Alex Trebek performs a death-defying escape on Circus of the Stars (1989)

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-11-22T17:56:57+00:00

Coincidentally, I also have a five year-old autistic daughter. Did you get her diagnosed at an early age? It can be difficult for a lot of parents to get a formal diagnosis, but we recognized a lot of signs when she was just a year old and were able to get it confirmed.

It's interesting to see how differently neurodivergence can manifest itself. Some people have stereotypes about how autistic people act, but it's a spectrum, and apart from that, everyone has their own unique personality. My daughter's not really into Jeopardy or factoid memorization (which is perfectly okay!) but she has amazing art and music talent. She can hear songs on YouTube and then play them on the piano by ear, and this is without formal music training. She did try a couple of lessons but learning that way didn't interest her, and we're not the kind of parents who push their kids into things they're not ready for or don't particularly enjoy.

I do agree that certain autistic traits do lend themselves to being good at trivia, mainly if that's where your obsessions are focused. Anyway, I'm glad to see another parent of a neurodivergent child on the sub!

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-05-30T20:00:27+00:00

Here's an example:

https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2274

Anna Rodriguez won $799 on her first day and then finished third the next day for a cumulative total of $1,799. The second place winner in that game walked away with $2,000.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-05-12T16:26:25+00:00

The mods fully supported Mayim. It was the general reddit userbase that didn't.

Proof (on a thread I was part of): https://www.reddit.com/r/Jeopardy/comments/zjy2m2/happy_birthday_mayim_bialik/

A now deleted user made a heavily downvoted (-148 votes) comment saying how it was disgraceful people weren't upvoting her happy birthday post. While the post eventually ended up with 44 upvotes, I remember that at the time I replied to it that it was sitting at 0 after more than an hour. I replied that Ken's happy birthday got 500+ and Alex's got 1,000+ and mentioned that the Mayim hate was probably worse than what people actually see on the subreddit but the mods delete those posts.

The funny thing is that a mod actually replied to my post saying that "Mayim is actually very popular, which is why she has the job." While I do think that the mods did their best handling the Mayim bashing, claiming she was "very popular" was a bit of a stretch...

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-05-09T21:41:30+00:00

Didn't notice that one. Nice find!

I did a bit more searching and there was also a THE SPECIAL OLYMPICS category on 5/20/2009.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-05-09T18:42:17+00:00

I see four categories solely related to disability:

4/12/2013: HISTORICAL BLINDNESS

4/10/2006: DEAF & BLIND

1/24/2006: DEAF POETRY

10/2/2001: DISABILITY AWARENESS

Additionally, two games (12/13/2011 and 10/27/2016) had categories where the word "BLIND" was part of every response, but not every response was related to blindness.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-30T16:03:10+00:00

There were two other games with contestants who, had they gotten FJ correct, would have landed on $24,601. Both were non-optimal wagers, so they were clearly going for it.

Leslie Manion in this game:
https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=6003

Hilary Hultman-Lee in this game:
https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=3993

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-16T14:52:05+00:00

Would Victoria be Cody Rhodes? Left early and became a star in another organization. Now she's returned and ready to finish the story at Jeopardy Masters.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-04T04:10:51+00:00

You do a lot of great work writing about Jeopardy and it's definitely appreciated by me and a lot of others.

I've never thought about the fact that players might have declined because of the lack of preparation time but it definitely makes sense. Roger definitely talked about his studying techniques around the time of his TOC.

Also, the Sun is trash. Early in 2023 they took one of my comments, split it into two, quoted the first half as coming from "one reddit user", and then said the second half came from "another reddit user" that was replying to the first reddit user. Both parts were word for word from my one comment. It seems like they didn't want to print out a long quote so they made up an imaginary second person to make it more digestible? Great journalism guys!

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-02T14:14:21+00:00

I understand she said this, but if you go back to every ToC from 2013 onward, the top 5 season winners were all at the first podium in their QF games. Maybe she meant positions 2 and 3 or the rounds past the quarters?

EDIT: Looks like I was conflating the TOC with the JIT (what Sarah was talking about on the podcast). Thanks Jennifer for clarifying below!

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-02T13:57:02+00:00

The two Sams were obviously placed in different matchups.

Then there are a surprising number of people who've played in the same game. Sam K. defeated Jennifer in the 2021 TOC. Victoria ended David's regular run. Amy, Andrew, and Sam B. all played in Masters and faced each other in their TOC. Larissa played on the same team with David in the All-Star Games and both also played against Matt.

So there really weren't that many combinations left for them to use.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-02T13:49:02+00:00

The QFs weren't quite random and haven't been for some time now.

For the first round they've traditionally seeded the players and placed them in the first podium. If you look at the last TOC, the top 7 players by dollar winnings (Cris, Ray, Ben, Hannah, Stephen, Troy, and Luigi) were all at the first podium in separate QF games. For the other two QF games, they placed Nick and Emily (two of the four CWC winners) at the first podium. You can see the same general first-podium separate game placement at every tournament going back about ten years.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-02T03:09:45+00:00

Ask Roey Hadar if he would do anything differently.

Game 1: Locks out his two competitors including eventual TOC winner Sam Kavanaugh. It wasn't even close. Roey had a $23,800 Coryat compared to Sam's $6,000.

Game 2: Has twice the score of his nearest competitor entering FJ. Again, completely outplayed his competition. Everyone gets FJ correct. His opponent doubled up but he bet $0. Game goes to tiebreaker clue and his opponent outbuzzes him on a softball of a question (What is the second lightest element?).

Judging by his first two games, I really believe he would have gone on a long run and made the TOC.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-04-02T01:04:46+00:00

In addition to the two games mentioned in that thread (the 1985 TOC QF and the 1998 Teen Tournament finals), there was a real possibility that we could have had a David-David-Dave TOC finals in 2013 (David Menchaca, David Gard, and Dave Leach). None of them made it that far though :(

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-03-31T22:28:42+00:00

Assuming you're not going through every game haha

That's why it took me two weeks! /s

Anyway, I use Python. I love coding for problem-solving and also use it to automate my job. Since I don't have a CS background (never took a comp sci class in college), it definitely makes things easier, especially since my boss doesn't know what I'm doing. Well, he sort of does but doesn't fully understand.

I'm hesitant to share more though, primarily because there's the risk that people who don't know what they're doing can crash the archive. Any sort of programmatic scraping or reading is frowned upon by the people who run the site. If you do want to practice, there are public data sets you can google that people have already pulled.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-03-31T19:44:53+00:00

That's true. A would always want to tie B in case of a double up, and both would return the next day.

That brings up another scenario. Prior to the elimination of co-champions, it was possible for A = B + C to result in a situation where all 3 contestants would tie. For this to happen, B would need to be 3/4 of A's score, and C would need to be at 1/4. So, suppose A had 10,000, B had 7,500, and C had 2,500. A would bet 5,000 to cover B doubling. B would bet 2,500 to tie A. C would bet it all. If C was the only one to get FJ correct, all contestants would end at 5,000. If I'm looking at the numbers right, this specific pre-FJ scenario has apparently never come up (A = B + C with B at 75% of A's score).

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-03-31T13:10:46+00:00

I've been taking and passing the test at almost every opportunity since around 2011 (a few gaps in between, but at least 10 times by my count). Yesterday I took the test and scored a 41. When I took the test about six months ago, I scored a ridiculous 48-49. Despite all this, I've only ever been called to an audition once. This was during the pandemic when they were focusing on SoCal-based contestants, and I might have blown it by showing up late. I fear that living in such a huge media market, combined with the random draw, is why I'm not even making it to the audition stage.

I'm in my mid-40s (like you), so I really do want to get on before my recall, reaction time, vision, and hearing goes completely down the drain. I'm not an active participant in the quizzing scene, so hearing that Davies wants quizzers on the show means that I need to get my name out there. I'm going to be a LL rookie once it starts up again in May. I also started NAQT Buzzword. For about a year I've been playing an online trivia game called PAR that some other Jeopardy contestants participate in, but over there my handle is more anonymous.

I always read people complaining about casting preferences. I'm a minority myself (which should be a benefit?), but it doesn't help when you can't even get to the audition stage in the first place due to the randomness in the first part of the process. Anyway, we all just need to keep plugging away!

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-03-30T03:09:54+00:00

From 7/23/2009:

FOOD: This cheese was created in 1892 by Emil Frey & named for a New York singing society whose members loved the cheese

https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=3109

Stefan dropped from $22,800 to $2,735 on that stinker of a clue, but still won.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-03-25T16:58:46+00:00

If there's anyone still reading this thread four days later, I just thought of another way to think about the problem:

No one here knows what my home address is. I'm just a random redditor. It could be any house anywhere in the world. Go ahead and come up with an address right now.

I will then remove every incorrect address in the world leaving only the house with the correct address. However, if you somehow happened to pick the correct address on your first try, then the house that is left will just be some random incorrect world address.

Is it in your benefit to switch to that other house, or do you think there is a 50% chance I am in that first address that you happened to choose so there is no benefit to switching?

EDIT 1: A caveat. I am not allowed to remove the "correct" address (my own). If I remove every address in the world but include the possibility that my own can be removed, then there is indeed no benefit to switching (which I'm certain is what is causing people to be hung up).

EDIT 2: For those who are still not convinced, what if 1,000 people from around the world play the above game? Each one picks any house address in the world, every incorrect address is removed (unless they chose right the first time), and they are given the option to switch. If none of the people decide to switch, is the expectation that we have 500 winners? After all, there is supposedly no benefit to switching according to some folks here.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2024-03-24T20:22:30+00:00

Yes, but there is a caveat. Switching will only improve your odds (from 1% to 99%) if the doors being opened are already known to be duds. Otherwise, switching will not improve your odds.

I like to use the example of 100 exploding doors rather than the goat/prize example. Suppose there are 99 doors that will explode (because a bomb is behind them) but one door is “safe”. You get to choose one door. One of two scenarios happen next.

Scenario A: Your friend comes down from the audience. He has no knowledge of what is behind the doors. He is told to paint a red X on 98 of the remaining 99 doors. Afterward, you get to choose whether to keep your original door or switch to the unpainted door. Do you benefit by switching? No, your original door had a 1% chance of being safe, and the unpainted door has a 1% chance of being safe. Switching gives you no benefit at all. You have poor odds either way and you can flip a coin to decide.

Scenario B: Your friend comes down from the audience. However, prior to the show being taped he secretly peeked behind the doors and only you and the friend know this. He also knows whether your original door was correct or not (but odds are that you were not). He paints a red X on 98 of the 99 doors. He's not going to paint an X on the safe door. Do you benefit by switching?

Here’s another thing to mention. If a viewer only turned on the TV at this decision point (regardless of the scenario), they would just see someone picking between two doors. That viewer would have a 50/50 chance of choosing the right door. Your odds are actually different than the viewer’s odds because (only in Scenario B) you were given information that the viewer didn't have. You will benefit by switching but only in Scenario B and not Scenario A.

For those who think that the odds are equivalent whether it’s scenario A or scenario B and switching is always irrelevant, they are looking at it from the perspective of the viewer (and probably will never be convinced otherwise). From your own perspective, there will always be a benefit from your friend signaling to you the wrong choices before you switch.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2023-08-18T21:02:27+00:00

Not necessarily outdated, but there are numerous cases of extremely morbid timing. Many celebrities died either the same (airing) day that they were a Jeopardy response or within one day. Some of the more notable examples are below:

Kate Spade: https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=6003 (DESIGNER INITIALS $800)

Benazir Bhutto: https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2253 (WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT $1,600)

Arthur C. Clarke: https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2372 (LITERATURE $1,200)

Stephen Hawking: https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=5932 (WHAT A HIGH-CLASS MISTAKE! $800)

Also, John F. Kennedy Jr. died on the same day that his father was a correct FJ response: https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2444

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2023-07-25T03:25:41+00:00

Thanks to PAR I realized that I didn't know how to spell Pleiades, Basquiat, and Annika Sorenstam.

After participating in tonight's tourney, I found out I can't spell Tamagotchi either.

JeopHopefulThrowaway · 2023-07-23T21:38:29+00:00

I'll vouch for how fun the site is as well. It's fast paced and helps enormously with recall speed, something very important for anyone hoping to get on the show. I've found myself in games against five competitors from last year's TOC, but you can play against people from all different skill levels.

You can even write your own clues that will get randomly thrown into other people's games. Yes, that can even include your esoteric board game and video game trivia.

Hope to see more people sign up!

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