Feb 6-10, 2023: Strategic Infliction
Falling attempts, late DDs, and different winning techniques in this week's games
Attempt Watch 2023
Total attempts continued to fall this week, as the peak led by Yogesh Raut and Troy Meyer subsides.
Attempts by attempt leaders fell to an average of 41.6 per game this week, which is still high compared to a post-Amy season 38 baseline, but low for season 39 and 2023 in particular. Attempts by the second-most attempting players fell to 35.0 per game for the week. This is similarly low for recent times but high compared to last season. Median performance is the thing that’s behaved differently in this peak compared to others, so it’s worth noting its volatility.
Daily Double Timing
I had a strong feeling watching this week that players were finding the Daily Doubles later in the round than normal, but I wasn’t sure if that was true or if I was just reacting to what I thought were selections that were unoptimized for DDs. So I pulled some numbers on that for season 39.
So far in regular play this season, DD1 has been found on the 12.1th clue of the J round. DD2 has been on the 8.5th clue of DJ, and DD3 has been on the 17.7th clue. In comparison, this week the averages were at clue 15.2 for DD1, 11.8 for DD2, and 21.0 for DD3. Those are obviously all larger numbers, so it wasn’t nothing, but it’s largely driven by Thursday’s game where the DJ DDs were on clues 23 and 30. Notably, I watched this game and Friday’s with my husband Jeff, which is unusual. I can tell I’ve inflicted enough strategy discussion on him because he was shouting “No!” at the television when contestants picked from the $400 row. In the end, I think that probably skewed my perception beyond what was actually deserved, even if the numbers show there was something to it.
Champions
Matthew Marcus
4-day champion Matthew Marcus ranks well on the statistical board of champions this cycle. His average attempt value of $38983 ranks sixth among the twenty-five champions, and he converted an average of 52.8% of that into buzz scoring, good for fifth among the champions. His value lay primarily in a game of accurate responses on top of average-for-a-champion buzzer timing. Not surprisingly for someone continuing to attempt a lot as the peak is waning, he got a lot of estimated value out of solo attempts. I don’t have it at hand yet, but I’ll be curious to see how those solo attempts fared for him in terms of correctness. Some upcoming work should allow some insight into that.
Matthew’s general buzzing game was important as he generally found fewer DDs than expected, averaging 0.2 below expectation per game. The buzzing finds him hanging out with the high ranks of the season statistically, but the DDs brought him down. Ironically, it wasn’t finding too few DDs that was the issue in his final game, it was finding too many — and failing to convert them. Matthew outscored Dan in the buzzing game, but lost $7000 on two DDs compared to Dan’s gain of $10000 on the single DD2.
Dan Wohl
1-day champion Dan Wohl averaged $28313 of attempt value across his two games, which is below average for contestants as a whole this season. His first game lock and his second game lead owe a lot to his accuracy: Dan made an average of $14500 on $14900 of buzz value, good for 97.0% and the highest percentage of any champion this season. He combined it with a large DD2 wager in his first game to win, and used it to combat Mira’s speed in his second game and take a lead into FJ. Accuracy feels like an understated skill at times, but Dan combined it with average timing to build an average 51.6% conversion value percentage, the same as Troy Meyer and sixth of the champions this season.
Mira Hayward
2-day champion Mira Hayward hasn’t yet led in a game going into FJ, but she also hasn’t been crushed in the scoring yet. This has let her FJ gets carry her across the finish line, as she’s been the only correct player on both her Finals so far. Mira isn’t a high attempter. With $31948 per game, she’s just ahead of Dan in this season’s ranks and just below the average contestant, but she is able to buzz in a lot. With fewer attempts, that means it’s coming from good rhythm with the buzzer, and she’s far to the right in the graph of timing value.
Mira’s accuracy value is just 55.6%, which is quite low, but the timing keeps her afloat. The buzz percentage is fourth-best among this season’s champions in both number and value. She finds slightly fewer DDs than expected but seems to select with the categories in mind a bit more, so that might change if there’s some DDs hiding in columns she favors.
Inclusion, Allyship, and Support
So part of the reason I delayed the post last week to Tuesday was because I spent the week before bingeing Élite and it ate up all my time. I end up doing things like that when left on my own too long, and Jeff had been gone for two weeks. (I started learning saxophone as well; it was an interesting time for all it felt boring and lonely.) But it’s only part. Part of it was also me deciding that I needed to talk about inclusion and allyship. I know you’re probably not here for that, and that’s fine. We’re here at the bottom of the post and there’s no more statistics after it. This is just something I felt like I needed to talk about, if I was going to talk about anything. Of course, I wrote most of this last week before posting, and then I took it out. Then I felt like I wasn’t being true to what I wanted, so this week I’m putting it back in.
This is in the air in some parts of J! social media because there’s debate over what being an ally with trans people means, and how to handle when there are flaws in allyship. (This all in the air generally because of Hogwarts Legacy and the continuing problems with financially supporting JK Rowling, and that bled over.) Being a good ally is complicated and comes with a lot of blind spots, and it’s hard to see the blind spots even when they’re pointed out. Sometimes they are difficult even when seen. I deal with that a lot myself, coming from a different slice of the LGBTQ+ community with different and often lesser issues to deal with. I certainly don’t have solid answers on everything.
What I do have is this: The health and happiness of LGBTQ+ people depends on accepting people as they are in these respects and accepting them as part of society and public spaces. Acceptance in these spaces allows for very little in the way of caveats or exceptions, because then it’s no longer acceptance. It’s barely toleration, and the shift from acceptance to toleration is nearly always a sign for us that those boundaries will tighten further and that danger is coming. That’s not something we should need to be worried about with allies most of the time. Look, it’s going to happen, and every LGBTQ+ person knows that. No one is perfect at this. But it should happen less than it does.
Does this have really much to do with trivia? Yeah, in the sense that trivia is a public space and a public community. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate in working with Jeopardy statistics is that I get a sense of when different people with different sets of knowledge and different approaches play each other. The way the trivia canon has grown (sometimes) and been able to reward people with different backgrounds. That at our best we celebrate all the wildly different things about each other and the ways we know things or know about things. I’m better at trivia than I would be if I were trying to hide being gay, trying to hide the reasons why I know some pieces of it. (Here is a fun example of that both working and not working simultaneously.) But I talked briefly about having a husband on television and had some experiences as a result that I found threatening. Some people understood. Some people did not. I mostly don’t blame them for not, including the nice police officer who wanted to know more about the show. Nonetheless, the experiences existed, and may still exist. I keep living, and I note where support came from.
It’s good for all of us if we look to support each other, and if we understand that we don’t naturally see all the threats to safety or happiness that others see and deal with. Some things are just not in what we see, and yet we all depend on each other despite our partial blindnesses. Last Pride I said I was going to think about connection, and grace, and the will to keep going. This is the same thing. In large part, the will to keep going comes from the first two.
It feels really trite as I write it, and I’m also cognizant that more than zero people will likely ask why “everything has to be gay.” The answer is that everything is gay for me, and everything is trans for trans people, and so on. We are never not living that, and ironically the only way to work on making it not define everything is to push through to the other side of openness, even as that opens the door to other dangers.
Thanks for reading, if you did. I appreciate it.