, 2019 at 11:13 pm |

         I don’t think so–I think more people would know that the German anthem had (has) a melody written by Haydn than would know that Austria also used the same melody for their anthem…I count myself among this group. In fact, it was probably those people who knew neither of these facts but did know only that Haydn was Austrian (James??) for whom it may have been a “dead giveaway,” or at least leading to an educated guess. What immediately came into to my head when I read the question was the controversy about the use of the first stanza of the “Deutschlandlied”: “Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles…” Of course, the Nazis seemed (ahem) to be fond of this stanza for some reason and the West German government stipulated that this stanza not be sung for official events (I’m not sure where this stands today–when I did a little research into this I found out that the author of the text that was written in the 1840s during revolutionary times in “Germany” meant this stanza to be an appeal for one German state as opposed to the patchwork quilt of duchies, principalities, etc that made up the area in that time and NOT a call for Germany to be dominant in the world at the expense of other nations. I did not know this before…Nevertheless, I think this stanza and the Nazis’ stressing of it contributed I’m thinking in no small way to the whole anthem becoming “Nazi-tainted.”
         In any case, once my mind went in this direction I never even thought about Austria–I mean how often do two countries have the same national anthem (melody-wise, at least)?? Austria only had it from 1929 to 1938, while Germany had adopted it all the way back in 1922 in the time of the Weimar Republic…So, I was ready to go with East Germany(!!), and if you leave out the date (East Germany adopted their anthem in 1949) I think you can make a case for it being an acceptable response…

         • Richard F Rolwing | May 31, 2019 at 11:48 pm |

           (My above reply is addressed to Sean L.’s “P.S.” comment…

       • Richard F Rolwing | May 31, 2019 at 11:42 pm |

         Elizabeth, James’ last name literally translates to “wood-cutter” in English (“Holz”=wood, “Hauer”=cutter, chopper)…It is interesting that he pronounces it in the proper German, a la “Mow-tzart” (Mozart), which would indicate a definite interest in his German heritage I would think…

         Still, knowing that Austria used the “Nazi-tainted” Haydn melody for their anthem for a time before 1938 (I am assuming that he would already know without a doubt that the German anthem used the melody by Haydn…For me, knowing the latter but NOT the former just scrambled my brains to the point where I was ready to say East Germany because I knew that West Germany kept the Haydn anthem after the war, with some stipulations about what stanzas should be used, etc…)

         • Richard F Rolwing | June 1, 2019 at 12:12 am |

           (sorry, got distracted by my long parenthetical tangent and did not finish my sentence)–Still, knowing that Austria…is, well, why he is James, I guess…!!

         • Karl | June 1, 2019 at 2:56 pm |

           Oh, good lord! None of this ridiculous circumlocution is necessary. All he needed to know is that a German-speaking country switched anthems in 1947 in repudiation of Nazi domination. Austria was (uniquely) absorbed into Germany and thus shared its national anthem until liberation in 1945. GDR didn’t exist until 1949. The only other plausible choice would be Lichtenstein, so there really was no choice: “Germany” was too obvious; “Lichtenstein” was too obscure; “Austria” was juuuuust right, declared Goldilocks.

9. Kelli | May 30, 2019 at 11:50 am |

   He has looked increasingly tired this past week. And his daily totals seem well below what they have previously been. I wonder if something was off for him during these tapings.

   • Zoe | May 30, 2019 at 12:20 pm |

     This is apparently the taping day where Trebek’s cancer announcement broke into the news, according to Megan from today’s game. So that likely affected James’s usual dominance.

     • Keli | May 30, 2019 at 3:41 pm |

       Thanks for sharing that info. I could see that definitely having some effect.

   • Jakob | May 30, 2019 at 1:59 pm |

     If you look at James’ 3rd DD wager, he seems to play a safer strategy, which hurts his total winnings, but helps his winning chances.

     • Karl | June 1, 2019 at 3:40 pm |

       His strategy hasn’t changed a bit. He calculates wagers based on probabilities going into Final Jeopardy! His proper wager then depends to a large extent on what he wagered in 2XJ! DDs. Variables in 2XJ! are several but looming large is how many clues are left and whether another DD is somewhere on the board. By the time the 3rd DD is found, if it’s late in the round he always wagers to defend his runaway, which is always the correct strategy. (He nearly always doubles on the 1st DD, bets his daughter’s birthdate or his own wedding date (or some other significant date that’s close to the the optimum $wager) on the 2nd DD, but wagers defensively on the 3rd.) That looks conservative but it’s simply correct game play.

       What’s changed is that a few players have caught wise to proper buzzer technique. In emulation, some lately have stood still, arms relaxed and extended, executing single, swift, precisely-timed presses. Consequently, James has not been 1st to buzz in on clues he clearly knew, and has jumped the gun a couple times on clues of which he wasn’t sure. Again, he adjusts his timing to suit the $ value and # of clues remaining, but the result has kept his lead from being large enough to bet huge on FJ!–bigger than almost anyone else in the history of the game, but not huge because he calculates precisely what guarantees winning. And only 1 game in the past month wasn’t guaranteed, none in the past week. His chances of winning don’t need help.

   • Elizabeth Harris | May 30, 2019 at 6:34 pm |

     Might be bored rather than tired – and perhaps tired of all the endless commenting and haters on social media. I can imagine that being roped into a schedule for this long (even if it’s just a couple of days a week) is confining for someone basically used to picking and choosing how he wants to use his time each day. I only teach two nights a week, but it seems like everything interesting I want to do comes up on one of those two nights!

     • Incognito123 | May 30, 2019 at 6:57 pm |

       As far as endless commenting and such, when this was taped, there was NO commenting online, it was only known to the show, contestants and the audience
       I must say, I know the show and contestants are held to not speaking about it, but pretty amazing all the audience members have kept a silence as well – – I’ve been curious if they have some obligation either implied or explicit not to talk about what they saw. The taping overlapping the general TV audience (and hence commenting, blogging, etc.) is still quite a few weeks away, it is roughly 3 months behind, and he has “only” been winning for 31 days

       • Elizabeth Harris | May 30, 2019 at 8:06 pm |

         I know. We’re all pondering how Jeopardy keeps the audience silent with all the social media today! Does anyone know how they do it??

         • Steve | May 30, 2019 at 11:33 pm |

           I’m sure most of the audience are super J! fans who respect the game, plus a good portion may be friends and family of the contestants for the week.

         • ReginaG | May 31, 2019 at 3:38 am |

           I did a bit of research on this and there seems to be a few factors. 1) Small audience, only 50-159 people, 2) most of whom are related to the contestants, 3)They are told by the stage crew about how much revenue will be lost by leaked info as well as having to sign an NDA and if that doesn’t work, 4) they have ALL THE LAWYERS.

10. Alfred | May 30, 2019 at 11:57 am |

    I bet he does it in 2 days. Imagine though if he were to hit an all-time high and break Ken’s record at the same time. That would be sweet.

11. Victor | May 30, 2019 at 1:48 pm |

    How many more shows are set to air before the summer break?

    • Andy Saunders | May 31, 2019 at 7:37 pm |

      there are 8 weeks left of shows (2 of which are going to be a teen tournament).

12. Noumon Munir | May 30, 2019 at 1:55 pm |

    once he beats ken jennings in 2 days….it will be unknown territory for everybody and the skys are the limits for him . i really wanna see how far the man can go !!