I took the coward’s way out on Jeopardy!. In a competitive episode of the show, typically the last round, Final Jeopardy!, determines the game’s winner. Contestants are able to wager any or all of the winnings they’ve accumulated so far on the chance they respond correctly to the final clue; if they wager everything and get it right, they can as much as double their score. And so a lot comes down to this wagering—the contestant with the highest total after Final wins the game, and gets to return for the next episode as a Jeopardy! champion. Avid fans of the show, especially the game theorists among them, long ago determined the “correct” way to wager for each contestant depending on their point totals heading into Final. When you’re in the lead going into Final Jeopardy!, as I was (not a brag, as you’ll see shortly), the correct or objective or rational strategy is straightforward: the first-place contestant is advised to wager just enough to cover the second-place contestant should the latter wager everything they have (ill-advised according to the game theorists, but an often enough possibility); if both contestants respond correctly, the leading contestant will win the game by one dollar, a common outcome on the show. So, what I was supposed to do was wager enough so that I finished the game with one dollar more than twice my nearest opponent’s current score. Of course, all of this hinges on answering the Final Jeopardy! clue correctly. Which brings me to Art.
Another piece of advice for prospective Jeopardy! contestants is that you can’t study everything to prepare for an appearance on the show. You should study the subjects you have a baseline familiarity with, so as to be confident when encountering a related category during the game, and forgo as hopeless the subjects of which you know nothing. In the weeks leading up to my appearance on the Jeopardy! stage, including the night before taping, I said to myself, and even aloud to others, with the confidence of a man unacquainted with the concept of jinxing: “I’m not going to bother to study art.” Art, in Jeopardy! parlance, almost always means visual art, and my knowledge of that vast field of human endeavor was at that time, to put it generously, minimal. And so, although I ended Double Jeopardy! in the lead after a late-game comeback, when Alex Trebek unveiled the final category as, simply, Art, I doubled over my podium. I briefly considered the “correct” way I was supposed to wager, but my fear of Art won out: I wagered zero dollars, hoping that all three of us would fail to think of the correct response and that I would outlast my opponents. Of course, both of them responded correctly, and I was left in third and last place—and with a convenient excuse. Because I wagered nothing, I did not even attempt to respond correctly to the clue, my own response being irrelevant.
I was not thinking altogether rationally. I was not really thinking about the money at stake, either. In the few minutes I had to make my wager, between the reveal of Art and the clue itself (pertaining to the provenance of American Gothic), I was thinking mostly about the limits of my own thinking, of how much there was that I didn’t know, and how I was being challenged on syndicated television by my own ignorance—and my own fear of facing that ignorance. Rather than follow the correct strategy, I chose to avoid the question altogether. Jeopardy! is a game of facts, but it’s played by human beings.
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After a relatively staid thirty-plus seasons, Jeopardy! has had a tumultuous go of it in recent years. In the final chapter of her 2020 book, Answers in the Form of Questions, Claire McNear previews the precipice the show was then approaching: Harry Friedman, Jeopardy!’s executive producer since 1999, stepped down in spring 2020, as would longtime contestant coordinator Maggie Speak. At the same time, Trebek—the show’s host and public face since 1984—announced he was undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer, which would kill him in November of that year. Mike Richards, the man chosen to replace Friedman, also chose himself to replace Trebek, until he was ousted from both positions after McNear’s reporting for the Ringer uncovered a history of offensive remarks on his game-show-themed podcast. The show settled on two co-hosts and then just one. Since Trebek’s departure, Jeopardy! has had to figure out what to do with itself—and what it wants to be.
There have long been two versions of the show to choose from. There is the nightly syndicated airing of 61 trivia clues, responded to with more or less success by computer programmers, librarians and homemakers. And there is the show as it’s dissected and chronicled online by some of its most ardent fans, often former or prospective contestants: there’s J! Archive, the fan-run compendium of nearly every clue from nearly every Jeopardy! game played since 1984, along with message boards like JBoard.tv and blogs like The Jeopardy! Fan and The Final Wager that recap games and outline how to win as much money as you can.
There is, in all of this, a lot of talk about strategy. McNear’s book—billed as an “insider’s guide”—even includes an entire chapter on the subject. There’s the aforementioned wagering strategy, but also buzzer strategy and clue selection—do you start from the top of the categories, where the easiest clues reside, or the bottom, with the hardest clues, or do you use the “Forrest Bounce,” the style of play named after early champion Chuck Forrest, who pioneered the strategy of jumping seemingly randomly from category to category hunting for Daily Doubles? Alongside these tactics come a bevy of statistics: Coryat scores, buzz-in rates, Daily Double wager amounts. In Answers, Ken Jennings, perhaps the first truly famous Jeopardy! champion (following his 74-game win streak in 2004), and now host of the show, describes this turn as the show’s “Moneyball era.”
In a 2023 interview with the show’s current executive producer, Michael Davies, headlined “Is Jeopardy! a Sport?,” McNear observed: “Davies has a plan for the show’s future, and that vision has more in common with soccer or baseball … It involves growth, modernization, and leaning way, way into elements of gameplay long held sacred by the show’s most devoted fans.” Davies is not the first to conceive of the show as sports-like, but he is among the loudest, and the most powerful advocate for this view. In 2022, under Davies’s authority, the show debuted a Daily Box Scores section on its website, where it tracks contestants’ performances each game—their buzz-in rates and correct-response counts and dollar amounts. Nowhere is there any indication of the subjects of the trivia clues contestants responded to or what they had to know to respond correctly. “Jeopardata,” the show calls it. There are conversations that could be had about what Jeopardy! should look like in the future—what facts of the world are highlighted by the show, what knowledge is privileged—but Davies does not broach them. The show has decided to bring the inside baseball out, to define itself by its most technocratic details.
Davies’s idea is to have Jeopardy! fans follow star contestants like star athletes, and the show’s turn to a more sports-like approach has coincided with the rise of Jeopardy! super-champions like Amy Schneider and James Holzhauer. The show has embraced the emergence of these super-champions in an attempt to turn them into recurrent and prominent icons in an extended universe of personalities and players —“a Marvel-brained corporate strategy,” wrote one critic. And as in Marvel movies, this way of thinking about Jeopardy! is less about what is and more about what’s next: How many games will this contestant win, how much in winnings can they rack up? Sometime in the past five years, Jeopardy! changed its opening title montage from highlighting different knowledge categories (portraits of historical figures, scientific equations, etc.) to highlighting itself: footage from the shows’ past, clips of the most recent super-champions celebrating their victories, behind-the-scenes studio preparations. Whether the model is more Moneyball or MCU, the heart of the show—the trivia—becomes, well, trivial.
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Before I was a contestant on the Jeopardy! stage, I was a Jeopardy! viewer at home. Growing up, there were more evenings when I watched Jeopardy! than evenings when I didn’t. I have to imagine it was all mystifying at first, oddly worded clues referring to things I knew nothing about, missives from the alien world of adults. But as I got older, I slowly made my way down the game board: at some point I found myself able to respond to the easiest $200 clues correctly, then the $400 clues, and so on. Jeopardy! showed me how much more there was to know about the world than I had learned—but it was a feeling of not having learned yet, and I shouted responses at the television, correct or not, with a coltish eagerness. I marked my progress by competing against the contestants on TV and my parents beside me on the couch, every year knowing a bit more until eventually I felt I could compete on the show without embarrassing myself. I took the tests for the Teen Tournament, and then the College Championship, and then the regular nightly version. I read up on strategy and study tips online, honed my buzzer timing and workshopped my personal anecdotes. But my practice was mostly watching the show, seeing how much I still had to learn. I went to one audition to no avail, and then a second, and then got the call in August of 2017 asking if I wanted to be on Jeopardy!. The original question persisted—did I know enough? does anyone ever?—but Trebek was getting older and who knew how long he’d keep hosting the show, and so I said yes to one question, and a month later I flew out to Culver City to answer the other.
To watch Jeopardy! is to participate in the game itself, to test your own knowledge; the experience in your living room is not all that different from the experience on stage. Anyone who’s seen it, then, knows that the most obvious problem with watching Jeopardy! as a sport is simply that it’s not. As Holzhauer notes, “If you watch an NBA game on TV, you don’t think, Oh, I can dunk over LeBron… But you might think, Oh, I could get a question here or there if the right categories come up.” Davies promises to cater to “the show’s most devoted fans,” but as Jennings writes in his foreword to Answers, “Jeopardy! diehards … talk about the show as if it exists mostly to service superfans like themselves who know all the insider secrets … But for the most part, all the behind-the-scenes trivia is beside the point. … Jeopardy! isn’t in a chilly California soundstage; it’s in your home, as you yell answers at the TV screen or furrow your brow during a tense Daily Double.” Yet here the show is, doubling down on insider secrets and sabermetrics. What insight do these statistics offer? How does knowing how many times a contestant attempted to buzz in enrich the experience of watching Jeopardy!? Do we watch to admire the precision of a contestant’s thumb dexterity?
“It has always bothered me when contestants adopt the tactic of going to higher-priced clues before they know what the category is about,” Trebek wrote in his 2020 memoir, The Answer Is…. “The gameboard is arranged the way it is to help the player.” The viewer too. The clues in a category are written to scaffold and often build on one another, coalescing around the theme; not only does board hopping dismantle this scaffolding, but this strategy is employed intentionally to throw off one’s opponents. Trebek noted that Chuck Forrest used his eponymous method “primarily to keep his opponents off-balance so that they could never settle into a rhythm and get comfortable.” And as a result, those watching at home can’t either. The viewing experience becomes jumbled, a race to keep up with a series of technical maneuvers. Rather than the questioning of answers, Jeopardy! becomes about one player’s pursuit of as much money as possible as quickly as possible.
This is the tension between a contestant’s winning strategy and the audience’s enjoyment. Jeopardy! has faced it before, in the very beginning. During the pre-1984 iterations of the show hosted by Art Fleming, and into the first season under Trebek’s star, contestants could buzz in with a response before the clue was completely read—a smart strategy, but also an unwatchable one. In his memoir, Trebek took credit for the rule change that stipulated that contestants could only buzz in once the host had finished reading the clue, in order to give “viewers a better experience of playing along.” And while this led to a fixation on buzzer timing and optimal at-home training replications of the signaling device, Trebek recognized how much this is beside the point: “I’m often asked what’s the secret to ringing in first. It’s simple: Know as much as you can about the categories and clues. The more you know, the faster your thumb is.”
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Even if it made sense to watch Jeopardy! as a sport, the show enters its “Moneyball era” at the same time baseball is attempting to escape its own. Major League Baseball instituted three new rules for the 2023 season in an explicit attempt to counteract some of the consequences of the Moneyball revolution, which had made the game much less compelling for the fans in the stands. Moneyball evolved in the early 2000s as a strategy for small-market teams to mine the copious amounts of data the sport produces to uncover an edge and level the playing field against, say, the free-spending Yankees—exploit inefficiencies was the going phrase. Over the next two decades Moneyball metastasized and became the entire sport. Teams learned that some parts of baseball weren’t worth the risk—for example, stolen bases, a target of the new rules, too often led to an out—and so they stopped doing those things. Eventually they learned that most of the baseball in baseball wasn’t worth the risk. The sport devolved into a series of risk calculations and was sucked dry of action, reaching lows for game attendance and World Series viewers. Here, like buzzing in early or Daily Double hunting, the “correct” or winningest strategies for teams, or players, or contestants disregard the substance of the game and transform a physical and aesthetic endeavor (yes, baseball has aesthetics) into an equation. Pointing out probabilities on a pie chart is not a substitute for watching a line drive evade the shortstop’s glove, or knowing that John Nance Garner was the oldest ex-vice president ever (clues that stump all three contestants are particularly satisfying when you get them at home).
A telling example: At the end of the 2023 season, the Seattle Mariners finished a once-promising season by missing the playoffs by a single game—one game out of 162, which might be numerically trivial, and yet it made all the difference. The team’s president of “baseball operations,” Jerry Dipoto, defended their performance by asking fans for patience. The goal, he said, was not necessarily to make the playoffs in any given year—what any self-respecting fan hopes for—but only to build a team that could win “54 percent of the time.” This feels perverse, and yet so much of sports and entertainment has adopted this actuarial worldview. In the popular computer game Out of the Park Baseball, users can play not as their favorite athlete but as the Dipotos of the league, the calculating manager in charge of the team; “baseball” becomes roster construction and contract negotiation, while the actual playing of the sport can be simulated in the background. You see this thinking, too, in the deluge of ads for sports betting during any televised sporting event, as if the game is played only to win money off it. Or in the “speedrunning” of video games, where the goal is not to enjoy the gameplay as designed but to complete it—to consume it—as fast as possible. Or how about the myriad attempts to optimize reading by eliminating the act of reading books altogether (like Blinkist, which offers “bite-sized” summaries so you never again have to spend more than fifteen minutes with a book), or evaluating a film’s merit based on its box-office haul or its Rotten Tomatoes score? Or in Olympic figure skating, in which skaters receive both a technical score and an artistic score (technically a “Program Components” score), the former emphasized and elevated for its elimination of subjectivity, at the expense of the routine’s aesthetics.
This is spreadsheet thinking, content-indifferent, devoid of meaning. It’s when efficiency is an end rather than a means. It’s when a metric subsumes the thing itself. It’s a consultant’s logic, which regards all enterprise solely as a means of value extraction. It’s the difference between coverage of Holzhauer’s winning streak that asked, “Can You Answer the Jeopardy! Clues James Holzhauer Couldn’t?” (Vulture) and that which graphed his “otherworldly” “money-winning pace” (FiveThirtyEight). In Take Time for Paradise, Bart Giamatti, the former MLB commissioner and literature professor, delineates “freely chosen leisure activities, games or others” from “tedious work.” For Giamatti, games are “active, not idle; entertaining, not simply useful; perfecting of our humanity, not merely exploitative of it.” And yet we increasingly surrender to the impulse to turn our games and hobbies into tedious work constrained by prescribed strategy, and our experiences into accomplishments.
Although I lost my game of Jeopardy!, the J! Archive record tells me that I finished with a higher Coryat score than either of my opponents. A Coryat score, named after a former Jeopardy! champion, is a contestant’s score regardless of any wagers made on Daily Doubles or during Final Jeopardy!. It controls for a player’s strategy, either well executed or, as in my case, not. But my Coryat score masks the dramatic irony of having Art as my Final category, or that earlier in the game there was a sports-related category—which I considered to be one of my subject-matter strengths—and yet I only responded to one of the five clues correctly. This statistic, like some of the advanced statistics in baseball, attempts to isolate a player’s performance from the randomness inherent in gameplay—or, looked at another way, the aspects of the game subject to human fallibility, either the player’s own or others’. But what is gameplay without this fallibility? Gameplay, in Giamatti’s words, is “an experience of … the repeated interplay of energy and order, of improvisation and obligation, of strategy and tactic, all neatness denied and ambiguity affirmed by the incredible power of the random, by accident or luck … by mental lapses or physical failure…” In a compelling game, the potential for error is inseparable from the pursuit of perfection.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with Moneyball. The best metrics can provide different angles from which to appreciate the games we enjoy. But what is lost when these stats and this way of thinking become the game—when we mistake Jeopardata for Jeopardy!? In Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, the German philosopher Fritz Heinemann warned that “both the spirit of technology and its frustration penetrate our behavior whether we notice it or not.” By technology Heinemann means actual mechanical technology, but also technique—strategy—that comes to dominate the fields to which it is applied and “brings about a simplification of their problems, but at the same time a loss in substance.” “The technician looks through his technical glasses” and sees everything as a “‘problem’ to be solved by reasoning and calculation.” For Heinemann, how we think changes what we think. Infatuation with technique, with strategy in and of itself, narrows our view. The difference between an artist and a mere technician, as Heinemann saw it, is that “the artist uses techniques and technical skills as a means to an end, whereas a technician adores them as ends in themselves.” This is not to say that Jeopardy! needs to be more artful, or even more existential (though Heinemann’s “I respond, therefore I am” formulation certainly sounds Jeopardy!-esque), only that there are alternatives to this metrics-obsessed point of view. Optimization cannot be the whole point if there is nothing we’re optimizing for.
In Answers, McNear writes that “the money is what makes things interesting” on Jeopardy!. But is it? “What I’ve found is that the majority of contestants care more about winning the game,” Trebek wagered instead. “The money is wonderful, but what they really want is to be able to call themselves a Jeopardy! champion.” Even Brad Rutter, who’s won more money playing Jeopardy! than anyone alive, “simply wanted to say he had been there.” Amy Schneider, too, acknowledges that there is more to be won than just money (despite winning more than one million dollars during her forty-game streak). And, for Schneider, the warm reception from fans didn’t just assure her that she could finally be “accepted for who [she] was,” the game itself was its own reward: seeking out trivia and knowledge “will not just make you better at Jeopardy!, but better at living in society. Better at understanding what is going on around you, and why, and what might happen next, and how you might prepare for it.”
The counterargument is, of course, that I can’t be so sentimental about a televised game show, in which money has always played a part. Ratings do go up during extended winning streaks; media coverage is more prominent during the show’s prime-time tournaments; the show’s commercialization ventures are successful, and I can’t begrudge the show for taking advantage. But what is the point of Jeopardy! when all we care about are buzzer attempts and wagers, when we no longer care about the 61 facts trotted out there every night, poking the tiniest pinholes into the unfathomable extent of the world? When we no longer care that Manhattan is the smallest island in the world with a population of more than a million people, or that in Buddhism an arhat is a person who has attained nirvana, or that Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin went to high school together, what refuge can there be?
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Perhaps this is only the lament of a sore loser. Perhaps I need to believe there is more to Jeopardy! than the dollar amounts on its game board, as consolation, so I don’t think of the money I might’ve won. Perhaps I am resentful of all this buzzer talk because I was all too adept with it, and look what good it did me—I buzzed in more often than my opponents, but I gave more incorrect responses too. I did not know who John Nance Garner was. I confused California poppies with buttercups. I thought boxing was wrestling, and then four clues later I thought bowling was wrestling too. I could not reduce Jeopardy! to mere technique.
As Jeopardy! pursues its own arcanum, and as an increasing number of contestants employ the aggressive playing style of would-be super-champions, the show risks cloistering itself, an insular conversation among initiates, the opposite of its earlier, knowledge-celebrating, horizon-broadening self-conception. Because optimization implies an end point; it implies that the game can be solved—and that this solving is why we watch. But Jeopardy! teaches us that there is always more we can know.
When people ask me about being on Jeopardy!, they do not ask me how many times I buzzed in, or what my Coryat score was. They mostly ask me if I was on the show when Trebek was still alive and what he was like (I was, but contestants only interact with the host on stage, not much more than what’s aired) and what it was like to be on television (surreal, disorienting) and what it takes to get on Jeopardy! (an online fifty-question test, then an in-person test and audition, then the hope that you were personable enough to convince the producers that they could put you on television). When people learn I lost on Jeopardy!, they ask me what the final clue was, to test whether they could have responded correctly themselves. I paraphrase the clue and wait the customary thirty seconds and prepare to act magnanimously either way. I tell them what I said the night before, about swearing off art, and promise them I’m taking the time to learn about it now. I didn’t win life-changing money on Jeopardy!, but I spend more time in art museums these days. I’ve learned, for example, that it’s the upper window that gives the house in American Gothic its titular style (I guess I’ve learned something about architecture too). In fact, I think I could get that clue correct today.
Image credit: ArcadeImages, Jeopardy – SNES Super Nintendo, 2020. Alamy Stock Photo.
I took the coward’s way out on Jeopardy!. In a competitive episode of the show, typically the last round, Final Jeopardy!, determines the game’s winner. Contestants are able to wager any or all of the winnings they’ve accumulated so far on the chance they respond correctly to the final clue; if they wager everything and get it right, they can as much as double their score. And so a lot comes down to this wagering—the contestant with the highest total after Final wins the game, and gets to return for the next episode as a Jeopardy! champion. Avid fans of the show, especially the game theorists among them, long ago determined the “correct” way to wager for each contestant depending on their point totals heading into Final. When you’re in the lead going into Final Jeopardy!, as I was (not a brag, as you’ll see shortly), the correct or objective or rational strategy is straightforward: the first-place contestant is advised to wager just enough to cover the second-place contestant should the latter wager everything they have (ill-advised according to the game theorists, but an often enough possibility); if both contestants respond correctly, the leading contestant will win the game by one dollar, a common outcome on the show. So, what I was supposed to do was wager enough so that I finished the game with one dollar more than twice my nearest opponent’s current score. Of course, all of this hinges on answering the Final Jeopardy! clue correctly. Which brings me to Art.
Another piece of advice for prospective Jeopardy! contestants is that you can’t study everything to prepare for an appearance on the show. You should study the subjects you have a baseline familiarity with, so as to be confident when encountering a related category during the game, and forgo as hopeless the subjects of which you know nothing. In the weeks leading up to my appearance on the Jeopardy! stage, including the night before taping, I said to myself, and even aloud to others, with the confidence of a man unacquainted with the concept of jinxing: “I’m not going to bother to study art.” Art, in Jeopardy! parlance, almost always means visual art, and my knowledge of that vast field of human endeavor was at that time, to put it generously, minimal. And so, although I ended Double Jeopardy! in the lead after a late-game comeback, when Alex Trebek unveiled the final category as, simply, Art, I doubled over my podium. I briefly considered the “correct” way I was supposed to wager, but my fear of Art won out: I wagered zero dollars, hoping that all three of us would fail to think of the correct response and that I would outlast my opponents. Of course, both of them responded correctly, and I was left in third and last place—and with a convenient excuse. Because I wagered nothing, I did not even attempt to respond correctly to the clue, my own response being irrelevant.
I was not thinking altogether rationally. I was not really thinking about the money at stake, either. In the few minutes I had to make my wager, between the reveal of Art and the clue itself (pertaining to the provenance of American Gothic), I was thinking mostly about the limits of my own thinking, of how much there was that I didn’t know, and how I was being challenged on syndicated television by my own ignorance—and my own fear of facing that ignorance. Rather than follow the correct strategy, I chose to avoid the question altogether. Jeopardy! is a game of facts, but it’s played by human beings.
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After a relatively staid thirty-plus seasons, Jeopardy! has had a tumultuous go of it in recent years. In the final chapter of her 2020 book, Answers in the Form of Questions, Claire McNear previews the precipice the show was then approaching: Harry Friedman, Jeopardy!’s executive producer since 1999, stepped down in spring 2020, as would longtime contestant coordinator Maggie Speak. At the same time, Trebek—the show’s host and public face since 1984—announced he was undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer, which would kill him in November of that year. Mike Richards, the man chosen to replace Friedman, also chose himself to replace Trebek, until he was ousted from both positions after McNear’s reporting for the Ringer uncovered a history of offensive remarks on his game-show-themed podcast. The show settled on two co-hosts and then just one. Since Trebek’s departure, Jeopardy! has had to figure out what to do with itself—and what it wants to be.
There have long been two versions of the show to choose from. There is the nightly syndicated airing of 61 trivia clues, responded to with more or less success by computer programmers, librarians and homemakers. And there is the show as it’s dissected and chronicled online by some of its most ardent fans, often former or prospective contestants: there’s J! Archive, the fan-run compendium of nearly every clue from nearly every Jeopardy! game played since 1984, along with message boards like JBoard.tv and blogs like The Jeopardy! Fan and The Final Wager that recap games and outline how to win as much money as you can.
There is, in all of this, a lot of talk about strategy. McNear’s book—billed as an “insider’s guide”—even includes an entire chapter on the subject. There’s the aforementioned wagering strategy, but also buzzer strategy and clue selection—do you start from the top of the categories, where the easiest clues reside, or the bottom, with the hardest clues, or do you use the “Forrest Bounce,” the style of play named after early champion Chuck Forrest, who pioneered the strategy of jumping seemingly randomly from category to category hunting for Daily Doubles? Alongside these tactics come a bevy of statistics: Coryat scores, buzz-in rates, Daily Double wager amounts. In Answers, Ken Jennings, perhaps the first truly famous Jeopardy! champion (following his 74-game win streak in 2004), and now host of the show, describes this turn as the show’s “Moneyball era.”
In a 2023 interview with the show’s current executive producer, Michael Davies, headlined “Is Jeopardy! a Sport?,” McNear observed: “Davies has a plan for the show’s future, and that vision has more in common with soccer or baseball … It involves growth, modernization, and leaning way, way into elements of gameplay long held sacred by the show’s most devoted fans.” Davies is not the first to conceive of the show as sports-like, but he is among the loudest, and the most powerful advocate for this view. In 2022, under Davies’s authority, the show debuted a Daily Box Scores section on its website, where it tracks contestants’ performances each game—their buzz-in rates and correct-response counts and dollar amounts. Nowhere is there any indication of the subjects of the trivia clues contestants responded to or what they had to know to respond correctly. “Jeopardata,” the show calls it. There are conversations that could be had about what Jeopardy! should look like in the future—what facts of the world are highlighted by the show, what knowledge is privileged—but Davies does not broach them. The show has decided to bring the inside baseball out, to define itself by its most technocratic details.
Davies’s idea is to have Jeopardy! fans follow star contestants like star athletes, and the show’s turn to a more sports-like approach has coincided with the rise of Jeopardy! super-champions like Amy Schneider and James Holzhauer. The show has embraced the emergence of these super-champions in an attempt to turn them into recurrent and prominent icons in an extended universe of personalities and players —“a Marvel-brained corporate strategy,” wrote one critic. And as in Marvel movies, this way of thinking about Jeopardy! is less about what is and more about what’s next: How many games will this contestant win, how much in winnings can they rack up? Sometime in the past five years, Jeopardy! changed its opening title montage from highlighting different knowledge categories (portraits of historical figures, scientific equations, etc.) to highlighting itself: footage from the shows’ past, clips of the most recent super-champions celebrating their victories, behind-the-scenes studio preparations. Whether the model is more Moneyball or MCU, the heart of the show—the trivia—becomes, well, trivial.
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Before I was a contestant on the Jeopardy! stage, I was a Jeopardy! viewer at home. Growing up, there were more evenings when I watched Jeopardy! than evenings when I didn’t. I have to imagine it was all mystifying at first, oddly worded clues referring to things I knew nothing about, missives from the alien world of adults. But as I got older, I slowly made my way down the game board: at some point I found myself able to respond to the easiest $200 clues correctly, then the $400 clues, and so on. Jeopardy! showed me how much more there was to know about the world than I had learned—but it was a feeling of not having learned yet, and I shouted responses at the television, correct or not, with a coltish eagerness. I marked my progress by competing against the contestants on TV and my parents beside me on the couch, every year knowing a bit more until eventually I felt I could compete on the show without embarrassing myself. I took the tests for the Teen Tournament, and then the College Championship, and then the regular nightly version. I read up on strategy and study tips online, honed my buzzer timing and workshopped my personal anecdotes. But my practice was mostly watching the show, seeing how much I still had to learn. I went to one audition to no avail, and then a second, and then got the call in August of 2017 asking if I wanted to be on Jeopardy!. The original question persisted—did I know enough? does anyone ever?—but Trebek was getting older and who knew how long he’d keep hosting the show, and so I said yes to one question, and a month later I flew out to Culver City to answer the other.
To watch Jeopardy! is to participate in the game itself, to test your own knowledge; the experience in your living room is not all that different from the experience on stage. Anyone who’s seen it, then, knows that the most obvious problem with watching Jeopardy! as a sport is simply that it’s not. As Holzhauer notes, “If you watch an NBA game on TV, you don’t think, Oh, I can dunk over LeBron… But you might think, Oh, I could get a question here or there if the right categories come up.” Davies promises to cater to “the show’s most devoted fans,” but as Jennings writes in his foreword to Answers, “Jeopardy! diehards … talk about the show as if it exists mostly to service superfans like themselves who know all the insider secrets … But for the most part, all the behind-the-scenes trivia is beside the point. … Jeopardy! isn’t in a chilly California soundstage; it’s in your home, as you yell answers at the TV screen or furrow your brow during a tense Daily Double.” Yet here the show is, doubling down on insider secrets and sabermetrics. What insight do these statistics offer? How does knowing how many times a contestant attempted to buzz in enrich the experience of watching Jeopardy!? Do we watch to admire the precision of a contestant’s thumb dexterity?
“It has always bothered me when contestants adopt the tactic of going to higher-priced clues before they know what the category is about,” Trebek wrote in his 2020 memoir, The Answer Is…. “The gameboard is arranged the way it is to help the player.” The viewer too. The clues in a category are written to scaffold and often build on one another, coalescing around the theme; not only does board hopping dismantle this scaffolding, but this strategy is employed intentionally to throw off one’s opponents. Trebek noted that Chuck Forrest used his eponymous method “primarily to keep his opponents off-balance so that they could never settle into a rhythm and get comfortable.” And as a result, those watching at home can’t either. The viewing experience becomes jumbled, a race to keep up with a series of technical maneuvers. Rather than the questioning of answers, Jeopardy! becomes about one player’s pursuit of as much money as possible as quickly as possible.
This is the tension between a contestant’s winning strategy and the audience’s enjoyment. Jeopardy! has faced it before, in the very beginning. During the pre-1984 iterations of the show hosted by Art Fleming, and into the first season under Trebek’s star, contestants could buzz in with a response before the clue was completely read—a smart strategy, but also an unwatchable one. In his memoir, Trebek took credit for the rule change that stipulated that contestants could only buzz in once the host had finished reading the clue, in order to give “viewers a better experience of playing along.” And while this led to a fixation on buzzer timing and optimal at-home training replications of the signaling device, Trebek recognized how much this is beside the point: “I’m often asked what’s the secret to ringing in first. It’s simple: Know as much as you can about the categories and clues. The more you know, the faster your thumb is.”
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Even if it made sense to watch Jeopardy! as a sport, the show enters its “Moneyball era” at the same time baseball is attempting to escape its own. Major League Baseball instituted three new rules for the 2023 season in an explicit attempt to counteract some of the consequences of the Moneyball revolution, which had made the game much less compelling for the fans in the stands. Moneyball evolved in the early 2000s as a strategy for small-market teams to mine the copious amounts of data the sport produces to uncover an edge and level the playing field against, say, the free-spending Yankees—exploit inefficiencies was the going phrase. Over the next two decades Moneyball metastasized and became the entire sport. Teams learned that some parts of baseball weren’t worth the risk—for example, stolen bases, a target of the new rules, too often led to an out—and so they stopped doing those things. Eventually they learned that most of the baseball in baseball wasn’t worth the risk. The sport devolved into a series of risk calculations and was sucked dry of action, reaching lows for game attendance and World Series viewers. Here, like buzzing in early or Daily Double hunting, the “correct” or winningest strategies for teams, or players, or contestants disregard the substance of the game and transform a physical and aesthetic endeavor (yes, baseball has aesthetics) into an equation. Pointing out probabilities on a pie chart is not a substitute for watching a line drive evade the shortstop’s glove, or knowing that John Nance Garner was the oldest ex-vice president ever (clues that stump all three contestants are particularly satisfying when you get them at home).
A telling example: At the end of the 2023 season, the Seattle Mariners finished a once-promising season by missing the playoffs by a single game—one game out of 162, which might be numerically trivial, and yet it made all the difference. The team’s president of “baseball operations,” Jerry Dipoto, defended their performance by asking fans for patience. The goal, he said, was not necessarily to make the playoffs in any given year—what any self-respecting fan hopes for—but only to build a team that could win “54 percent of the time.” This feels perverse, and yet so much of sports and entertainment has adopted this actuarial worldview. In the popular computer game Out of the Park Baseball, users can play not as their favorite athlete but as the Dipotos of the league, the calculating manager in charge of the team; “baseball” becomes roster construction and contract negotiation, while the actual playing of the sport can be simulated in the background. You see this thinking, too, in the deluge of ads for sports betting during any televised sporting event, as if the game is played only to win money off it. Or in the “speedrunning” of video games, where the goal is not to enjoy the gameplay as designed but to complete it—to consume it—as fast as possible. Or how about the myriad attempts to optimize reading by eliminating the act of reading books altogether (like Blinkist, which offers “bite-sized” summaries so you never again have to spend more than fifteen minutes with a book), or evaluating a film’s merit based on its box-office haul or its Rotten Tomatoes score? Or in Olympic figure skating, in which skaters receive both a technical score and an artistic score (technically a “Program Components” score), the former emphasized and elevated for its elimination of subjectivity, at the expense of the routine’s aesthetics.
This is spreadsheet thinking, content-indifferent, devoid of meaning. It’s when efficiency is an end rather than a means. It’s when a metric subsumes the thing itself. It’s a consultant’s logic, which regards all enterprise solely as a means of value extraction. It’s the difference between coverage of Holzhauer’s winning streak that asked, “Can You Answer the Jeopardy! Clues James Holzhauer Couldn’t?” (Vulture) and that which graphed his “otherworldly” “money-winning pace” (FiveThirtyEight). In Take Time for Paradise, Bart Giamatti, the former MLB commissioner and literature professor, delineates “freely chosen leisure activities, games or others” from “tedious work.” For Giamatti, games are “active, not idle; entertaining, not simply useful; perfecting of our humanity, not merely exploitative of it.” And yet we increasingly surrender to the impulse to turn our games and hobbies into tedious work constrained by prescribed strategy, and our experiences into accomplishments.
Although I lost my game of Jeopardy!, the J! Archive record tells me that I finished with a higher Coryat score than either of my opponents. A Coryat score, named after a former Jeopardy! champion, is a contestant’s score regardless of any wagers made on Daily Doubles or during Final Jeopardy!. It controls for a player’s strategy, either well executed or, as in my case, not. But my Coryat score masks the dramatic irony of having Art as my Final category, or that earlier in the game there was a sports-related category—which I considered to be one of my subject-matter strengths—and yet I only responded to one of the five clues correctly. This statistic, like some of the advanced statistics in baseball, attempts to isolate a player’s performance from the randomness inherent in gameplay—or, looked at another way, the aspects of the game subject to human fallibility, either the player’s own or others’. But what is gameplay without this fallibility? Gameplay, in Giamatti’s words, is “an experience of … the repeated interplay of energy and order, of improvisation and obligation, of strategy and tactic, all neatness denied and ambiguity affirmed by the incredible power of the random, by accident or luck … by mental lapses or physical failure…” In a compelling game, the potential for error is inseparable from the pursuit of perfection.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with Moneyball. The best metrics can provide different angles from which to appreciate the games we enjoy. But what is lost when these stats and this way of thinking become the game—when we mistake Jeopardata for Jeopardy!? In Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, the German philosopher Fritz Heinemann warned that “both the spirit of technology and its frustration penetrate our behavior whether we notice it or not.” By technology Heinemann means actual mechanical technology, but also technique—strategy—that comes to dominate the fields to which it is applied and “brings about a simplification of their problems, but at the same time a loss in substance.” “The technician looks through his technical glasses” and sees everything as a “‘problem’ to be solved by reasoning and calculation.” For Heinemann, how we think changes what we think. Infatuation with technique, with strategy in and of itself, narrows our view. The difference between an artist and a mere technician, as Heinemann saw it, is that “the artist uses techniques and technical skills as a means to an end, whereas a technician adores them as ends in themselves.” This is not to say that Jeopardy! needs to be more artful, or even more existential (though Heinemann’s “I respond, therefore I am” formulation certainly sounds Jeopardy!-esque), only that there are alternatives to this metrics-obsessed point of view. Optimization cannot be the whole point if there is nothing we’re optimizing for.
In Answers, McNear writes that “the money is what makes things interesting” on Jeopardy!. But is it? “What I’ve found is that the majority of contestants care more about winning the game,” Trebek wagered instead. “The money is wonderful, but what they really want is to be able to call themselves a Jeopardy! champion.” Even Brad Rutter, who’s won more money playing Jeopardy! than anyone alive, “simply wanted to say he had been there.” Amy Schneider, too, acknowledges that there is more to be won than just money (despite winning more than one million dollars during her forty-game streak). And, for Schneider, the warm reception from fans didn’t just assure her that she could finally be “accepted for who [she] was,” the game itself was its own reward: seeking out trivia and knowledge “will not just make you better at Jeopardy!, but better at living in society. Better at understanding what is going on around you, and why, and what might happen next, and how you might prepare for it.”
The counterargument is, of course, that I can’t be so sentimental about a televised game show, in which money has always played a part. Ratings do go up during extended winning streaks; media coverage is more prominent during the show’s prime-time tournaments; the show’s commercialization ventures are successful, and I can’t begrudge the show for taking advantage. But what is the point of Jeopardy! when all we care about are buzzer attempts and wagers, when we no longer care about the 61 facts trotted out there every night, poking the tiniest pinholes into the unfathomable extent of the world? When we no longer care that Manhattan is the smallest island in the world with a population of more than a million people, or that in Buddhism an arhat is a person who has attained nirvana, or that Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin went to high school together, what refuge can there be?
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Perhaps this is only the lament of a sore loser. Perhaps I need to believe there is more to Jeopardy! than the dollar amounts on its game board, as consolation, so I don’t think of the money I might’ve won. Perhaps I am resentful of all this buzzer talk because I was all too adept with it, and look what good it did me—I buzzed in more often than my opponents, but I gave more incorrect responses too. I did not know who John Nance Garner was. I confused California poppies with buttercups. I thought boxing was wrestling, and then four clues later I thought bowling was wrestling too. I could not reduce Jeopardy! to mere technique.
As Jeopardy! pursues its own arcanum, and as an increasing number of contestants employ the aggressive playing style of would-be super-champions, the show risks cloistering itself, an insular conversation among initiates, the opposite of its earlier, knowledge-celebrating, horizon-broadening self-conception. Because optimization implies an end point; it implies that the game can be solved—and that this solving is why we watch. But Jeopardy! teaches us that there is always more we can know.
When people ask me about being on Jeopardy!, they do not ask me how many times I buzzed in, or what my Coryat score was. They mostly ask me if I was on the show when Trebek was still alive and what he was like (I was, but contestants only interact with the host on stage, not much more than what’s aired) and what it was like to be on television (surreal, disorienting) and what it takes to get on Jeopardy! (an online fifty-question test, then an in-person test and audition, then the hope that you were personable enough to convince the producers that they could put you on television). When people learn I lost on Jeopardy!, they ask me what the final clue was, to test whether they could have responded correctly themselves. I paraphrase the clue and wait the customary thirty seconds and prepare to act magnanimously either way. I tell them what I said the night before, about swearing off art, and promise them I’m taking the time to learn about it now. I didn’t win life-changing money on Jeopardy!, but I spend more time in art museums these days. I’ve learned, for example, that it’s the upper window that gives the house in American Gothic its titular style (I guess I’ve learned something about architecture too). In fact, I think I could get that clue correct today.
Image credit: ArcadeImages, Jeopardy – SNES Super Nintendo, 2020. Alamy Stock Photo.
If You Liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.