May 15-19, 2023: And I Wonder
Ben Chan defeats Hannah Wilson and continues his own streak, Masters reaches the semifinals
This Week’s Champions
I’ve only found a little time to write, so I’m not going to go into the full statistics for Hannah or Ben. Hannah’s are going to be mostly the same as the last weekly writeup, and her last game is such an outlier that I don’t think it’s a good reflection of her makeup as a player and I don’t feel bad in not taking the time to include it in a summary. Ben’s going to be around if I find time to write for next week, so that’s fine too.
In the meantime, first I need to acknowledge that Monday’s game went nothing like what I expected, with Ben dominating both in buzzer rhythm and solo attempts. A great victory over a great champion, and well deserved.
Still felt I could provide something a little less time-intensive, so if I had to summarize what Ben’s doing in a couple of graphs, here they are:
First, Ben is leading this season’s 3+ game champions in how valuable his conversion of attempts to buzzes is. He’s also second in accuracy, the conversion of those buzzes into money. So it’s no wonder he’s first in the overall conversion process. Factor in that he attempts more than most opponents and he’s got overwhelming production.
Second, Ben isn’t just searching for Daily Doubles. No, Ben is finding Daily Doubles. Even with his advantage in having more selections than his opponents, he still finds more Daily Doubles than expectation, at nearly an extra Daily Double per game. Out of 24 Daily Doubles in his games, he’s found 21. When you’re finding all the Daily Doubles and your buzzer game is strong, it almost doesn’t even matter if you convert the DDs, as his Friday game shows.
Masters
The second week of Masters largely followed the first, and James, Andrew, Mattea, and Matt have qualified for this week’s semifinals. Normally in making predictions, I try to qualify that they’re mostly unfounded and it’s hard to have much certainty in Jeopardy… but come on, y’all. James is a massive favorite.
James continues to dominate lead in attempts and dominate the buzzing game, and is the easy favorite. This is a boring prediction, but the right one.
I think the standings are correct and Andrew has had the second-best play in the tournament, but I think of the three underdogs he matches up least well with James. He’ll likely do much better in the semifinal without James in it. I think the profiles here are just too similar, and James is better.
Mattea is my most likely challenger to succeed. This may be surprising, but I think their knowledge set is just orthogonal enough to the others that a good set of categories will give them an advantage, and they have the buzzer rhythm to compete well when everyone is in.
Matt has been pressing the edge of his recall for the entire competition, and if he’s able to gain off of betting on himself then he’ll pick up points. If it’s just not there for him, he won’t. Matt’s got the most variability in how this can go.
An actual prediction overall, and the details here are gut feel: James over Andrew and Mattea in the final.
Do you think that Hannah was weirdly locked in on Friday, or were her opponents not getting it? Because if she can consistently tap into whatever happened there, she will be dangerous.