We’re now through six weeks of Season 40—here’s another week of editorial thoughts!
What Video Games Are Best For Jeopardy! Preparation?
In his interview on Monday’s show, Dane Reighard basically said that he prepared by playing Nintendo. This led to Lilly, in her fashion recap that night, asking “I would like to know what Nintendo game Dane played to exercise his buzzer thumb for Jeopardy!“.
While I don’t have a specific answer as to what game Dane would have played, I do have a suggestion—in fact, I have an entire genre’s worth of suggestions: Rhythm games.
Jeopardy! is a game where the all-time greats consistently signal as close to the exact millisecond as possible. Thus, the best training can be had when repeatedly trying to press a button as close as possible to the perfect moment in rhythm. Moreover, rhythm games provide instant feedback to players—you can immediately tell whether you are too early or too late.
It would be hard for me to recommend a specific game in the genre—so many rhythm games are based upon music, and differing tastes in music might mean that I would enjoy a different game than you, the reader, might. However, if you are a fan of the Final Fantasy series and its music, I highly recommend the 2023 game Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, available on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
My friends over at Geeks Who Drink have introduced a daily trivia game—Thrice! Existing to make daily clever trivia content accessible to a wide audience, it's a daily challenge that tries to get you to the answer via three separate clues. It has a shareable score functionality to challenge your friends and new questions every day will give you a new daily social ritual. You can find it at thricegame.com.
Are you going on the show and looking for information about how to bet in Final Jeopardy? Check out my Betting Strategy 101 page. If you want to learn how to bet in two-day finals, check out Betting Strategy 102. In case the show uses a tournament with wild cards in the future, there is also a strategy page for betting in tournament quarterfinals.
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You Don’t Like The Forrest Bounce? There’s Still A Really Easy Fix That’ll Neutralize It!
In the Jeopardy! Universe this week, William Hughes of the A.V. Club put out an interesting article regarding the Forrest Bounce; it’s been one of the rare articles recently where my disagreement with the author’s thesis hasn’t actually left me angry after reading it (even though the article’s subheading describes it as “effective but irritating”).
The article does raise a good point, though, in that the Bounce is at odds with how the show is written—and it’s a point that Alex Trebek always made: the categories are written to have a flow to them, and going from top to bottom, easy to hard, helps with the natural flow of the game.
However, there is still a really easy way to stop the current Daily Double hunting strategy in its tracks: make each row of the board—$200 through $1000 in the Jeopardy Round, $400 through $2000 in Double Jeopardy—equally likely to contain a Daily Double. If you take away the advantage to hunting around the bottom rows of the board (placing 20% of the Daily Doubles in the top row will do that), more players will take categories top-to-bottom.
A Suggestion I May Regret Making—But I’m Making It Anyway
While I generally disagree with those who are upset by the lack of regular play over the next few months—and I still believe that the general blame should be foisted in the direction of the AMPTP—there’s a simple olive branch that the show could extend to its fans who are hoping for more regular play: No reruns this summer, just run an extra 30 episodes of regular play.
As I said, I may end up regretting this suggestion—having no summer reruns would 100% take away my ability to recharge my own batteries in August and early September—but running 22+ weeks of regular play instead of 16+ weeks would allow for a larger Tournament of Champions field next fall, as well as for an extra 60 contestants to get on the show this season. While there are certainly more production expenses involved, it might be seen as a way for Michael Davies et al to tell a large portion of the fanbase “we know you’d like to see regular play, thanks for being fans, here’s another six weeks’ worth of regular play for you”.
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Some Alex Trebek On The Way Out
In June 1990, Alex Trebek hosted the NHL Awards, along with an opening rap, some stand-up, and famous Canadian figure skater Brian Orser—two years removed from an Olympic silver medal in Calgary, having lost the “Battle of the Brians” to Brian Boitano—serving as Alex Trebek’s figure-skating stunt double.
Here’s the full broadcast:
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A great suggestion regarding Daily Double placement. It’s far better than the alternative idea I’ve heard of limiting players’ selections to category only (requiring them to take the lowest value clue remaining in that category).
Six weeks of regular play might work as a one-time thing; even so, that would only get us to 110 or so games, still the lowest total of any season to date. It’s notable that you floated out the possibility going to year-round production when Champions Wildcard was first announced in late March; you made clear some months later that it was a suggestion, and that you didn’t endorse it. The writers shouldn’t have a problem with it; after all, they chose to take nearly five— «ducks and covers» (I’m kidding, of course.)
You’re already familiar with my objection regarding where responsibility lies for the programming layout on Season 40. I do want to add one thing. On Reddit yesterday, you said Michael Davies deserves all of the praise for the direction he chose. But I submit that if the AMPTP gets the blame on this, it instead must also get the praise. “Davies gets the the credit for success, but the AMPTP gets the blame for failure” is functionally a “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose” argument, and accordingly must be summarily rejected.
Finally, I recently caught up on Potent Podables. Particularly given that after the first week of Spades, Emily said of CWC, “this is dumb,” and Kyle agreed, I forwarded them your recent editorials regarding why you think it necessary, as well as why you think shifting the balance between regular play and tournaments is absolutely necessary to save the show. (This was in the course of also explaining hows and whys of the schedule ending up where it is.) I thought they should have the best possible case for the changes, so they can evaluate it for themselves.
We fundamentally disagree to the degree to which regular play during the strike was a viable option once the show elected to reuse clues.
Note my editorial from August 7, especially on the heels of my game comments from the start of the strike where I instruct players to ramp up studying from the Archive.
The Archive did not exist to nearly the same degree in 2007–08, which made regular play on reused clues viable. It’s not viable in a world where 95% of the Archive is complete, and 100% of the Archive post–1997.
Regarding the Archive: I’m surprised you didn’t throw my own words back at me. On Opening Day, I got into why the show decided that regular play wouldn’t fly now vice the last WGA strike, and it was basically much as you state here. (Link at bottom.) Summing it up, I said: “The call was made that, for whatever reason, there would have been too fundamental a difference between regular play conducted under the present circumstances and ideal ones…” Like your original remarks in March about extending the season, that was an explanation of what I thought was the show’s position, not an endorsement of it.
I also said that the importance of any competitive inequity is amplified by the postseason and the pyramid. Thus, this fundamental disagreement on regular play vs. these tournaments is indeed only a part of our fundamental disagreement over Davies’s vision for the show, and the necessity of implementing it on his chosen timeline.
In response to “Note my editorial of August 7”, my reply is “check your email archives.” We’ve already been over the matter of lead times. For the current “Diamonds” bracket, we’re looking at about five weeks; I’m not sure our previous discourse over Clubs and Hearts holds as it did then, with the writers back on set.
I’m going to posit something I didn’t then — the possibility of diminishing returns from Archive study. Is the “haystack” so big that the probability of finding just the right “needles” is too low to affect game play? With the many hundreds of thousands of clues now in the Archive, and only 61 clues in any game, does that limit the potential benefit from cramming out of the Archive?
And if the Archive has indeed rendered regular play unviable, maybe this isn’t entirely on Michael Davies after all. It would then seem that responsibility also extends to, among others, Mr. Meyer, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Knecht Schmidt… and yourself. Congratulations, Andy — you’ve played a role in [breaking or saving] Jeopardy! [depending on your standpoint].
https://mattcarberry.substack.com/i/136917903/why-this-and-why-these-players
I agree on rhythm games! Would love to see someone compile data of buzzer tests followed by rhythm practice and then buzzer testing again to see if there is actually quantifiable improvement compared to no practice. (Also opens up another question of whether musicians as a whole are more adept at the buzzer.)
Samurai Kirby is another game I’ve always wondered about re: Jeopardy buzzer https://kirby.fandom.com/wiki/Samurai_Kirby
This is just a jumble of not-necessarily-related [not to each other, but somewhat related to Andy and Matt’s discussions] thoughts . . .
Nobody is to blame for the archive (just kind of the timing of it) because with the advent of the internet it was bound to happen sometime by someone.
If the archive is more of a negative [throwing the games to people with photographic memories and lots of time on their hands to memorize from the archives] than a positive [keeping fans engaged the many hours of the week when Jeopardy! is not on the air], then the onus falls on Jeopardy! for not realizing that something like that was going to eventually happen and thus employing some kind of copyright situation to deter it. [I don’t know if they could have legally prevented it entirely, but I’m thinking they probably could have either prevented it from being so like their game or come out against it enough to make true fans ashamed to use it.]
I feel like the “fans” who are so upset by not having “normal” games are just a small minority of squeaky wheels. If there were new games instead of reruns in the summer, there would be at least an equal number of fans complaining about having to miss those shows due to summer activities. [Yeah, I know many “DVR it” (or whatever) but more cannot and summer activities also reduce the time available to catch up.]
There have been several fans on this site during the summer when it WAS reruns commenting that they remembered the FJ answer from its original airing, but not the correct response. This is part of the reason why I don’t think that high a percentage of watchers really care that there are reruns in the summer.
I even suppose that there are some rerun-haters who just like to show-off their Jeopardy responding skills to their family and don’t want their family to be able to say “Hah, you’ve just already seen these.” 😉
Lastly, people seem to enjoy having favorites and rooting for them, but in regular games they don’t have much to go by, having just been introduced to the two challengers and usually not having known the champion for very long. So these shows with returning contestants offer more of that aspect than regular shows do.
To be clear: the Archive has unquestionably and overwhelmingly been a net positive for the game. It actually follows on from an earlier iteration. A Season 18 champion archived all of Season 20 — but that season ended with Ken Jennings as a 38-day champion, and she was sick and tired of him. (To this day, Ronnie O’Rourke wants the 5-win limit brought back.) The Archive team picked up things in Season 21 and took it from there.
My understanding is that the Archivists have taken legal advice regarding the project, and that Sony allows it to continue as long as nobody makes money off of it. (The Archivists strongly enforce prohibitions against the data being scraped.)
The over-arching concern many fans have is about this change in the balance between regular play and tournaments. Many think that—the pivot toward “bankable personalities,” as Andy put it—will turn Jeopardy! into reality TV or something similar, and some think that would be tantamount to destroying the show in order to save it. (I don’t go that far.) Another way I’ve been thinking of this is, since Davies sees Jeopardy! as a sport, how will it be presented and packaged. Will it be like the Premier League he loves so much, or the NFL — or more like how NBC does the Olympics, with its emphasis on “human interest” elements and “storylines,” seemingly at the expense of actual game play?
That’s something I struggle with internally. I’m very inclined not to dictate to anyone how to consume and enjoy the show—but I also have feelings of disapproval for the ways some consume and enjoy it. (And I’ll admit here: among those “some” is another commenter on this post.)
With all due respect, should we all not be free to consume and enjoy Jeopardy! however we want—especially if others are not actively harmed in that consumption?
Sorry if I seemed to imply that the Archive has not been a net positive for the game. I only started out with the “more of a negative” phrasing [which began with IF] because I seemed to have been seeing more commentary lately of that nature — in the direction of “I want to see average people who just have a wide knowledge base from a love of true learning, not a bunch of people who are good at memorizing facts used on past Jeopardy! episodes.”
[Recent “reused clues” aside, on any one day (even before the writers’ strike) you could take the keywords from any clue/response combo and search in the Archive and almost always (other than for very current events) find AT LEAST one (usually more) instance of it having been used before in some fashion, i.e., not worded exactly the same nor just a swapped question/answer situation, but ABOUT the same people, incidence, date, location or whatever such that if you already knew one of those facts you were almost certain to know all of them due to their relationship/involvement, not because they had been referenced before on Jeopardy. For example, when I recently saw about the huge 1833 meteor shower when watching Ken Burns’ new documentary about American Buffalo, I thought “I bet that’s going to show up as a Jeopardy! clue soon, but then I looked it up in the Archive and it already did — in 2009 and 2019 (though those clues did not emphasize the magnitude, so it might appear again with that aspect).]
So the Archive is wholly positive as far as I am concerned!
Could Jeopardy! lower the amount of “Archive cramming” possible (and thus lower the amount of criticism that this occurs) by giving new contestants less notice that they get to be on the show? I’m sure the show HAS to get all their ducks in a row somewhat ahead of time (as opposed to picking from a studio audience), but when the strike caused them to have to “turn on a dime” and invent these sort of “surprise second chance, using re-cycled clues” shows, I believe Andy mentioned it would be quicker turnaround of contestant notification to appearance and that this would presumably cut down on ability to cram from the Archive and thus make re-used clues even less of a problem.
A lot of people in the contestant pool aren’t waiting until they get The Call to run through the Archive — a lot of them have ramped up their studying as soon as they finish their audition and put in the contestant pool. For those players, a week fewer won’t make any difference at all.
The presumption was that players picked “by surprise” wouldn’t be in that “perpetually studying” mode—that’s why I think the decision was made.
Also, less notice would need to be likely met with the show handling all flights and accommodations; it would be financially unviable to put that on contestants on even shorter notice. (But that’s a separate point.)
I wholeheartedly endorse the suggestion of extending the regular play portion of Season 40.
For me the best rhythm game to play to get ready for Jeopardy is rhythm heaven on the Wii. Though I love theatrhythm you have a lot to focus on in that game. In rhythm heaven you only have to tap one button and the Wii remote is probably similar in size to the buzzer used in jeopardy.