TOC Qualifiers: Justin Bolsen and Stephen Webb
The HSRT and regular play both yield championship qualifiers
If you follow the Inside Jeopardy! podcast, you’ll know that they refer to Jeopardy Air Time (JAT) and Jeopardy Production Time (JPT) as the timeframes they have to keep track of in talking about the show. For me, I keep up with JAT regardless of where I am with the recording on my DVR, so that I can keep the stats up to date, but Jeopardy Viewing Time still exists as travel and work conspire to build a backlog of episodes. In this case, JVT is filling in in patches, as I’m still missing the quarters and semis from my trip, but I’ve caught up on the finals and the resumption of regular play. That prioritization was so that I could catch up with the latest two qualifications for the 2023 Tournament of Champions: Justin Bolsen and Stephen Webb.
HSRT Champion Justin Bolsen
In the HSRT semifinal preview, I noted that the contestants had been allocated into games in three somewhat coherent groups. Justin’s allocation in Semifinal 2 was in the moderate band, and he came in with median attempt value and just above median conversion. The final put him up against Maya Wright, who went into the semifinals with low attempt value and high conversion, and Jackson Jones, who went into the round with high attempt value and low conversion. Both Maya and Jackson modulated a bit on conversion, with both players’ accuracies moving towards mean, while Justin held on to his high accuracy marks.
The finals were competitive, especially with the buzzing scores in the second game breaking down $11200 for Maya to $11000 for Justin to $10400 for Jackson, but Jackson’s miss on a game 2 DD and Maya’s weaker game 1 made the difference for each of them, with Justin’s steady conversion working in his favor.
5-Day Champion: Stephen Webb
I did a statistical summary for Stephen when he finished the last week before the HSRT with three wins, so let’s see how his fourth and fifth victories have affected his statistics.
Average buzz score: $18040 (8th out of 27, up from $17867 (8th))
Average attempt value: $35301 (12th, up from $33770 (17th))
Average conversion value percent: 51.5% (8th, down from 53.2% (5th))
Average buzz value percent: 61.3% (9th, up from 60.1% (11th))
Average accuracy value percent: 85.1% (9th, down from 88.2% (6th))
DD+: -0.34 (23rd, did not post before)
There’s not a lot of movement, which might be good news for the idea that statistics should converge to some sort of talent level over time. What movement there is reflects small changes in how Stephen’s game is working. He’s getting in on the buzzer a little bit more (which got discussed on the IJ! podcast), but he’s also missing a little bit more (which is entirely from his fourth game). Overall his buzz score is a little higher as a result, which is good because he hasn’t been finding Daily Doubles at the expected rate since his first game.
Stephen’s game continues to remain in the zone where a continuing streak is possible but not reliable, but the tournament berth is already assured.
Jeopardy Masters
I’m still looking at this post's graph of opponent BuzI and wondering how you don’t favor James in this upcoming competition. But beyond that, I won’t be saying too much about Masters in advance because I’m going to today’s initial taping and stepping a little into JPT. Don’t expect a lot of prediction (when have I ever done that much justified prediction anyway?), but I am looking forward to seeing what the league format shows us about strategy and gameplay when the episodes and stats come out.
Programming Notes
I have a few non-recap posts planned alongside continued redevelopment of my statistics pipeline. I don’t have a set schedule for these and it’ll depend on how much attention I devote to said redevelopment around regular life and work. The first planned one is going to be on why I think win probability is harder to work on in Jeopardy than in baseball, so if that’s interesting to you keep an eye out.
Will Masters be a spinoff like Celebrity, or will it air in the regular syndicated rotation?