Daily Doubles should require the contestant to bet everything he has.

I don't particularly understand suggestions the game is flawed and find that take very Bernsteinish. Daily Doubles have always allowed the possibility of huge swings and that's one of the things that makes a game show entertaining.

And as far as hunting for them goes, it's not like James was particularly unique in that regard. Chuck Forrest was bouncing between categories, sometimes in search of Daily Doubles and sometimes just to throw off opponents over 30 years ago. Twitter SJW favorite Arthur Chu did the same thing, as did all of the better all-star contestants in the tournament from a few months ago (and Brad's success in finding them is one of the main reasons he beat Ken yet again).

If for whatever reason someone wanted to still fix this non-issue, simply randomizing the actual locations of the Daily Doubles such that they could occur in top row clues and even twice in single columns seems a lot less radical than some of the ideas being proposed.

No, the game must be destroyed.

Doesn't Jeopardy work from a defined set of sources? Might've been one of the tips the original Jeopardy whisperer had on his website, "watch the credits and write down the names of the books/periodicals" they cite as sources for questions/answers.

So they end up with something akin to Mike Leach/Chip Kelly's offense: 144 ways to run 12 plays.

e.g., when Elizabethan playwrights are in play, if it's not Shakespeare, it's either Marlowe or Ben Johnson or maybe the odd Middleton or Dekker or Fletcher. But from what I could tell, if it's one of the more obscure ones, it's not gonna be a complicated clue or deep pull from that guy's work or background.

Whereas if the question seems inscrutable, it's gonna be one of the main guys/better known works. They're sending 3 guys in motion and have the QB start off lined up behind the tight end to run a simple slant.

So you ignore the fact that the clue references something you've never seen before and start pulling individual words out of the clue and throw em against the works of Bill/Ben/Kit (as Holzauer dude wrote) and see if anything clicks e.g., this somewhat recentish Final Jeopardy clue under the category "Plays", which only 1 of the 3 got right, 1 had no response and the 3rd guy, who won by default on dollars, answered by badly translating Un Capitano Moro as "Capt Death".

"Plays"

Given how the game had played out, odds were they would both get the correct answer. Thus she bet just enough so that she would win even if he had bet everything. I get why he didn't but I also understand her thought process.

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Betting to cover an all-in by second is generally seen as a completely acceptable wager by a leader. I think the only time it makes game theoretic sense to go all in or bet nothing as a leader is in a tie game. The archive's algorithm suggests James' wager is mathematically correct for the scenario, but Emma's is as well.

And criticizing it with second order considerations about what she should know about James doesn't make much sense to me because she said she wasn't aware of his streak until she showed up for the taping.

She did? That's kind of odd. I would think you would want to know who you are up against. And if you are enough of a fan of the show that you tried out it's hard to believe you could have missed what this guy was doing.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

If it's anything like Price is Right or Wheel of Fortune, they film a month of shows back-to-back-to-back in a week of production and do so a couple months ahead of time.

I think the guy said on Dan Patrick that the episode he lost in was filmed in March.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yeah that episode was taped March 12, which was a few weeks before his first episode even aired. If anything, only knowing that James has won money at a higher rate than anyone ever has on the show suggests making the standard cover bet while in the lead even more strongly.

Makes sense.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

JORR's 0$ wager for a player in the librarian's position might be tempting if the Final Jeopardy category revealed an Achilles heel for the player, like if it were freaking Opera or Black History or Women's History or Native History or Classic Cinema/old films or whatever it's called. Those are tough, I only know like Martin, Malcom and the guy who invented peanut butter. and fuck-all about women's or native people's history. Might get lucky and it'd actually be Magic Flute or Don Giovanni or Casablanca/Citizen Cane.

I wish I could remember which episode it was, but a year or two ago there was a dude who radiated Strong Male Ally so hard, I couldn't believe he didn't do the whole show with a soy face. Women in History was a category and he hit the Daily Double there. With a big, shit-eating grin, he wagered almost everything he had. He whiffed. I laughed.

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I didn't realize Emma wasn't really familiar with Holzhauer's play. I had no idea they had so many shows stacked up. But if you watched the guy play you knew he was going to bet what he did. It wasn't a surprise.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I think they tape Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, lunch break, Thursday-Friday each day (That's why being a game show host was nice work if you could get it: you could shoot thirteen weeks of shows in three weeks), but James lost on a Monday, so she wouldn't have had a chance to sit in the audience and watch him work.

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I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that contestants not chosen for a particular day have to stay backstage and don't get to watch the games that take place before they're chosen.

I've heard that, too, but one of the interviews with Holzhauer had Alex saying "look at that guy in the audience, he's thinking oh shit, I gotta play him next," so maybe they've eased up on the sequestration in recent years?

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Ok, I see your point about the sharper wager on the part of the leader/librarian lady would've been a de minimis/zero dollar wager in that context.
Yeah, Holzhauer has said that he's surprisingly risk adverse; staying in the game is more important than winning a big pot. And thus his final Final Jeopardy wager maximized his chances to stay in the game / minimized, to the extent he could, the odds he'd be bounced from the game.

I hope Ken Jennings beats his ass.

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That's outstanding.

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Ken Jennings is a pussy

James seems to be a very humble man and that it is just you know using "trash" talk in a good kind of kidding way is what I took out of it.

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Happy Halloween!

Whose buzzer hand is fastest?

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Yeah. Nerd trash talk. Very exciting.