I'm sure there are people who know nothing about the show Jeopardy, but for those who do, they are watching another contestant turn into a near GOAT—Greatest of All Time.
I just got my 2021 blog postings compiled into the annual book and I was surprised to read I started to write about another Jeopardy champion, Matt Amodio, when he had just won 11 games. I looked at the back of the 2021 compilation, and I see I wrote about Amy on December 30th, wondering how she was going to fare into the New Year. Very well it turns out, thank you.
Amy at the close of show on January 14, 2022, has now gone 33 games for a total pile of cash of $111,800. Ken Jennings tells us she has answered over 1,000 clues correctly. She in now third in games won.
Each champion has their own style, and Amy's is conservative to a fault. She starts with the lowest denominations, but just keeps buzzer-beating the other contestants. She doesn't adhere to a scorched board approach of burning away the high amounts first. She doesn't gamble.
At the start of one show this week Ken told us that the day before Amy had answered 41 of 60 clues correctly. Of course it wasn't the prior day, it was the prior telecast. The show tapes six episodes in one day, loading up for later telecasts. Bring a change of clothes if you're the champ.
Amazingly, results don't seem to leak out. Amy has already met her match, or, is still going so strong that she has yet to be conquered. Either way, we the audience do not know.
How would you feel as a contestant to be told that the champion you're going to try and topple has now won over $1 million and over 30 straight games? Because of the taping schedule, these people do not even know such a person existthat before they get behind their little lectern. The contestants are being fed to the lion in the Roman Coliseum.
Aside from just winning, Amy had been knocking the Final Jeopardy question out of the ball park. Not so lately. She's wobbling there, but it doesn't matter. She's in no danger of losing since she always has more than twice what the nearest opponent has. And some opponents have so little money going into the final round that you feel sorry for them and wonder if they have enough to get back to Ohio, or wherever they're from.
The press media has caught onto her story. The NYT did a piece at the start of the week headlined 'Jeopardy' Streaks Now the Norm. Are the clues getting easier?
The producers flatly deny that, and I would say they're not. The low amounts are softballs, but they do get progressively harder as the amounts increase. Amy just makes it look easy.
The Final Jeopardy clues seem as clever as ever, but when you get the answer right and the champ falters, wasting say $20,000 on not being able to answer...
Cemeteries and Memorials
60,000 are at rest in a national memorial cemetery opened in 1949 in the crater of an extinct volcano in this state.
...you start to wonder how did they get there? Well, there were plenty of clues I had no clue of and Amy did.
One contestant offered Wyoming as the state; the other Oregon. Amy's going to get it, right? No. She offers California. Wastes $20,000, buy hey, it's Monopoly money at that point, right?
Yikes. A state with volcanoes can only be Hawaii, and it would be natural that there would be a huge veterans' cemetery there considering Pearl Harbor and the casualties from the Pacific conflicts with Japan in WWII. In 1949, Hawaii wasn't even a state. It was a territory
Being the NYT they try and theorize why there seems to a recent spate of long-running Jeopardy champions. The guy who dethroned Matt Amodio went 11 games himself before going under. Eleven is not a bad streak. Not a GOAT, but certainly one that keeps you in the top spot for over two weeks of telecasts.
Covid delays are offered an explanation. When Covid hit the contestants slated to go were held back because of the lockdown. The theory is they had time to study more and therefore were more likely to answer what can be truly obscure answers.
Despite Matt Amodio telling us he boned up on contemporary pop music while waiting for the lockdown to be lifted, it only led to his correctly answering one clue that he otherwise would have blanked out on. One.
Jim Holzhauer, who you should remember has advanced degrees in mathematics, tells us clusters happen. It's natural for there to appear aa a winning streak that is a product of chance.
"People always assume everything is a paradigm shift, when it is actually fairly normal for results to occasionally cluster."
And who better to talk about chance than Holzhauer, who is a professional gambler living in Las Vegas. He goes to the betting window like we go to the grocery store.
Amy's head is just filled with more facts than most of the rest of us. She tells us, "you just have to live life where you're learning stuff all the time." And she's a buzzer-beater, an art form of the game.
Amazingly, Ken Jennings, now a co-host of the show, won an incredible 74 games before losing. Amy's not even halfway there, but she's advancing.
Only time will tell where she's finally headed.
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