“If you’re watching at home, the illusion of a dominating player is his timing on the buzzer.” The stats back him up: According to the almost frighteningly detailed site Ken Jennings Detailed Statistics, Jennings buzzed in before either of his competitors on 61.5 percent of the clues he saw during his “Jeopardy!” run.Īlthough Jennings went on to win an additional 36 games after the buzzer change, his dominance declined. “Almost all the players know almost all the answers almost all the time,” Jennings said. But they have to be careful - buzz in too early, and they’re locked out for a crucial half-second. While contestants are told to wait for a signal light to go on before trying to buzz in, the champions almost always time their buzz-ins to the end of Trebek’s reading of the clue. According to Jeopardy executive producer Harry Friedman, the change was unrelated to Jennings’s streak.īuzzer dominance - or mojo, as Jennings calls it - is hugely important and takes a little while to get the hang of. ![]() The new policy stated that the game couldn’t start until every contestant had successfully outbuzzed his competitors in real game-play conditions. During the next month and a half, while the show was off the air, the producers instituted a major change: more rehearsal time for new contestants. His competitors combined for just $3,000. Thirty-eight games into his streak, Jennings ended Season 20 of “Jeopardy!” 1 on a thunderous note, correctly answering 44 of the 60 clues and setting the “Jeopardy!” single game cash record with $75,000. (Collins, for example, achieved lock games in 57 percent of her games during her stay, while Chu locked out 58 percent of his games.) Buzzer dominance has been diminished (These are called “lock games” in “Jeopardy!” parlance.) That’s far more than any of the 29 other players who have won more than five games. In 87 percent of his games, he had amassed more than twice as much money as his closest competitor before Final Jeopardy, which ensured that he’d win. Unlike Chu, Jennings wasn’t overly aggressive in his style of play, and he never seemed to press in fact, he frequently left money on the table by underbetting on Daily Doubles.Īnd he was more dominant than most other returning champs on a game-by-game basis. ![]() Taping would have resumed the following week.įormer champions describe Jennings as unflappable and robotic while they worried about burning out, Jennings described the morning “Jeopardy!” orientation, when producers explained the rules to the newbies, as a mantra that soothed him. “There’s a possibility that if I had won the next three games that day, I would have gotten over the hump,” he said. … You could definitely tell I was making dumb mistakes.” Chu’s streak ended on the last day of taping for the week when he lost the second game of the day. “One of my opponents said I looked punch-drunk. “Jeopardy!” tapes up to five episodes a day, and while Collins was reluctant to hypothesize reasons for the cluster, she noted that most of those five-, six- and seven-time champs hadn’t had a chance to recover over a weekend.Įleven-time winner Arthur Chu is more direct about why he couldn’t keep his streak going. Julia Collins, whose 20-game winning streak is second to Jennings’s, pointed to a cluster of five-, six-, and seven-game winners and noted that only 10 contestants have won more than seven games. If you were to design a long-term “Jeopardy!” champion, he or she would probably be a lot like Jennings: someone who is not only incredible at trivia but also has the stamina to make it through a grueling schedule and can wrap up a game before it even reaches the final round. But after going through the Internet’s “Jeopardy!” databases - yes, there are several - and talking to former champions, I can say this: It’d be a near-miracle if somebody beat Jennings’s streak. We don’t make a ton of promises at FiveThirtyEight - the nature of forecasting is that something unexpected is bound to happen one of these days. He’d do it 73 more times after that, the most ever.įor those six months in 2004, Jennings put together an unassailable streak unlike any other in any competition. Instead of being relegated to third place, Jennings became a “Jeopardy!” champion for the first time. Jennings, who had bet $17,201 of the $20,000 he had earned during the first two rounds, clenched his teeth nervously - and then exhaled once host Alex Trebek confirmed that the answer was correct. Ken Jennings, a baby-faced computer engineer, printed the phrase “Who is Jones?” onto his Final Jeopardy lightbox.
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