Warning: This page contains spoilers for the June 20, 2025, game of Jeopardy! — please do not scroll down if you wish to avoid being spoiled. Please note that the game airs as early as noon Eastern in some U.S. television markets.
Here’s today’s Final Jeopardy (in the category Chemical Element Names) for Friday, June 20, 2025 (Season 41, Game 205):
Spanning the alphabet, they are the only 2 chemical element names that end with the letter “C”
(correct response beneath the contestants)
Today’s Jeopardy! contestants:
Liv Markham, a localization producer from Darien, Connecticut
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Andrew Brigger, a social studies teacher from Roseville, Minnesota
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Bevin Blaber, a writer originally from Schenectady, New York (1-day total: $600)
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Andy’s Pregame Thoughts:
Bevin Blaber is your new Jeopardy! champion, having won yesterday with just $600; today, she faces off against Liz Markham and Andrew Brigger. Despite what many viewers thought last night, the judges absolutely made the correct call within the bounds of the show’s rules in ruling against Jacob Hale’s spelling of “Carlsbad Cavrans”. This specific rule is even posted at the show’s website: “Written responses to the Final Jeopardy! clue do not have to be spelled correctly, but they must be phonetically correct and not add or subtract any extraneous sounds or syllables.” “Cavrans” is not phonetically correct; it was ruled on properly by the judges. In fact, I don’t even think that the rule should be changed; I believe that the rule as it stands right now is most fair at toeing the line of “someone who might have learned the correct response by hearing it but not knowing how to spell it” and “fairness to one’s opponents”—as Alex Trebek opined a few times in early seasons of the show, especially after the judging tightened up: judging is essentially zero-sum; if you are too lenient towards one player in judging, you are essentially acting unfairly towards that player’s opponents.
While we are on the subject of Final Jeopardy, there’s a bit of a trend that I find very concerning as a fan: the game’s 61st clue is playing at just 40.3% in regular play this season. Last season, it played at 46.4%, which is much more in line with the 45-46% it has played at the last few seasons. (Thankfully, J! Archive makes it really simple to consult these statistics by season—at the bottom of every season’s display of games, you can click “Daily Double statistics”, “Final Jeopardy! Round statisics”, or other more detailed statistics for that season.) I’m not sure if the current show management really realizes the gravity of this situation, but if contestants start to realize that Final Jeopardy is too hard, then contestants—especially leaders—will start to play more conservatively in Final Jeopardy, and that will overall make the product less exciting and more boring to the average viewer. It’s an interesting historical curio to see all three players bet $0 in Final, but this is not a situation that makes for good television; the difficulty of Final Jeopardy needs to return to the 45% range at hardest in order to retain the excitement that the last segment of the game is known for.
Interestingly, the Unified Prediction model self-adjusts in regular play for the recent (recent being the last 200 regular play games) difficulty in Final. I also want to note that while the performance mean numbers being used for the challengers are currently among the lowest I have seen, this is entirely because Final Jeopardy has been playing at historically difficult levels over the past year.
(Content continues below)
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Correct response: What are arsenic & zinc?
More information about Final Jeopardy:
(The following write-up is original content and is copyright 2025 The Jeopardy! Fan. It may not be copied without linked attribution back to this page.)
There’s really not a whole lot that I can say about today’s Final Jeopardy clue (this section is going to be quite sparse compared to the short essay I wrote in Pregame Thoughts today); both arsenic (well-known as poisonous, especially in terms of groundwater contamination and its poisonous arsenic trioxide form) and zinc (a relatively abundant metal) are very likely well known to most of the show’s viewers. The difficulty in this clue is to realize that the show has probably included “spanning the alphabet” for a reason, and start thinking of elements starting with the letters A and Z.
And if it goes 3 for 3? Maybe this is the start of a turnaround in terms of the difficulty of Clue 61. Both challengers have been correct in Final only three times over the last 52 episodes.
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Game Recap & Tonight’s Game Stats:
Looking to find out who won Jeopardy! today? Here’s the Friday, June 20, 2025 Jeopardy! by the numbers, along with a recap:
Jeopardy! Round:
(Categories: Law Revue; Famous Names; Also A Spice Or Seasoning; Miles Away; Keep It Clean; I’m Worried About My Fish Tank)
A couple of incorrect responses kept Bevin’s score down as Andrew had 6 correct early to lead. After 30 clues, your scores were Andrew $2,600 Bevin $1,000 Liv -$800.
Statistics at the first break (15 clues):
Andrew 6 correct 1 incorrect
Bevin 3 correct 2 incorrect
Liv 0 correct 1 incorrect
Today’s interviews:
Liv has a pirate, Jacinto, in her lineage.
Andrew coached girls’ badminton for 19 years.
Bevin does the Chiditarod shopping cart race in Chicago.
Liv got herself out of the hole in this segment while Andrew doubled up through the Daily Double to lead after 30.
Statistics after the Jeopardy round:
Andrew 9 correct 2 incorrect
Bevin 5 correct 2 incorrect
Liv 7 correct 2 incorrect
Scores after the Jeopardy! Round:
Andrew $5,600
Bevin $1,800
Liv $1,000
Double Jeopardy! Round:
(Categories: Losing Veep Candidate; 5-Letter Words; Brit Bits; Ends In Silent “X”; 19th Century Literature; Zombie A-Go-Go)
Liv bet just $1,200 of her $2,200 on DD2, then stayed in the same category. Andrew then found DD3 immediately after gaining control, doubling up again, and cruising to a runaway—albeit aided by an extra “S” that Bevin added to “Lake District”.
Statistics after Double Jeopardy:
Andrew 16 correct 4 incorrect
Bevin 13 correct 5 incorrect
Liv 9 correct 2 incorrect
Total number of unplayed clues this season: 40 (0 today).
Scores going into Final:
Andrew $14,000
Bevin $5,400
Liv $3,400
Everyone got Final Jeopardy correct today! Andrew added $2,000 to bring his winnings to $16,000. He’ll be back Monday to defend.
Tonight’s results:
Liv $3,400 + $0 = $3,400 (What are arsenic + zinc?)
Bevin $5,400 + $1,401 = $6,801 (What are arsenic & zinc?)
Andrew $14,000 + $2,000 = $16,000 (What are zinc and arsenic?) (1-day total: $16,000)
Other Miscellaneous Game Statistics:
Daily Double locations:
1) MILES AWAY $1000 (clue #21)
Andrew 2800 +2800 (Bevin 1600 Liv -800)
2) 5-LETTER WORDS $1600 (clue #2)
Liv 2200 +1200 (Bevin 1800 Andrew 5600)
3) LOSING VEEP CANDIDATE $1200 (clue #5, $29200 left on board)
Andrew 6400 +6400 (Bevin 1800 Liv 3400)
Overall Daily Double Efficiency for this game: 255
Clue Selection by Row, Before Daily Doubles Found:
J! Round:
Bevin 4 4 3 4 3 3
Andrew 5 3 2 1 5 4 5 4 5 3 3 4 2 5*
Liv 2
DJ! Round:
Bevin
Andrew 3*
Liv 3 4* 5† 2†
† – selection in same category as Daily Double
Average Row of Clue Selection, Before Daily Doubles Found:
Andrew 3.60
Bevin 3.50
Liv 3.20
Unplayed clues:
J! Round: None!
DJ! Round: None!
Total Left On Board: $0
Number of clues left unrevealed this season: 40 (0.20 per episode average), 0 Daily Doubles
Game Stats:
Andrew $7,000 Coryat, 16 correct, 4 incorrect, 29.82% in first on buzzer (17/57), 1/1 on rebound attempts (on 5 rebound opportunities)
Bevin $5,400 Coryat, 13 correct, 5 incorrect, 28.07% in first on buzzer (16/57), 2/2 on rebound attempts (on 4 rebound opportunities)
Liv $3,800 Coryat, 9 correct, 2 incorrect, 14.04% in first on buzzer (8/57), 0/2 on rebound attempts (on 9 rebound opportunities)
Combined Coryat Score: $16,200
Lach Trash: $26,200 (on 22 Triple Stumpers)
Coryat lost to incorrect responses (less double-correct responses): $11,600
Lead Changes: 1
Times Tied: 0
Player Statistics:
Bevin Blaber, career statistics:
32 correct, 9 incorrect
2/2 on rebound attempts (on 5 rebound opportunities)
32.46% in first on buzzer (37/114)
0/0 on Daily Doubles
1/2 in Final Jeopardy
Average Coryat: $9,500
Andrew Brigger, career statistics:
17 correct, 4 incorrect
1/1 on rebound attempts (on 5 rebound opportunities)
29.82% in first on buzzer (17/57)
2/2 on Daily Doubles (Net Earned: $9,200)
1/1 in Final Jeopardy
Average Coryat: $7,000
Liv Markham, career statistics:
10 correct, 2 incorrect
0/2 on rebound attempts (on 9 rebound opportunities)
14.04% in first on buzzer (8/57)
1/1 on Daily Doubles (Net Earned: $1,200)
1/1 in Final Jeopardy
Average Coryat: $3,800
Andrew Brigger, to win:
2 games: 52.946%
3: 28.033%
4: 14.842%
5: 7.858%
6: 4.161%
Avg. streak: 2.125 games.
Andy’s Thoughts:
- No, 22 Triple Stumpers is not a record.
- No wagering suggestions are posted due to today being a runaway game.
- Today’s box score will be linked to when posted by the show.
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spanning the alphabet gave it away for me – else I might have run out of time working my way through the periodic table mentally.
Ditto, MarkO. The phrase “spanning the alphabet” immediately sent me to a and z, thus, easy to come up with arsenic and zinc.
Seeing the word “arsenic” always makes me think of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Way back in the 1960’s, over 60 years ago, my sister played one of the older ladies in “Arsenic and Old Lace” at the Maryland School for The Blind. For the life of me, I can’t remember whether she played Abby Brewster or Martha Brewster but I think it was Abby.
Since FJ is rather straightforward, let me discuss your concerns about get rate:
I would venture part of the reason for lower get rate is we haven’t had the megastars of past seasons. There’s no Harmeyer, no Basile, no Raut, no Chan, no Pannullo, no Meyer, or any one close to that. When the players are not dominant, then Final defaults to a lower %. Incidentally, I wonder what the get rate is just among challengers this season and previous seasons; that would be telling.
Okay, folks, I DID THE MATH!
Let’s compare Season 41 to Seasons 36-39. (Season 40 had too much tournament play and therefore too small a sample size to be useful in my opinion.) The good news is, our j-archive has results of Final by lectern. Therefore, we can isolate how the champs do compared to how the challengers do. (We also have to remove tournament results, now that I think about it… one moment…)
The results, taking into account only those games where all three players made Final:
Season 36 — Challengers 40.8%, Champions 54.2%
Season 37 — Challengers 41.6%, Champions 52.6%
Season 38 — Challengers 41.4%, Champions 54.7%
Season 39 — Challengers 41.9%, Champions 55.6%
Season 40 — too many tournament games, skipped
Season 41 — Challengers 38.9%, Champions 42.4%
It would appear Final Jeopardies are slightly harder this time around than in prior seasons, but not enough that you’d say you have a writing problem. When a champ is dominant, he/she tends to clean house on Final Jeopardy. We haven’t had a superchamp in Season 41, and with all due respect to Laura Faddah, she won in spite of Final Jeopardy (3/9). So I wonder if this burst of data changes anything.
The last 200 regular play games vs the 200 regular play games before that–as per the data used in the UPM–FJ% for challengers has dropped from 42.5% to 37.5%. FJ% has dropped 5% across the board and it’s not because there aren’t any superchampions this season.
You may want to exclude runaway games. In a runaway game, there is less of an incentive to think hard.
Got half of the answer, zinc. The other half, if I had ten minutes would have. Multiple answers are always more difficult.
Same Karen and perhaps if I used the “spanning the alphabet,” I might have figured out arsenic.
“Spanning the alphabet” didn’t register with me, and arsenic came right away, but for whatever reason zinc didn’t, but talc came briefly and I dismissed it as not an element almost immediately, but zinc continued to elude…
Just the opposite! And that darn scanning the alphabet was neglected by me.
I tend to think of poisons as compounds instead of elements, so never considered arsenic, assuming that there was some obscure element that started with “a” and ended with “c”.🙄
Yes Lisa, it does seem strange that a poison is an element.
Finally, a FJ which is up my alley! “Spanning the alphabet” did help.
Perhaps it’s time to get rid of the stylus and tablet and allow the contestants to speak their Final Jeopardy question into a recording device in such a way that the other two players can’t hear what they are saying. Sort of a Cone of Silence approach (shout out to Get Smart). This method would also eliminate the illegible handwriting and all those Hi Mom messages. Just a thought.