Apr 10-14, 2023: Lowering the Volume
Total attempts are down, and solo play drives wins when contention is low
Trivia!
I played against fellow 2022 ToCer Megan Wachspress in last week’s episode of You Should Know Better!, a fun trivia game podcast hosted by Season 37 3-game Jeopardy champion Mike Nelson. The next episode may be out by the time you read this, but you should totally skip that and go back to last week. (Just kidding, I really enjoy this show and I’m not just saying that because I was on it.) Mike gets a mix of celebrities and J contestants (not together) and everyone has a fun time doing some trivia. Plus you get to find out what I think is in a Waldorf salad! It is… not correct.
Trending This Week
Average total attempts fell this week, from 110/game last week to 96/game this week, which we haven’t seen since Season 38. Correct buzzing responses held steady, going from 48.4/game to 48.2/game. As contestants were getting about the same board coverage but with fewer attempts, estimated contention dropped significantly, falling to its lowest level since the second week of Season 39. Despite seeing declines in attempts from all three podiums, the decreased contention elevates solo versus timing. Accordingly, Ben Chan tops the Season 39 champions’ leaderboard with an average of 10.0 solo attempts each game. (His solo value is lower than Matthew Marcus’s and Luigi de Guzman’s, who each needed to work more of the bottom of the board in order to create solo attempts.)
As always, it’s impossible to untangle cause and effect among board difficulty, contestant overall ability, board-contestant interaction, and differences in gameplay. For example, Ben may have attempted fewer times than he could have as games became mostly locked partway through DJ, in which case a less competitive environment recursively pushed itself into an even less competitive environment. There’s not complete way to estimate board difficulty on its own. When benchmarking myself, I have used a measure I call Combined Contestant Coryat Positive (CCCP), which adds only the positive contributions of all contestants (except if multiple responses are counted correct). Think of it as a Team Coryat with an inauspicious acronym. I just got back into tracking myself this week and came in well under CCCP on Wednesday and Thursday, but surpassed it on Friday. Any particular individual results, including the on-stage results are noisy, so there’s not a good measure contained within the show itself.
Final Jeopardy correctness jumped back up to 53.3% this week, turning around a prolonged decline. We got one Triple Get, one Triple Stumper, one single, and two doubles for 8 out of 15. The longer term rolling averages are still dragging and will take a couple positive weeks to pull them up, but we might be headed that way.
This Week’s Champions
Rachel Clark
Average buzz score: $9900 (37th out of 40 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $22630 (40th)
Average conversion value percent: 39.7% (28th)
Average buzz value percent: 43.9% (39th)
Average accuracy value percent: 90.3% (4th)
Average DD score: $2200 (22nd)
Average DD+: +0.25 (21st)
Average end DJ score: $11100 (36th)
I realized that with CWC coming, it would be nice to be more complete and “close the book” a bit better with champions who return on Mondays but don’t win the return game. Accordingly, I’m starting with Rachel and completing her statistics with both games in the books.
Rachel is a high-accuracy champion, but with very low attempt volume and buzzer timing. She was able to win the close-fought match on April 7 by keeping it close enough to wager for the Triple Stumper that happened, but wasn’t able to keep up in her next game. There’s kind of two possibilities for high accuracy/low volume players. One is that they have a strong sense of exactly what their knowledge is and are working at their limits, and only more study and trivia knowledge growth will help. The other is that they have too cautious a sense of what their knowledge is and should work on pushing themselves to attempt more. With more people returning to play in the fall, we’ll see more differences in how these two options play as they return.
Robbi Ramirez
Average buzz score: $12300 (28th out of 40 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $25540 (36th)
Average conversion value percent: 46.4% (16th)
Average buzz value percent: 66.2% (6th)
Average accuracy value percent: 67.4% (30th)
Average DD score: $2600 (t-16th)
Average DD+: -0.03 (28th)
Average end DJ score: $14900 (24th)
Robbi is also a lower-volume champion, with an attempt value that is definitely affected by his difficult time with DJ in Tuesday’s game (in what I thought was a rather weird set of categories). The direct buzz percentage is quite high, and reflects a fairly large amount of solo attempting he was able to get in during DJ on Monday, though his competitive timing seems decent as well.
Kat Jepson
Average buzz score: $10600 (t-32nd out of 40 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $25429 (37th)
Average conversion value percent: 40.0% (27th)
Average buzz value percent: 55.8% (25th)
Average accuracy value percent: 68.9% (29th)
Average DD score: $4000 (t-9th)
Average DD+: +0.04 (26th)
Average end DJ score: $14600 (26th)
Continuing the theme, Kat is another low-volume champion. She was able to use game-best accuracy and a pair of DJ Daily Doubles in Tuesday’s game to turn a slim lead in Buz$ into a crushing lead in game score but found herself well behind Ben in Wednesday’s match.
Ben Chan
Average buzz score: $18400 (9th out of 40 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $32794 (24th)
Average conversion value percent: 56.3% (5th)
Average buzz value percent: 64.2% (12th)
Average accuracy value percent: 88.0% (8th)
Average DD score: $3267 (13th)
Average DD+: +0.95 (1st)
Average end DJ score: $21667 (7th)
Finally, we come to 3-game champion Ben Chan. Looking at the statistics through the same lens, I wouldn’t really apply “low-volume” to Ben, but he is below the median Season 39 champion in attempt value, and 13th out of 14 3+ game champions. Buzzer percentage and accuracy both factor into his conversion rate in balanced fashion. Where Ben shines the most is in hunting for Daily Doubles, earning nearly an extra DD per game through selection. He’s found seven out of nine DDs so far and cashed in on six. The money earned has been modest because he’s mostly used late-game DDs to defensively to lock down games where he already has a large lead, while he took a large hit on the very first DD he found.
Again, it’s hard to differentiate among the many factors that drive low attempt values, so we’ll need to wait to see how Ben does next to evaluate that. Unfortunately, it looks like he’s not returning directly as the J! website has three new contestants for today’s game, so we’ll really have to wait.