Mar 27-31: Introducing the Champions Wild Card
The JeoparDAY announcement of the postseason's next iteration makes a good case for J!ometry's existence
Champions Wild Card
Okay, so, wow. Jeopardy has announced that it is inviting back all champions from Season 39 to participate in a new level of postseason competition: the Champions Wild Card. The CWC will slot in after the Second Chance Competition, taking in its winners plus the champions not qualifying directly for the Tournament of Champions, and setting them against each other for slots in the TOC. There is no precise format or even number of slots for any level of this competition yet, but I think this provides the endless amount of flexibility in how to structure the Jeopardy postseason that is necessary to move it from “whenever we have enough contestants” to a standard annual calendar.
It also serves some additional goals. First, there are probably two most exciting forms of Jeopardy to watch, if you’re the type of viewer who is in it for the competition and gameplay and not just the trivia itself. The first form comes from above-average-level players (not necessarily highest, but higher), driving the game in speed and quality and pushing scores higher. The second comes from low talent spread among players, driving competition and amplifying the tension behind clue selection, guessing, and wagering. Codifying a structure that will inherently work towards both of those forms simultaneously is going to produce some exciting Jeopardy.
A common refrain in response has been to wonder about the fate of all the people out there still trying to get on the show. This will eat up slots for them, and maybe we’ll miss out on new and exciting players we would have seen otherwise. And yeah, maybe. It’s a downside. I think the return on the risk — the very likely run of very good entertainment we’re going to get — is worth exploring.
The second goal I think this serves is very immediate and specific to this season: The current roster of TOC-eligible players is very male and very white. But the demographics of the champions as a whole are less so. I think providing an avenue of competition to mix up this pool a bit is also a good thing. I’m interested in seeing how this mixes with the selected level of difficulty the competitions end up having, as high level also generally means less “trivia canon.”
It’s not hard to look at this format, with SCC feeding into CWC feeding into TOC, and see a strong influence from soccer competitions like the UEFA Champions League, which slots in different seedings of national league champions or high-finishers into different entry levels of competition. The format provides a number of stages of roughly equitable competition along the way to its finals, and it’s highly watchable. We’re going to see something similar here. It’s new, it’s different, we’re not sure how to value the importance yet. But we’ll learn, and I think it’ll be worth it.
Site Updates
In order to support looking at players at different possible levels of competition, I’ve given the season/period summary pages (such as the current period’s) controls for which contestants to display based on number of wins. These are available as dropdown boxes at the top of the page and affect the listings in the tabular data as well as the graphs. Really, these have been possible to construct for a while with some URL hacking (that’s how I make most of my graphs) but now they’re in your control, too. Changing the controls will also update the URL, so you can bookmark or share particular setups you come back to frequently.
I anticipate this will be pretty useful, because there’s a lot less information on short-term champions. The underlying data becomes more necessary to differentiate among them and understand their chances in this new format.
Trending This Week
Total attempts fell from 112.6/game last week to 108.0/game this week. This was driven by a drop contestants attempts the least, widening the gameplay spread.
I played with rolling average graphs a bit following last week’s launch and discovered that average winnings have been falling over the last couple weeks, but that this drop is really just moving into line with the long-term average. Also, if you’re looking for why the show might be concentrating so much on particular contestants, this is a pretty good reason.
This Week’s Champions
Nicole Rudolph
Average buzz score: $13200 (19th out of 34 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $31701 (25th)
Average conversion value percent: 41.7% (20th)
Average buzz value percent: 57.3% (19th)
Average accuracy value percent: 72.8% (23rd)
Average DD score: $0 (t-30th)
Average DD+: -0.19 (26th)
Average end DJ score: $13200 (25th)
Nicole is a roughly median-level champion in the buzzing game, balanced between timing and accuracy, who nonetheless put together nearly two runaways in her two games. In her first game, she augmented a $1000 Buz$ edge over Tamara Ghattas with an $8000 margin in DD$, pushing into lock territory when she found and got DD3. In her second game, she held an $8000 edge in Buz$ over Lisa Sriken, but held a $3800 deficit in DD$. Nicole still managed to hover around the runaway margin throughout DJ, but fell below when Lisa got clue 29, which ended up being the last clue of the game due to time. This was still a strong crush position, but her incorrect FJ cost her the game.
Lisa Sriken
Average buzz score: $7267 (34th out of 34 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $35406 (12th)
Average conversion value percent: 20.3% (34th)
Average buzz value percent: 68.9% (2nd)
Average accuracy value percent: 28.1% (34th)
Average DD score: $1333 (23rd)
Average DD+: +0.54 (8th)
Average end DJ score: $8600 (34th)
Lisa’s value lost on incorrect responses (the middle of each bar) is visibly larger than other Season 39 champions’.
Lisa is a champion on the extremes of most measures in the buzzing game. She has very good timing but very bad accuracy — in fact, her highest accuracy value percentage in a game (50.7% on Wednesday) is still below any other Season 39 champion’s average. She takes a lot of shots and makes a lot of incorrect guesses, but in her wins she was able to make it up enough in volume of attempts. Her average attempt value comes in at $35406 (12th this season) and average attempt count at 40.0 (tied for 16th), both of which are on the cusp of high but not particularly high for season 39 — but both are high for this part of season 39, and high enough to get two wins.
Sharon Stone
Average buzz score: $12000 (26th out of 34 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $32904 (22nd)
Average conversion value percent: 36.5% (25th)
Average buzz value percent: 44.3% (33rd)
Average accuracy value percent: 83.0% (10th)
Average DD score: $4750 (t-6th)
Average DD+: +0.77 (1st)
Average end DJ score: $16750 (15th)
Sharon relies on her accuracy to buoy her buzzing game, which turns out to be decent even with bad buzzer timing. She’s had a lot of success with Daily Doubles so far, finding and converting two in each game. She hasn’t yet been in a situation where she has the means and the necessity to go hard in wagering on these DDs (her $4000 wager on Thursday came when she had $10000 and a $7200 lead), so I’m waiting to see what happens if she does find herself there in this week’s games.
Two runaways in two games is hard to argue with, but Sharon’s strongest fundamentals are in accuracy and finding DDs, and I’m not sure the latter is intentional as we haven’t seen a strong hunting selection from her yet. She’ll likely be competitive but vulnerable as we start the week.