They create them that way because they are. In fact, very few questions on Jeopardy require a huge depth of knowledge. Usually from the clue, if you know a few basic things about the topic you can figure out the answer. Of course there are topics like literature and art that I am clueless on even at the most basic levels. Even then I can get some decent guesses just knowing some basic stuff. I bet Art History majors are like "wow, these are all softballs for art, and sometimes they don't get them!"

probably, but pop culture type stuff isn't that hard, and any non-spazz should be able to get a lot of it just from memory. i don't watch that much network television but i rarely go 0-for on TV categories.

academic challenge, yeah; it was sponsored by panasonic. i don't know about questions unlimited.

There was also a big thing many years ago about Jeopardy being biased toward men and that many categories were male-oriented (like sports). So I think as a result, they've watered down a lot of these so-called male categories.

But I agree with you. I find that many can be guessed without knowing a single thing about the topic and using the hidden clues within.

Sup bro?

If you read Ken Jenning's book, I think he does say that a lot of the people he remembers from his college bowl days have gone on Jeopardy!.

In a couple year Jeopardy will be a solved game.

hmm, okay, so maybe the way jeopardy has people buzz in only after alex finishes reading the questions equalizes things, since for half the questions, all 3 contestants know the answer. college bowl is probably ring in whenever you want, which decreases variance a lot, because excellent players will ring in when they hear key phrases in the middle of a question.

Yeah, he said his main advantage was the buzzer. He said the first couple of games were overwhelming, but once he got used to the buzzer, he was able to time it perfectly while his opponents were ringing in too early or late. Obviously he was a complete freak on top of that too.

I did college bowl once as an undergrad. We finished second... out of three teams one of which didn't show. There was a guy on the team we played was incredible. At least the one we had the host read the questions out loud and stopped when you buzzed in so you can get screwed by answering what would have been correct but not guessing the right question.

more failboat bidding today, when a guy fishes for a daily double having 6k early in double jeopardy and champion at the time had 14k - the dude bets 3k. facepalm

That was terrible. And while in the game he was out of contention going into final jeopardy, had he gone for a true daily double he would have been able to catch the leader in FJ. /results oriented

It really made no sense because if he gets it wrong and gets knocked down to 3k'ish then he's essentially out of the game anyway. Why potentially cripple yourself and still NOT give yourself a chance to win?

This is the answer. Most quiz bowl questions (the Panasonic format is a complete aberration) are typically several sentences long with a number of clues of decreasing difficulty. Knowing obscure stuff is considerably more important than quick reflexes. If you're curious, most places show high-school trivia competitions on public access sometime during the week.

EDIT: Oh yeah, at least as important is the fact that most good quiz-bowlers are really really untelevisably ****ing weird.

His failing to bet it all on the DD in single jeopardy was pretty awful too. He'd just heard Alex explain that Roger was averaging $40k, so he bets enough to take a small lead early in the game? oops.

Don't know if it's been posted yet, but here's Roger's big DD http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsyk9aQHDPQ#t=2m55s

ok I just pretty much wrote the same thing bobman posted to Triumph in a PM.

I did quiz bowl in High School and while our team was pretty good (won district and thus got a chance to go to nationals 2 years in a row), the furthest we got was maybe number 10 nationally. Definitely preferred the emphasis on obscure knowledge as opposed to buzzer speed.

The people who are really serious and continue to do quiz bowl in college are pretty weird. A lot of kids who were awesome in high school and fairly normal looking give it up once they face the temptations of college.

I was never a top tier player but I would say that my memory is much better than most people. And while my memory didn't get worse, I didn't immerse myself in acquiring a lot of trivia knowledge in college as I did in high school.

BTW, after watching the clip again, I was reminded that the, um, "fem" guy in the middle found a last-second DD. He couldn't take the lead, but at least he made a big enough bet to get within reach if he got it right. Unfortunately for him, he was asked to name the Russian guy who invented the helicopter. Luckily for me, I read all the macho Tom Clancy books during the cold war, and I was quite familiar with the Sikorski helicopter. This guy on Jeopardy, however, clearly had no idea, and I remember thinking, "Too bad--that's way too manly a question for this fruit." Losing that big bet crippled him, and just his luck, FJ category was Musical Theater (which he got right, only he didn't have any chips left to bet).

does sklansky deserve credit for this? i wondered who came up with it, not that it will ever be employed on typical basis during our lifetimes.

Kudos to last night's cannon fodder, er, "opponents", who both went DD hunting to try to keep those WMDs out of Roger's hands.

To no avail, of course. Go, Roger! I love you, man!

(They each found one, and each made a much larger bet than we're used to seeing. I'm hoping Roger's success with big bet strategy revolutionizes how the game is played.)

It won't.

If Jeopardy has taught us anything its that people that are good at trivia aren't really all that good at playing Jeopardy. The odds that he revolutionizes the game are pretty slim.

What I find amusing about the whole thing is that the average guy practices up for Minute to Win It and 99% of the super smart Jeopardy guys don't prepare at all for the non-trivia aspects of the game.

ytf: i missed single jeopardy last night, but the woman had to ship it given her money position, and the guy wagered horribly, like people tend to do in double jeopardy. i don't think that was exactly a revolution; just because he wagered more doesn't mean he wagered well.

Is this the one in Orlando? God I hated that tournament, such a shame to finish my career at that piece of crap. And what bothered me most was that the people there took it so seriously and really thought they had made a fantastic tournament when in reality the style of the questions made their tournament such crap.

I don't want to sound bitter. My team was probably the 15th or so best team the year we played, but we had a much better chance to win the Panasonic tournament than any normal tournament.

For those who don't know, at the Panasonic tournament, six teams play at the same time. The problem with this is that it allows teams that have huge knowledge gaps to just pound what they know and continue on in the tournament (I think you always had to finish top two to advance) as the other teams split the points. For my team, which had no legitimate science and virtually no chance of ever getting a science question right, this meant we had to destroy the liberal arts, where we were very good, not better than the other really good teams, but on par with them.

However, only one team gets a crack at answering a question. So they read a question and you can buzz in at any time-- you do not have to wait until the question is over. This is incredibly stupid, especially since a fair number of their literature questions boil down to the following: "Match up the following authors with their works: A) Bulgakov, B) Dostoyevsky, C) Tolstoy, D) Turgenev. 1) Fathers and Sons, 2) The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 3) The Gambler, 4) The Master and Margarita"

The strategy for this question is to hit the buzzer at about the time where you get the first snippet of a syllable on the third work, because if you can identify all three works you obviously get the fourth one. In this case, you would be pretty screwed because you would get "the" and probably have to go with Bulgakov for C since it's unlikely they would use a Bulgakov work other than Master, but there are fair number of Dostoyevsky works they could use. And this is what happened to me on the two lit questions I was expected to answer, which if I had gotten just one correct my team goes to the finals (where we would have won, only because we ran insanely, insanely hot on the questions they asked in the finals, just all this really weird obscure stuff that we happened to know and none of the teams were getting them).

I don't know where I'm at with my rant, but the list-style of questions is just awful, and no tournament should come down to getting lucky on a coin toss because you have to ring in so fast because every single other team in the game, save Idaho, is doing the same thing. This really is not sour grapes, because my team had no business beating those guys, they were powerhouses who crushed us time and time again and it would have been a huge upset if we pulled it off. We shouldn't have had a chance, but did because of the asinine structure. It's just terrible.

Also, that utterly disgusting Hollywood red carpet treatment before the final dinner made me want to throw up. I just hated it that those people got so much credit and thought they deserved said credit for blowing thousands on a tournament that sucked ass when Case Western was running awesome tournaments and spending like ten bucks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP7za...eature=related

What the hell was going on with this wagering by the eventual winner?

Are you referring to her wagering $1000 on a subject she had approximately 0% chance of answering correctly?

I cry every time I miss a sports question on Jeopardy. It took me 40 seconds to come up with that Superbowl answer.

Thanks for reminding me.

(I also missed the Andy Roddick question this week.)