Trending This Week
Total attempts rose this week to 101.2/game after the prior week’s low of 92.2. Correct answers, scoring, and Final Jeopardy success rate all rebounded as well. Attempting was generally on the rise this week, but the lion’s share of the increase can be attributed directly to Hannah Wilson’s three games. After a moderate start of 34 on Wednesday, she notched 44 and 45 attempts on Thursday and Friday, with Thursday’s number putting her 16 ahead of her closest competitor.
This Week’s Champions
Kevin Belle
Average buzz score: $11950 (33rd out of 50 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $21444 (49th)
Average conversion value percent: 55.1% (6th)
Average buzz value percent: 62.9% (18th)
Average accuracy value percent: 85.2% (13th)
Average DD score: $200 (t-42nd)
Average DD+: -0.24 (41st)
Average end DJ score: $12150 (39th)
The first half of Season 39 produced strings of champions on the right side of the graph — lots of attempts, often with moderate buzzer rhythm and response accuracy. The second half has produced strings of champions along the top of the graph — high conversion through rhythm and accuracy but with lower attempt volume. But we haven’t had anyone as successful as Kevin this far to the left in this graph since the start of box score publication. Both his buzzer rhythm and accuracy are good but not great, but the combination was enough to see him through three wins despite generally being out-attempted by his opponents.
Hannah Wilson
Average buzz score: $17467 (11th out of 50 champions this period)
Average attempt value: $33568 (24th)
Average conversion value percent: 52.3% (8th)
Average buzz value percent: 65.1% (13th)
Average accuracy value percent: 80.9% (17th)
Average DD score: $6500 (4th)
Average DD+: +0.75 (4th)
Average end DJ score: $23967 (5th)
Hannah occupies an interesting place along the top of the graph, where there’s a mix of champions and non-champions together. She’s stayed in the general area, but as moved around with some volatility from game to game. After two games, her attempt volume, conversion, and the split of conversion between buzzing and accuracy were all very close to Mattea Roach. After three games, her buzzer play looks a bit more like Stephen Webb, except that Hannah is also finding and capitalizing on Daily Doubles.
Intriguingly, Ben Chan is also in this statistical neighborhood. Although it’s more likely Hannah loses sometime this week than that she wins out, it’s definitely possible that the two will face either other next week when he returns.
Masters
Masters is starting today, and the most important thing to remember is that regardless of where and when you normally get your Jeopardy, Masters is on ABC at 8pm Eastern/Pacific and 7pm Central/Mountain. It’s also technically a different series, so your DVR is not going to automatically pick it up and you’ll need to set it separately. (On the plus side, if you forget, it’ll be on Hulu.)
I went back and forth on how to do a preview for Masters, but here’s the deal. I don’t think the bulk of the statistics we have are useful. Regular play is the bulk of our data, but regular play is different from championship tournament play, and this is definitely more like tournament play. Mattea and Matt each played only one tournament game. Amy, Andrew, and Sam all mostly played each other, and while you’d think that would be valuable predictively what you actually get is a lot of volatility. (Andrew has one of the worst buzzer rhythm games on record in the 2022 ToC Finals due to the competition.) James is basically an off-the-charts outlier in every category we can build stats for from before box scores, but Matt and Amy aren’t that far behind him and both of them caught mean regression in the increased competition.
But mostly, I’ve seen the first eight games of the competition. I don’t know how to do a preview that doesn’t leak that knowledge into itself, so I’m not going to. You’re going to see a lot of excellent, exciting Jeopardy gameplay, and I’ll be breaking it down here. But after it airs.