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At some point, I should get around to posting, or at least collecting, my thoughts on his recent run. As a high-level competitive trivia player in the 1990s, we'd had a lengthy set of discussions over how to break down the game on usenet.
James' playstyle applied a lot of the theory we discussed then, likely with much more rigorous statistical analysis of the game then we had readily available. It's not that James has played in a way no one had though of. To a large degree, we had thought of playing as he did.
Which is to say - aggressively chase high value questions. Bet extremely high on daily doubles. Build a large lead early, to get opponents thinking about you instead of just answering questions. And above all, to get into final Jeopardy! with an insurmountable lead. I could not list, even then, the number of people I know who lost because they made mistakes in Final Jeopardy! that they would not otherwise make.
What seperated James was that he actually played this way. Several of us talked about trying to do this. Most of us (I've not actually gotten on) played conventionally once on. I, myself, could not pull it off. My get-rate sits at about 83%, which isn't high enough to bet that much on the doubles. You'd want to be over 90%. I also suspect I did not have the buzzer speed/timing. I had above average speed in college, but I was not elite then and certainly not now in my 40s.
I do not know James personally, whereas I did know Ken Jennings - having played against Ken's BYU teams many times when I was in college. (More accurately, Bryce Inouye's BYU teams that also had Ken on them - he got much better, later, when he started working as a Question writer) But, I do know James by reputation, and through mutual competitors on the current trivia circuit. His success here is remarkable, because I know people who are much better than him on other trivia formats, but who do not match his performance on J!.
James' playstyle applied a lot of the theory we discussed then, likely with much more rigorous statistical analysis of the game then we had readily available. It's not that James has played in a way no one had though of. To a large degree, we had thought of playing as he did.
Which is to say - aggressively chase high value questions. Bet extremely high on daily doubles. Build a large lead early, to get opponents thinking about you instead of just answering questions. And above all, to get into final Jeopardy! with an insurmountable lead. I could not list, even then, the number of people I know who lost because they made mistakes in Final Jeopardy! that they would not otherwise make.
What seperated James was that he actually played this way. Several of us talked about trying to do this. Most of us (I've not actually gotten on) played conventionally once on. I, myself, could not pull it off. My get-rate sits at about 83%, which isn't high enough to bet that much on the doubles. You'd want to be over 90%. I also suspect I did not have the buzzer speed/timing. I had above average speed in college, but I was not elite then and certainly not now in my 40s.
I do not know James personally, whereas I did know Ken Jennings - having played against Ken's BYU teams many times when I was in college. (More accurately, Bryce Inouye's BYU teams that also had Ken on them - he got much better, later, when he started working as a Question writer) But, I do know James by reputation, and through mutual competitors on the current trivia circuit. His success here is remarkable, because I know people who are much better than him on other trivia formats, but who do not match his performance on J!.