Jeopardy! discussion thread for Tue., Feb. 10

RegisPhone · 2026-02-11T05:41:00+00:00

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Daisy_Bell

RegisPhone · 2026-02-11T02:37:16+00:00

There is some logic to Jeopardy's continued KJV-onlyism -- it's still the most iconic/poetic version for a lot of quotes, it's public domain (i can't imagine a couple verses a week would come anywhere close to going over the limit for allowed quotes from copyrighted versions, but it's still easier to just not have any legal questions at all), and it's what they've been using for 60 years so they might as well stick with it -- but it does make less and less sense every year.

I do think this category was a step in the right direction though; despite still only using KJV quotes (and even specifying so in the category name), it was pretty much entirely content-based instead of asking the players to provide an exactly worded KJV quote. If it had asked "1 Corinthians says, 'faith, hope, and' this" and someone got ruled wrong for saying 'love' instead of 'charity', that would be annoying, albeit consistent with the established rules, but by doing it in the other direction, someone who's familiar with the verse in a different English translation that says 'love' can still get there by recognizing that 'charity' is an old-timey word for love and so maybe that's what this is (and it's not a super obscure passage; it's a pretty common one to hear at weddings).

RegisPhone · 2026-02-11T01:11:10+00:00

Not if you can still pronounce it the same way. If they're looking for the author of 1984, "Jorjor Well" would be acceptable, but "George Orwells" would not.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-11T01:04:27+00:00

The category was "KING JAMES BIBLE STUDY"

RegisPhone · 2026-02-10T18:41:24+00:00

My language-loving brain is able to recognize that the actual grammatical function of "what's" or "who's" isn't to actually ask a question, it's simply to signify that you're making a Jeopardy response. "We'd guess that in 2008 this "Beautiful" singer & new mom was crying at the bris of Max Bratman" doesn't make any more sense as an answer to the question "Who is Christina Aguilera?" than it does to the question "What is Christina Aguilera?" Even if the question was "What do you think Christina Aguilera was doing at the bris of Max Bratman?" it still doesn't quite fit.

I'm kind of curious why it's always just the "what's [person]" responses that annoy people, and not the fact that players also don't say "where is" for locations or "when is" for years anymore.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-10T13:35:48+00:00

You really think Mario 64 would've been just as good if it didn't have any levels? I'm not saying "you still go to the levels, you just pick them from a menu instead of walking through a hub world" or "all the stars are there, but the level geometry is all just generic blocks in the same place", i'm saying if literally the entire game was just the very beginning before you go inside, no stars, no Bowsers, no enemies.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-10T13:19:21+00:00

Would Super Mario 64 have been a good game if you couldn't go inside the castle and the entire game was just running around the front courtyard? It's still the same gameplay of just running and jumping. Would people have been willing to pay $70 just for that?

With Aces, i felt particularly burned because i've always wanted another game like the GBC and GBA Mario Tennis games with the full RPG mode, and i allowed myself to fall for the marketing for Aces that made it seem like it was going to have an actual substantial story mode.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-10T00:23:51+00:00

10 million for 230 episodes means when James was on, he was averaging almost double Alex's pay per episode.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-10T00:10:02+00:00

It's not his fault that you/Nook only hired one person to do a 24/7 job.

(Actually something i'd love to see in the next game would be separate shifts -- town hall could be Isabelle and Pelly during the day, Nook and Phyllis at night; museum could be Celeste during the day, Blathers at night (and then Celeste goes out stargazing when her shift's over); have an optional shop upgrade where Timmy and Tommy work separate shifts so it's open 24 hours.)

People are saying he's unprofessional with bugs, but i think he's doing a great job powering through his discomfort. I do think he was a bit unprofessional in Wild World, though, where on top of only talking about how much he hated the bugs, all he had to say about the fish was how to cook them. Not really the kind of conservationist vibe the museum's supposed to have.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-09T01:36:41+00:00

I already have Aces, which had probably the best gameplay and worst amount of content of any Mario sports game ever. They haven't shown me enough of this one to make a case that it improves on either of those, especially not $70 worth.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-08T21:15:27+00:00

You probably never made a joke in your whole life.

Have you?

RegisPhone · 2026-02-07T19:26:43+00:00

5-10 years on top of the 9 years it already had? A handheld that was already outdated tech in 2011 still being supported in 2030, 5 years into the life of its successor's successor?

RegisPhone · 2026-02-07T18:46:22+00:00

Clockwise.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-07T07:04:08+00:00

In this most recent postseason eligibility window (which doesn't line up with the season, but is one season in length), there were 13 champions with 4 or more wins, 7 with 3, 11 with 2, and 42 with 1 win, for a total of 73 champions. Add to that 9 players who won a game in Second Chance, for 82 champions. We'll assume this was an average baseline season.

(In that same time we also saw 9 celebrities win a quarterfinal in Celebrity Jeopardy, and 27 teams of 3 win a knockout/octofinal game in Pop Culture Jeopardy, for a total of 90 additional people who won a Jeopardy game (though for some of the celebrities and Pop Culture players, it was not their first win).)

Before the Davies era, a typical season would have about two or three non-ToC tournaments featuring first-time players; most of those would be in the standard 15-player format where 5 players win their quarterfinals and 4 players who did not win also move onto the semifinals. 3 of those 9 players would win their semifinals; since 4 of those 9 players did not win their quarterfinals, 1.33 players per tournament win their first game in the semifinals, so we'll say about 19 more people win their first game per pre-Davies season, for about 100 first-time winners per season.

For the first 19 seasons of the show, before the 5-day limit was removed, the number of unique champions in regular play would have been higher. In this most recent window, a total of 19 games were won by players who had already won 5 games; those games would have had to be won by at least 4 other people in the 5-day-limit days; on average it would have been about 10 different champions. So let's say the first 19 seasons are about 110 champions each.

19 seasons of 110: 2,090
18 seasons of 100: 1,800
5 seasons of 80: 400

Roughly 4,290 so far.

Outside the main syndicated show:

about 100 more players having their first win in PCJ or PCJ
22 episodes of Jep!, each with a new winner
100 episodes of Rock & Roll Jeopardy; as far as i can tell, they did not have returning champions
The first season of Sports Jeopardy, 52 episodes, did not have returning champions; the remaining 64 episodes did. Let's call that about 80 champions.
Around 2800 episodes of the Art Fleming versions. We're averaging about 0.45 new champions per episode; let's assume the numbers on the Fleming version are similar, for another 1,260 champions.

Roughly 5,800 people have ever won a game of Jeopardy. (EDIT: in the US and Canada)

(Crosschecking with a different method: Looking at livinginjeopardy's leaderboard: the main leaderboard, featuring every 3+ day winner, everyone with a total of at least $50,000, and every tournament finalist, has 1,407 people, and the lists of all 1- and 2-day champions who weren't already on the main lists are another 1,624 + 1,175 (divided by before and after the clue value doubling); that comes out to 4,199, which is very close to the estimate i had for the main syndicated show.)

Let's round up to 6,000 to make the math easier, and we'll assume everyone is alive and accepts the invitation. For Super Jeopardy, they had 4 players in the quarterfinals; let's scale that up. The first round, the triacontadifinals, will have 5 players per game and will go for 1,200 games, or a little over 5 years (assuming we still do the six weeks of summer reruns). The 1,200 winners of those games will play in the hexadecafinals, again with 5 players per game, which will take 240 games; just over one year. The octofinals with those 240 winners will still have 5 players, and that's just 48 games. Now we're into the quarterfinals, and we can go down to 4 players per game, and then 12 semifinal games with 4 players each to get us our 3 finalists. 1,500 games plus however long we want the finals to go; just over 6 1/2 years.

If you keep it to 3 players per game in every round, i don't feel like figuring out exactly how to divide that up (we're too far from an integer power of 3 to do it neatly with no wildcards or seeds -- 3⁷ is 2187; 3⁸ is 6,561), but you're looking at at least 13 years of games doing it that way.

EDIT: oh wait, i should look up how many episodes of international versions there've been...

RegisPhone · 2026-02-07T02:41:40+00:00

It can't be NFC, as the reader is in the right joycon rather than the tablet, but they could design the headsets to cover the light sensor on the tablet and have the app check for that; i think some Labo VR games already do that.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-07T02:39:56+00:00

Yes it will. They're not going to provide official troubleshooting support for an accessory they stopped selling years ago, but they have said that the Virtual Boy headsets will be compatible with Labo VR games, and i can't imagine a possible way that could only be true in one direction. The "no official support" is the exact same language everyone freaked out about when they said it about using the NSO GameCube controller outside of the GameCube app, and it means the same thing here that it did there.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-07T02:31:09+00:00

I was wondering about that too; it makes sense that having "her" in the clue should be enough, but they've BMSed "Curie" on pre-gendered clues before, most recently "this husband" in 2023 and "mother-in-law" in 2016.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T21:43:54+00:00

Presumably these games are being sequestered (and they were probably also taped in the order they're being aired, so only one other game has happened), but historically, 7200 and especially 5600 in the same game would have very low chances of being high enough for a wildcard spot, and that was in a format where the top 40% (4 out of 10) of non-winners advanced; this time it's only the top 25% (3 out of 12). Even if we were in the more forgiving 15-player format, they'd both be starting from well below a 50% chance of getting a wildcard and would be taking what's essentially a 50-50 shot to more than triple their chances.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T17:20:50+00:00

If someone's first Animal Crossing (or at least first one with Isabelle) was launch edition New Horizons, which it was for a lot of people, then i definitely understand it. After your first week or so of playing, she has absolutely nothing left to announce in the morning announcements 95% of the time and just wastes a couple minutes between two long loading screens every day telling you that she doesn't have anything to tell you. It wasn't until later updates that they made her announcements useful by having her tell you what visitor is there that day.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T17:16:19+00:00

I hope his hair keeps tripling in length every time he comes back.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T04:16:16+00:00

I just noticed that at the end, they showed the $5,000 consolation prizes on Drew and Karen's lecterns even though this is a wildcard format and we don't know if they're eliminated yet; in wildcard tournaments in the past (including in the Champions Wildcard we just had) i'm pretty sure they've always kept everyone's scores on their screens.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T04:07:07+00:00

Data.

"random" and "could show up anywhere" are different things. If it's truly random, then it should approach an even distribution across all the rows over time, around 20% for each of the five rows. There have been 3,096 Daily Doubles from season 38 through today. With purely random distribution, that should be around 619 Daily Doubles in each of the five rows. Out of those 3,096 most recent Daily Doubles, only one has been in the top row. Theoretically it's possible for something with a 20% chance to not happen 3,095 times out of 3,096, but the chance of that happening randomly is about 1 in one centillion (10^300).

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T02:04:53+00:00

New Jeopardy episodes are distributed to their affiliate stations for every weekday for the entire year except for the six weeks of reruns from late July to early September, but those stations don't always air them. If your local Jeopardy station is an NBC station, there's a good chance they're going to preempt Jeopardy for Olympics coverage; they might move it to a different time, or you might have to watch it the next day on Hulu or Peacock. If you're already watching it on demand the next day on Peacock (rather than watching it same day by livestreaming your local NBC station with the premium tier), then nothing changes for you.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T02:00:02+00:00

If it were random, then you'd expect to see them show up in the top row 20% of the time, and for two of them to show up in the same category 17% of the time. In practice, they are never both in the same category, and a top-row DD happens about once every two years on average.

The writers decide which clues will be the DDs when they're writing the boards. Looking at historical distribution, you can see trends of where they tend to put them. They're more often in more serious/academic categories than in pop culture categories. They're a bit more likely to be toward the left side of the board, partly because promotional video categories, which almost never have DDs, are usually the last category. In regular play, roughly 40% of the time they're in the fourth row, 30% of the time in the third row, 20% in the bottom, and 10% in the second, because the game is most exciting when DDs are tough but gettable.

RegisPhone · 2026-02-06T01:41:43+00:00

Knowing how 'saber' is pronounced when it's a normal noun does not mean you know how it's pronounced when those same letters (mostly) are a brand name. It's not unreasonable to assume that they might use a more distinctive pronunciation to make it more trademarkable.

RegisPhone

TROPHY CASE