#sodacrackers

hi thank you for sending me this ask because i’m very passionate about jeopardy and this answer is prob gonna be more than you bargained for on account of i am very passionate about jeopardy lmfao i’m also writing this post for my irl friend who is sayin the same thing to me

james’ final jeopardy wager actually makes perfect sense! he didn’t throw the game at all. going into final jeopardy james had $23,400 and emma had $26,600. emma knew (even if she had never seen james play—he had a streak of 32 games and is a professional gambler) that it was james’ m.o. to bet BIG and that he wasn’t afraid to do it. she operated under the assumption that james was going to bet it all, and james knew that she would. she had to bet big in order to secure her win (which of course she did, with a bet of $20,201) and the only way james could have possibly won was if she got the final jeopardy question wrong. if wouldn’t have mattered if james had bet big. emma’s wager was big enough that even if he bet it all, she would have beaten him by a dollar.

with james knowing that the only way he could win was if she got the question wrong, he was more concerned about the third place guy, jay, who went into final jeopardy with $11,000. emma was going to have to bet almost all of it, and if james bet all his money and they both got the question wrong, jay would have won. james bet the $1399 so that even if he got the question wrong and jay doubled his money, he would be still be ahead of jay by $1. he was thinking about jay when he made that wager, not emma, because it all hinged on whether she got the question wrong and it’s not like he could have controlled that. does that make any sense? this post on reddit breaks it down better than i probably could if it doesn’t

what would have truly been heartbreaking was if emma had actually wagered low enough that james could’ve surpassed her by betting it all, but of course that didn’t happen

during his run, jeopardy experts estimated that the probability of james losing a game was 3/100 (can’t find the source but i know it read it), and with him losing on his 33rd game it’s safe to say they were pretty on the money! everything was kinda stacked against him this game. he was up against not just one but two supremely smart competitors (emma even wrote her master’s thesis on jeopardy trivia questions!!) who were able to take enough answers away from him, and emma was amazingly fast with the buzzer (one of james’ big advantages was that he had practiced the buzzer at home and even read jeopardy champ fritz holznagel’s book about it); landing on the daily double right out of the gate really hurt him because he hadn’t gotten any money to maximize his profits and could only bet $1000, and then emma got both daily doubles in double jeopardy; and it seems that james wasn’t very strong in the shakespeare category, which emma evidently was.

also, james is of course good at looking on the bright side of all his wins, but tbh you can kinda tell it’s really eating him up inside that he was only $58,000 from ken jenning’s record and didn’t beat it. not only that, but he’s made fun of the theory that he threw the game on twitter lmfao