One of Jeopardy!‘s favorite player techniques makes for terrible TV
Many of Jeopardy!''s most successful contestants, including James Holzhauer, have adopted the effective but irritating "Forrest Bounce"
TV Features Jeopardy!
It’s not surprising, given the pool of people from which it pulls both its fans and its players—i.e., hyper-pedantic nerds with a taste for showing off—that Jeopardy! is one of the most aggressively analyzed TV shows in game-show history. You don’t really need to look any further than the fabled online J! Archive to see what we’re talking about: a meticulously researched index of not just (nearly) every single question from the show’s current 39-year run, but also every wager, contestant bio, and bit of host banter. It’s the sort of monumental labor of love you don’t see people apply to, say, Wheel Of Fortune.
Even beyond this digital temple to trivia, though, the show’s move into online spaces over the last 20 years has been a major boon for players both past and (optimistically) future. Where once prospective players would have to scour books like 1992’s Secrets Of The Jeopardy! Champions to learn about the ins-and-outs of getting on the show—or having a chance in hell of actually winning once the buzzer was in their hands—now they can congregate on Reddit or other online communities to swap strategies, often interacting directly with actual champions who can back their advice up with the wins to prove it works. Interestingly, though, the legacy of Secrets (or, at least, one of its authors) still hangs over the series in a strange way—which is a bummer, because it actively makes Jeopardy! a worse show for fans of the program to watch.
We’re speaking (obviously!) of Chuck Forrest and the infamous “Forrest Bounce.” Forrest appeared on Jeopardy! in its second season as a syndicated nighttime show, back in 1985, becoming one of its first-ever super-champions. (A rather breathless L.A. Times piece from 1989 called him the “Alexander The Great of Jeopardy! players.”) Like every contestant before 2003, Forrest was only allowed to win five games (and a massive $72,800) before “retiring” and ceding the champions’ podium to someone else. But that didn’t stop him from coming back for the annual Tournament Of Champions and adding another $100,000 to his prizes (or, yeah, literally writing the book on winning Jeopardy!, along with fellow champ Mark Lowenthal). It goes without saying that Forrest had the encyclopedic command of trivia required of any top Jeopardy! player and a dauntingly fast finger on the game’s buzzer. But he also came equipped with a new technique, one he credited to and named after his friend Donn Rubin, but which has come to be known among Jeopardy! nerds simply as the Forrest Bounce.
The Bounce brings disruption
If you’ve watched Jeopardy! recently (or at multiple points across its four-decade run—but it’s endemic at present), you’ve almost certainly seen the Bounce: It involves aggressively working the bottom of the clue board, moving between categories frequently, rather than taking a more traditional tack and running down an entire category from the top. It’s an undeniably useful technique for two big reasons. There’s Forrest’s initial rationale, which was entirely based on psychology and disruption: If you know what the next category is going to be, and your opponents don’t, that’s an advantage in the lightning-reflex world of Jeopardy!; forcing people to load up geography, then vocabulary, then movie trivia in their brains at a rapid pace is inherently disruptive, and disruption is a powerful weapon in a mental game like Jeopardy!
The other reason, meanwhile, is monetary and has come in vogue after being central to the strategy of dominant Jeopardy! player James Holzhauer in 2019. Holzhauer’s Jeopardy! run has been a turning point for the modern incarnation of the game, not necessarily because of how often he won—his 32-game streak was impressive, undoubtedly, but has since been surpassed more than once—but for how much he won. Holzhauer demolished the show’s single-day earnings record within his first week on the series, ultimately winning nearly as much money as current host Ken Jennings brought in during more than twice as many games over his legendary streak in 2004—and he used the Bounce to help him do it.
That’s because Holzhauer (a professional gambler) grasped, as few players have, the raw power of the Daily Doubles, those three spaces in each day’s game that allow Jeopardy! players to as much as double their current scores, without having to fight anybody else for control of the question. A single smart Daily Double wager can pull a player back from the brink, but the sheer power of multiplicative math means that a player who can get their hands on multiple DDs can build a lead that no amount of regular question-answering (which operates additively, maxing out at $2,000 per pop) can touch. By bouncing around the bottom of the board, Holzhauer not only stumbled onto the Doubles (which are, more often than not, located in the more expensive questions and always just one to a category) more quickly, but also ensured he had a hefty bankroll to wager with when he found them.
The results speak for themselves: Holzhauer averaged $75,362 per game, numbers that demolished, as a matter of regularity, the previous all-time top games with shocking regularity. (The show’s official list of highest single-game winners is literally just Holzhauer 10 times—including one instance where he tied himself, just for fun.) Like Forrest three decades earlier, that success speaks to the man’s mastery of the material—Holzhauer’s hit rate was phenomenal, giving incorrect responses only three percent of the time during his initial run—but it also speaks to his understanding of Jeopardy! the game. Even more than Jennings, the super-champs who have come after Holzhauer (notably Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider, who both won more games but less money) have followed the path he laid out. Really, though, it’s everybody: Jeopardy! players are people who like optimal solutions, as a rule and, having seen a better way, they’ve adopted it fervently.
And it makes, we hate to say it, for terrible TV.
Dominant performances detract from the game
Like the rationale for using it, the viewer-side arguments against the Forrest Bounce are two-fold. The first is dramatic: When the strategy works, it works decisively. The “lock game”—i.e., one where all other players have less than half the points of the leader, rendering Final Jeopardy! meaningless in the absence of anything but complete wagering madness on the winner’s part—is the least exciting outcome for a game of Jeopardy! Sure, we like watching the occasional dominant performance, as a player like Amodio, Schneider or Mattea Roach smashes through opponents and records alike. But nobody really enjoys a fait accompli, the whole dramatic spectacle of Final Jeopardy! rendered inert by the preceding two rounds.
The bigger issue with the Bounce, though, is a narrative one—and one that Alex Trebek himself, usually that most neutral of observers, occasionally expressed some frustration with. Despite the high-profile host hunts of the last few years—and the show’s producers deciding to move forward with a compromised version of the series during the WGA strike—Jeopardy! has always been a writer-forward show, with the clues themselves as the most compelling aspect of the series. A good Jeopardy! board isn’t just a series of topics culled together from old trivia books; it’s a net of categories that covers an engagingly wide span of human knowledge.
And each category within that system follows its own flow, from the easy introductory questions at the top of the board, down to the stumpers floating around the bottom, with questions even subtly building on each other more often than not. Among other things, many of the more puzzle-like categories (variants on series staple Before & After, for instance) use their early questions as tutorials, easing players and viewers into the logic of whatever the writers are asking contestants for in an environment where even a bad guess will only cost $200 or $400. Similarly, writers will sometimes use an earlier entry to weed out an obvious wrong answer down the line; if Romeo And Juliet has already been used in the $800 slot of a Shakespeare category, you know it’s out of consideration for the $1600 clue. Now, that flow rarely gets a chance to show itself.
Are the writers out of step with the times?
Or, to put all this another way: Jeopardy! is currently being written in a way that is out of step with the way it’s being played, because the way it’s played has drastically changed over the last few years. The clue boards are still being written for the old show, where categories would be read out in sequence from the top down, following the natural rhythm the show has employed over almost 40 years on TV. But the regular adoption of the Bounce—it’s even taken over side programs like the Teen Tournament, where the bottom rows of the board are now regularly cleared out by contestants born 20 years after Chuck Forrest’s first appearance behind the podium—means that running a category in traditional sequence is now exceedingly rare. (If you need convincing, watch the regular videos of whole categories that the show’s social media team posts on YouTube and see how scattershot the editing can be as moments several minutes apart get cut together to make a cohesive whole.)
What’s interesting about all this, then, is that everything we’re describing here is a natural outgrowth of the rules of the game—which just happen to be running counter, for once, to the rules of “what makes good TV.” If you can hang with the Bounce, it’s a genuinely useful strategy—even as it makes the process of watching a category unspool go from a gentle pleasure into a mild pain in the ass for viewers. (Among other things, it’s probably why we’ve had so many more multi-week champion runs over the last few years; this is just supposition, but we suspect the all-or-nothing, high-pressure Bounce favors high-performance players in ways that lets them stomp dozens of opponents apiece.)
It’s certainly not anything Jeopardy! can really fix, at least not without making changes that would fundamentally alter the game in ways no one is prepared to do. (You could try to take out the subtle sequencing of question order, but that’s a straight-up bummer; situating the Daily Doubles more regularly in the top half of the board might slightly alleviate the problem, but it’d also screw with balance.) The thing is, game shows are weird, because they have to function both as games and shows, and Jeopardy! has hit a stumbling block in that regard that it might not be capable of reconciling. All we can really do is turn back to Trebek himself, who opened up about the Bounce in a wide-ranging interview with Vulture in 2018, two years before his death:
What bothers me is when contestants jump all over the board even after the Daily Doubles have been dealt with. Why are they doing that? They’re doing themselves a disservice. When the show’s writers construct categories they do it so that there’s a flow in terms of difficulty, and if you jump to the bottom of the category you may get a clue that would be easier to understand if you’d begun at the top of the category and saw how the clues worked. I like there to be order on the show.
“But,” he ultimately acknowledged. “As the impartial host I accept disorder.” So, perhaps, must we all.
115 Comments
This reminds me of the time I was on Jeopardy. I was there, to match my intellect, on national TV against a plumber and an architect, both with a Ph.D. I was tense, I was nervous. I guess it just wasn’t my night.
You don’t even get a copy of our home game!
Could’ve been worse.
Fun fact, Larson originally gave Norman a few points in the comic, but changed because he thought it sacrilegious to suggest someone could even score a single point against God.
Zero points is funnier, so good call I’d say.
I just wanted to say “False.” as someone who watches Jeopardy every night, I could not care less how people bounce around the board, or not. It’s a fully-open gameboard, any square at any time is up for play, and that’s the point!
Yeah, either I’m enjoying watching Jeopardy! wrong, or Hughes is.I really don’t give a shit who wins (unless it’s a really cute woman, but that’s just sexism on my part), I watch the show to see if I can blurt out the answers before the contestants. It doesn’t matter to what order they choose.The only thing Jeopardy! contestants do that bugs me is take too long to pick the next clue, which inevitably ends with clues left on the board when time runs out.
Hughes is always wrong. Even when he’s just re-writing someone else’s better blog post, he’ll be wrong, because his standard random joke is bad.
“ah yes, let see, I will take for $100, Alex, please.
Yes! I hate when they waste time by saying “please” after each selection and when they feel the need the repeat the entire category title rather than shortening it. But the worst is when they say “I’ve wanted to say this for years! Let’s make it a TRUE blah blah!” Ugh.
The writers can fix this by placing Daily Doubles anywhere on the board, not just on the lower-level clues (I think this very site interviewed a writer once who said they are, as a rule, never in the first row). That would make going top-to-bottom as random as bouncing to find them.
They can be in the top rows, just very rarely. This heatmap is from a few years ago, but it still holds. Good players know this, and so they target the spots where daily doubles will most likely be.
It would make it just as random in finding them, but would still encourage people to bounce around the bottom of the board because you don’t just want to find them, you want to find them when you have a bunch of money. Finding a daily double when you can only double your $400 isn’t nearly as useful as finding it when you can double your $4000
Agreed. I barely even pay attention to the contestants. I’m trying to give the question before the answer is even finished being read (or I’ll cheat and pause it if the question is on the tip of my tongue).
Yes. Unless the contestant really charms me in some way, like a Mattea Roach or even Holzauer, the contestants are almost completely irrelevant to me. I just want to answer the questions before they do.
Obviously have to include this:
William Hughes, Sam Barsanti, and Katie Rife“Who are 3 people who have no business calling themselves journalists?”
First thing I thought of when I saw this:
The “lock game”—i.e., one where all other players have less than half
the points of the leader, rendering Final Jeopardy! meaningless in the
absence of anything but complete wagering madness on the winner’s part
This is easily solvable.You just need to hide and randomize the order of monetary values (not the actual values themselves) within the category; so no one person can mine the high value questions: “I’ll take World History Question #3, Alex.”, “Well, Ray that value is…$200.00″Or if you really want to mix it up, hide and randomize the monetary value and the topic subject, the board could still list what the subject topics are on the board:“I’ll take Question A5, Alex.”, “Jennifer, the topic is Victorian Literature and the value is…$800.00″
Or you only let the contestants pick the category and force the sequence.But any of these are fundamentally changing the game, which Hughes says he doesn’t want to do, yet it’s the only way to prevent the Bounce.
Yes, this is the “fix” if one were to consider it broken. You can pick whatever category you want but you have to pick the lowest dollar amount available in that category.
Indeed, the problem with Jeopardy would be solved by making the game not Jeopardy.
Welcome to Jeopard-ish!
“This is easily solvable.”
This doesn’t need to be solved.
I hope you’re not going to require Alex Trebek’s re-animated corpse to return to host the show.
On the plus side, he wouldn’t have to go far for “brains, brains…”
Hopefully, the corpse would be a little less snarky than the living Trebek.
That doesn’t solve the problem brought up in the article about how the sequence of categories “trains” contestants and viewers how to answer, though.
More importantly, I don’t think it makes the show any more fun to watch.
Maybe add some kind of multiplier if the next clue in the sequence is picked?Like if you start with the first clue then you can jump around but if you pick the next clue in the category it’s worth 2x, then 3x if you continue the run with the next category and so on (obviously not those amounts though)That way you can still hunt for the Daily Doubles if you want to, but there’s an incentive to playing it the “right” way
I’ve always thought they should have a bonus if a player clears a category all in a row without letting any other players in.Even if they don’t do it in order.
The point of harder questions having higher dollar values, that the player selects, is that it’s a risk/reward thing.That the “hard” questions aren’t really very hard for the champions renders it next to pointless, yes, but your suggestion would be to just give up on the idea entirely.Not every episode of the show features a trivia and/or gambling savant who breaks the format, so really you’d be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
As a long-time Jeopardy! viewer, I don’t find that “Forrest bounce” strategy annoying or unwatchable in the least. For clearly superior players, it’s just the smartest thing to do. And it all ultimately hinges on whether the player knows the answer or not, there’s nothing unfair here or anything.
I know opinions vary, but as a viewer I do prefer it when contestants go through one category at a time. I don’t have a problem with the “Forrest bounce”, as it’s within the rules. Regarding James Holzhauer, I’ve shared in the past that he is a good dude in my eyes, and I thought I’d share it again. I watched his original run with my then-5 year old every night. My kid was obsessed with seeing how high James’s winnings got. Once James finally lost my kid was incredibly sad. He wrote a short note and drew a couple of pictures for James, which I mailed to Sony Picture Studios. Maybe a month later my son received a very nice handwritten card in the mail from James. I thought it was super cool of him to take a little time out of his day just to make a random kid happy.
Yeah, James has said he enjoys playing the role of “game show villain”.
It literally took me about 6 months to watch J! in earnest again after James and Matt Amodio lost. I thoroughly enjoyed watching their opponents get obliterated.
That was cool of him to do.
How do you write an entire article about the Forrest Bounce and not mention Arthur Chu once? He was first on Jeopardy years before Holzhauer, is top 10 in winnings despite having a run far shorter than most other big winners, and his use of the Forrest Bounce was, like, all anyone could talk about re: Jeopardy for the couple weeks he was first on. He was even attacked pretty heavily online for it.
i think he was mostly attacked by the ants that live on his clothes
He was even interviewed by this very site!https://www.avclub.com/controversial-jeopardy-champ-arthur-chu-tells-his-stor-1798266388
About the only thing this site has in common with circa-2014 AV Club is the URL….and Barsanti. And Hughes might have been on staff back then, too, come to think of it, which makes all this richly ironic.
2014? Nobody from then works here now.
Chu hasn’t been in the Top Ten in awhile. But your point still stands.
Getting the details wrong but the gist of it right is me to a T. B)
Y’know, Nietzsche says: “Out of chaos comes order.”
Blow it out your ass, Howard.
“It’s the sort of monumental labor of love you don’t see people apply to, say, Wheel Of Fortune.”Okay
https://buyavowel.boards.net/page/compendiumindex
Just seeing “buyavowel” reminds me of 80% of what I hate about Wheel.
A good rule of thumb for the internet: always assume there is an obsessive group of nerds out there labouring over any possible interest.
Exactly. I read that and thought, “There is zero chance that that’s true”.
The first time I became really aware of that was when Dan Rather showed his Bush National Guard documents, and the Font Nerds (all respect), who know every font used on every typewriter ever, erupted cause a certain font/feature didn’t exist until well after the document was supposed have been typed.A friend of mine said something like “No way somebody happens to just know that”, and I said “Yeah, that’s the internet.”
Wow, I was going to make the same observation, but with a different website:https://andynwof.wordpress.com/2021/09/03/wof-retro-recap-march-23-1999/I came across that one in an effort to find a video of my buddy on WoF back in 1999. All I had to Google was [wheel of fortune “shake it big”] * and I got right there (which gave a me a recap and date, which let me find it on YouTube).*He won the game, and then in his bonus round he had:S H _ _ E | I T | _ _ _and the best he could come up with was “shake it big”. We still give him shit about it.
Well, she-it!
Shave it off? Shake it off? Share it now? Shove it off? Shove it now?
Tay Tay said it best, though 15 years later:
Wheel Of Fortune is no Countdown , and Countdown is no Street Countdown
I honestly think it’s fun watching a good contestant do the Forrest Bounce. Holtzhauer was entertaining to watch during his run.
Didn’t they get like record-high ratings during Holzhauer’s run? Obviously the viewing public doesn’t find it “terrible TV” in the slightest.
It’s a blast to watch.
I remember seeing James Holzhauer for the first time and thinking “He looks like one of my college roommates, also named Holzhauer, who was also from Naperville, IL…” Turns out he was his brother.
You could incentivize following the narrative by valuing the questions at “$200 plus the value of all other questions already answered in this column” and “randomly distribute the daily doubles vertically”.Then, incentives to earn more for harder questions are aligned with answering order, not just the question difficulty.You retain some of the “DD seeking” as a skill by continuing to only have one per column without it being an all-consuming strategy.
I find it a lot more annoying that contestants can win more than a week worth of shows, honestly.
Is does add an asterisk to certain records.
It makes the game seem cheap, like you’re just in it for the money and not the challenge of knowing a whole bunch of trivia.
Can we agree, though, that winning way more than a week’s worth of games requires you to know a whole bunch more trivia?I get it, though: seeing somebody win a bunch is fun, but so it variety.
It’s clearly a problem only to other contestants, not viewers, but that’s the game: when you answer a question correctly you have control of the board. Playing to your own strengths and selecting categories/amounts so you can win more and maintain control is part of the strategy, or else there would be no need for a board and they’d just ask questions at random.
I’m pretty agnostic on the bounce vs sequence thing except that least interesting parts of the game show for me are the “game” part. Optimized betting and strategy is boring , I just want to see if I know more answers than these nerds. Similarly, I think runaway games are fine – as a viewer, I’m not getting any money either way. I have a bigger problem with episodes where everyone gets the final question wrong, and the “winner” is just the one who loses the least.
“and the “winner” is just the one who loses the least.”
AKA the one with the most? Yeah, that one should….not be the winner?
I love it when all the players get the final answer wrong and I knew it. Doesn’t happen very often, but it has.
Sounds like you need to join me in watching the much harder and far nerdier quiz shows Only Connect and University Challenge. Much harder questions, no cash prizes.
If I get just *one* sequence question right on Only Connect I feel like a genius. And if I get it one clue before the contestants, that feeling can last for days.
I’m shockingly poor at missing vowels.
I’m not too bad at the missing vowels round (really depends on the category), but I don’t play along because I think it’s a stupid round that has no place on what is otherwise a brilliant format. 😆 When it comes up I literally stop watching the episode or skip to the end for Victoria’s end-of-show joke.
What’s strange about this article is what it omits. The reason why Daily Double hunting is so effective. As Chu and Holzauer have expressly said— it isn’t betting and answering the daily doubles correctly that matters so much. It’s the fact that you’ve prevented your competitors from getting them. It’s basic game theory. And their success shows why it makes the big difference.
That sounds reasonable on its face, but when the phenomenon is Holzhauer dominating the all-time daily leader board, it doesn’t hold up. He’s only getting to that point by finding the Daily Doubles, betting big on them, and getting them right.If we were trying to explain a phenomenon of Holzhauer winning a ton of games, then that explanation would hold. But from the article, it sounds like he was nothing special in that regard, given his innate trivia capability.And while this probably isn’t what’s going on here, I certainly would not put it past Holzhauer to lie about why he was doing what he was doing. He’s a professional gambler to his core and super serious about this stuff, and wouldn’t miss the chance to give himself any edge.
He’s a professional gambler to his core and super serious about this stuff, and wouldn’t miss the chance to give himself any edge.That’s not how most professional gamblers work. During competitions, people are obviously competitive, but they love discussing game theory and mathematical models and the correct moves outside of competition.Most modern strategies have been built within the community, as people discuss the optimal ways to play, which also changes as strategies evolve. You might keep a novel strategy to yourself for an edge, but chances are, you’re not always competing with the people you’re discussing these things with. And even if you are, execution matters as well.James Holzhauer can explain his entire strategy to you, but are you going to answer Jeopardy trivia at a 97% clip and out-buzz him too?
“He’s *only* getting to that point by finding the Daily Doubles, betting big on them, and getting them right.”
So your objection is that his strategy only works because he’s too good at it?
The fact that Holzauer DID bet big and bold was invigorating. But he is at heart a game theorist and when he says that it’s more important to prevent your competition from getting the daily double edge than it is on your own daily double wager, I believe him. Think of it this way: he found the daily doubles and bet big because he bet on his own knowledge. But if had had bet zero– he still would have won because he prevented his competition from finding the daily doubles.
One solution to that might be to limit the number of times the daily doubles come up for a player– one, or max two, per episode. It’d be pretty simple to program that nowadays.
One solution to that might be to limit the number of times the daily doubles come up for a playerIf you’re suggesting that somehow they control players’ access to DDs, I suspect that the producers would get into trouble akin to the $64,000 Question show, where they were rigging the game for dramatic appeal. I think that a better answer would be to require that categories be run in order. A contestant can choose any category they want, but the clues have to be taken in ascending value.
This is the correct approach. It’s what the producers clearly want to happen, so they should just make it the rule. Instead of choosing the category and the dollar amount, just choose the category and run them down top to bottom.
Personally I think the producers do want contestants like Holzhauer, no matter what they say. Because more people tune in when someone is on a long streak or making more money than anyone has before. I barely watch Jeopardy myself these days but I tuned in every night when I heard about him winning over $100k in a single game.
As long as they announce a rule change in advance, they’re covered on the game show laws.
They could fix that simply by giving each player one DD. The game could, for example, choose one player in Round 1, the other two in Round 2, and have the DD activate in one of several ways. DDs could be random, so at some point each player‘s DD will pop when he chooses a box. Or, a player can announce that he is calling a DD on his current selection. Using the DD then becomes part of each player’s gameplay strategy, rather than hunting DDs being the strategic focus.
That’s precisely what I’m saying. I’m not sure it runs afoul of anything. If you say up front that each player will only be allowed to find one DD per game (or per round, or whatever the criteria is), it’s above board. Basically, assign the DD’s as they always have, but if the player has already found one, it doesn’t “activate”. That means that even if a player runs literally every clue in Double Jeopardy, they still only find one DD, because the other was deactivated for them.
Or just leave the whole thing alone, because unless it causes a dip in ratings, WGAF? And if it does, they can always reinstitute the 5-episode cap on successful runs.
Yes, if the rules changed to allow but one DD per player, that would not be a problem, but it would diminish some of the thrill that goes with DDs. And going back to the 5 game cap would kill those series that get people to tune in more often just to see if the streak continues. The least disruptive solution would be require categories be run in order.
It would also be simple to randomize the dollar values of each square. Just label them 1-6, but only reveal the dollar value of a square once it has been chosen. This prevents players from hitting the big money answers first to build up a big bankroll ASAP, and would also (all other things remaining equal) make DD hunting a more random affair (while keeping the relative value position of DDs the same).
Hobble superior play? Always the answer from the mediocre group. Let’s just award everyone the win, while we are at it.
It also omits the fact that people aren’t JUST watching to answer trivia questions—the thrill of the competition is part of it! The dramatic wagers & gamesmanship are exciting!
I mean, I’m only here for the trivia. I HATE the wagering, I hate the buzzers. Which is why I bailed on Jeopardy when Alex passed.
Yeah this doesn’t bother me whatsoever. I admit, my pet peeves are nitpicks. I hate when, presumably just to make gameplay easier, someone will constantly say “what is” even if referring to a person. And I also find it a bit unfair when only last names are given for every person answer. Though, I completely understand that technically both of these are correct.
I like to picture myself asking “Hey, am I crazy, or are you talking about Pol Pot?” But I’m sure I’d run out of time.
“Is that Pol Pot?” would be a legitimate way to answer.
This has to be the longest article for what amounts to “work from the bottom up.”
This is a pretty good piece, with just one minor quibble, which is that its appears to be founded on two objectively incorrect takes.
It is not correct to say that the Bounce detracts from the most viewers’ experience, nor that a dominant player does. The Jeopardy! viewer wants to be challenged just enough to feel like they’ve been challenged, and wants to see people-who-appear-smart win a lot of money.Jeopardy! clearly thinks of itself as the crème of the American quiz show crop, and, from where i sit, it absolutely is. The sweet spot for a TV quiz show is playable-but-not-easy – where about half the time you know the correct response, and about half of those times you can feel just a bit smug that you knew it. That’s where J! is most of the time, and i think that’s the core of its enduring popularity.Now. I’ll grant that it can become a drag when every game’s outcome seems like a foregone conclusion. This, i suspect, is at the heart of the article’s generalization that viewers don’t like dominant players. But my sense is that viewers like it when a player is so damn good that they dominate a game, and then a week of games… and then fatigue starts to set in. Viewers start to think, “Very impressive, but give us a bit of variety.”And then eventually the wildcard player comes along that surprises the champ, and it’s all the more satisfying when the unstoppable player gets beaten. I, for one, enjoyed the theater of James H’s run until it got boring. But even when his dominance took away the question of “who will win tonight?” i still enjoyed the question of “can i get any of these right?” So it was a little bittersweet when… someone… eventually took James out. But, by contrast, i legit cried a little when… someone… took Amy Schneider out. ‘Cause everyone connects to the players and to the show in their own way, and probably a bit differently than they did the day before.I love it – LOVE. IT. – when a Jeopardy! player is undeniably great at it. When they use just their general knowledge to run the categories, it’s fuckin’ fun to watch. When they use both their general knowledge and game strategy to go as far as they can, it’s also fuckin’ fun to watch. When i’m just able to pull the right response, it’s great; and when the player pulls something i feel like i should know but can’t pull, i’m like, “FUCK yeah, they’re awesome!” When all three scores are close going into Final, it’s great; and when one player has run away with the game (even though you can tell the others are smart cookies), it’s also great.Jeopardy! is damn near perfect, and i legit don’t understand quiz-show people who disagree. If they were to change the rules to prevent Bouncing or multi-day ass-kicking, it would detract severely from the viewing experience. If my life depended on disagreeing with what appear to be this piece’s two central points, i still couldn’t do it.(Oh my gods, cuzn ed, could you be any more verbose?!? For the record, yes i did decide to use player throughout this interminable comment (instead of contestant) because it’s quick to type and i’m much less likely to misspell it.)
This is a pretty good piece, with just one minor quibble, which is that its appears to be founded on two objectively incorrect takes.I agree with this. The takes feel off to me, but at the same time this was written much better than the usual AV Club crap, so it at least feels like a proper attempt to justify the opinion instead of the usual “bad take without rhyme or reason”.I think there might be some hope for Mr. Hughes after all.
and a dauntingly fast finger on the game’s buzzer.I think this is underappreciated. I think Jennings said this was the real secret. I don’t think most people know that if you buzz in a fraction early, you get locked out.You can’t win if you don’t play, and if your timing isn’t just right, you’ll never even get a chance to use any strategy.
You often see players looking around like their buzzer’s broken.
Hehe. There was one fucker on the other day who didn’t know about the lockout, clearly, because he kept hammering the fucking thing about half way through question and never getting in. Look like someone was running voltage through it. It was super distracting. Was satisfying to see the guy next to him just wait a bit and effortlessly getting the buzz.
Yeah, you see it all the time once you’re aware of it.That guy might’ve had a foolproof strategy and an encyclopedic brain. Fat lot of good it did him.
The Forrest Bounce doesn’t have anything to do with finding Daily Doubles. The main key in finding DDs is understanding that they are never in the 1st row. But switching categories doesn’t help beyond that. There’s no reason not to run the same category from row 2 to 5 – and many players do exactly that.The other key to finding DDs is that Jeopardy usually puts them in general categories, rather than categories about specific areas of knowledge, because they don’t want to give someone who is familiar/unfamiliar with that particular subject an advantage/disadvantage. So, you’ll almost never see a DD in a category like Astronomy, or Opera, or German Rulers. You’re more likely to see a DD in a category like Hodge Podge, Title Women, or Famous Seconds.
hyper-pedantic nerds with a taste for showing offI don’t care how certain regional accents (mis)pronounce words, “knotty” and “naughty” are not homophones.Rant over, continue with your original programming.
My biggest gripe about the show is how often Bible and/or Christianity questions are a category. You can try to defend that by saying something about “the best selling book in the world” or “more people in the U.S. are Christians than any other religion” but it still bothers me and it must be really offensive to people of other beliefs, especially non-Abrahamic religions.
Where this strategy really hurts the game is those categories like “Before, During, and After” where the contestants don’t have to recall information so much as “combine information.” It’s much easier to start with the $400 clue whose response is “What is Easter Egg Roll Tide” than the $2000 one with the correct response “What is Sudden Death in the Afternoon of a Faun”.As a result some of the “clever” categories tend to get no correct responses starting at the bottom because people haven’t oriented their brain in that way with the easy ones.
There is no problem with Jeopardy the game. The fact that there can be different strategies in playing sets it far above most American TV gameshows. My logic brain prefers going through categories one at a time, but I can see the strategy of finding the Daily Doubles first.My issue with James Holzhauer wasn’t his play style. When he went all in, every time you wanted to see if he would finally get the question wrong. Even if he is a really nice guy in person, his game persona was snarky and arrogant and I dislike those kind of people. I prefer geeky/silly/funny/warm personalities like Amy Schneider or Mattea Roach.
The fact that there’s strategy at all sets it above most American game shows.
No disrespect to the late, great Alex Trebek, but he’s wrong. The category building on themselves helps the less informed players. By the $2000 clue, perhaps a player who wouldn’t have known the answer suddenly does because of the hints in the $400 and $800 clues. That’s a disadvantage to a player like Holzauer who is likely to know the answer without the hints. I do notice, even with all this knowledge, sometimes even veteran players coming back to various tournaments will pick a low value clue in a category they may not quite understand, just to get an idea of how it works. Otherwise, if you have more trivia knowledge than the other two contestants, the Bounce is the right way to play.
Contestants are there to win, not entertain us. If a particular strategy works for them, I don’t expect them NOT to use it because they’re worried that it’s not good TV. If a contestant focuses on categories they know a lot about, we don’t bat an eye. That’s just common sense. Same with the bounce. If the bounce wins games for them, how can we get mad that they use it?
Off-topic (kinda/sorta) if you watch early episodes of The Price Is Right, the unofficial rules of bidding hadn’t quite sorted themselves out yet. You’ll see someone bid $20 UNDER someone else, for example. And I’ll admit I don’t like when people bid $1 over someone else, but if it meant winning I’d do it too. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
The only thing I find annoying about Jeopardy! is when Mayim Bialik is hosting.
Analytics help you win baseball games, too.But they also make baseball less fun to watch.
… just watch Only Connect.
You could try to take out the subtle sequencing of question order
No, they should do the exact opposite.Make the sequencing of questions in a category absolutely vital to understanding the later questions. Put in devious traps for players who pick the bottom row first, or spook them into thinking there’s a trap even if there isn’t.Write categories which require players to remember things for later, and make cross-category answers slyly similar enough in structure or deduction to be easily conflated, taxing the short-term memories of players who switch categories and rewarding the ones who stick with one.
Basically, don’t change the rules of the game, change the content. Leverage the game’s existing format to discourage the Forrest Bounce, or rather, make it prohibitively risky.And if players still want to go for the Bounce, then that will make for compelling TV.
This kind of reminds me of the guy who was on Press Your Luck back in the day, he watched old taped reruns ALL the time and figured out the light bouncing around the board wasn’t actually random but it was a pattern and he memorized it. then he got on the show and was unstoppable, because he gamed the system. He racked up TONS of free spins so many in fact he was gifting them to other players.