James Holzhauer versus Jeopardy!: how a pro gambler beat America’s biggest game show
Jeopardy! is a staple of US television; you don’t need to watch it to know it’s there. Since its inception in 1964, bar a temporary late-Seventies break, the quiz show has trundled along, practically unchanged. British TV has nothing quite as august: Jeopardy! has 18 years on Countdown, 22 on Catchphrase, 34 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And yet, in the last few weeks, something odd has happened: Jeopardy!’s viewing figures are suddenly beginning to rise.
On last night’s edition, James Holzhauer, a professional gambler, sailed into the final round with 13 straight victories already to his name. As per Jeopardy!’s idiosyncratic format, which reverses question and answer, the host Alex Trebek gave a prompt: “On May 1 1869, these two men met at the White House, four years and three weeks after a more historic meeting between them.” Holzhauer guessed that the answer was “Who are Grant and Lee?” He made a typically aggressive wager of $50,000 on being correct. He was, and by adding that figure to his score of $68,816, he won for the 14th consecutive night.
Holzhauer has now taken over $1 million home, and for the first time since 2004, Jeopardy! is making US headline news. One excited viewer is Ken Jennings, who caused that spike 15 years ago; his 74-game winning streak set an absurd new record, pushed viewing figures up 20 per cent, and temporarily made Jeopardy! the highest-rated syndicated show in America. He’s been enthusiastic about Holzhauer’s feats, writing last week on Twitter that he “always wanted to see someone try Jeopardy! wagering this way who had the skills to back it up”.
By several measures, Holzhauer is a statistical freak. Until he appeared at the turn of the month, the highest victory on any episode of Jeopardy! had been $77,000. This is no longer the case. At $118,816, Holzhauer’s total last night beat his own records of April 10 ($106,181) and April 9 ($110,914), though it fell short of April 17 ($131,127). According to one fansite, the average Jeopardy! winner between 2004 and 2017 went home with a shade under $20,000; after last night’s win, Holzhauer is averaging $75,825 per show.
Holzhauer not only is a gambler by trade, but has a maths degree from the University of Illinois, and has been successful on two other game shows, 500 Questions and The Chase. He makes no bones about what he terms his “cold-blooded” attitude to TV quizzes. “Even when I was a kid,” he told Vulture, “I would tell my dad, ‘Man, I wish there was something that was a stock market, but for sports teams instead of businesses.’ Fast-forward to adulthood, [and] there is indeed such a thing!”
Devon Ivie, his interviewer that day, suggested that the Holzhauer approach might seem, to some viewers, at odds with Jeopardy!’s role as an entertainment show. “The general chatter on social media,” she said, “is that you ‘broke’ the game”. Holzhauer was too sanguine to see her point. “It didn’t get broken, I just found a way to play that fit well with my style.”
Anyone could do what he’s doing, he points out, and it’s true. Winning a quiz show is rarely easy, but it’s often extremely simple. To beat Jeopardy!, you just need to be fastest on the buzzer (to earn the right to answer) and have a broad knowledge of trivia (to get the answer correct). Holzhauer is excellent at both. On top of that, he searches methodically for the game’s bonus cards, to establish a lead as early as he can, and whenever he has the chance he makes wagers of frightening size.
This demonstrates how projection, the addictive effect of a TV quiz show, is also its central lie. People watch Jeopardy! in order to play along; it’s harmless fun for them, because they lose nothing when they’re wrong and they can be proud when they get it right – especially if the contestants don’t.
But Terri Pous, a former contestant, points out that most of us could never compete. The Jeopardy! producers whittle 300,000 applicants down to 30,000 viable contestants, of whom only two (plus the reigning champion) can appear on each episode. Auditions in person are the final step, picking up individual traits or stories, because there isn’t much discrepancy left between people’s quizzing skills. “Almost all of the contestants,” Jennings told The Ringer, “know almost all of the answers almost all of the time.”
One winner isn’t much different to another, then, and in turn few of them can last very long. Jennings himself was a drastic outlier, unusually quick on the buzzer; this gave him an unusual number of chances to answer, which is (after all) the only way to win. Fritz Holznagel, another former contestant, became obsessed with reducing his reaction time. He wrote an entire pamphlet, Secrets of the Buzzer, about how you can trim milliseconds from your hands.
Holzhauer, like many Jeopardy! winners, has worked relentlessly on his technique. “I took an old mechanical pencil,” he told Ivie, “and wrapped a lot of masking tape around it to simulate the shape of the buzzer. […] When I was practicing, I would put on my dress shoes, stand up, and actually click this makeshift button I made while watching old episodes.”
Ken Jennings’s total winnings were $2,520,700, which took him 74 episodes. If Holzhauer keeps going at his current rate, he’ll pass the former in less than half the latter. A single dominant champion isn’t part of the quiz-show plan, but Bob Boden, a veteran producer, explained to The Atlantic that Jeopardy! would benefit either way. The prize money is a small expense (Alex Trebek reportedly earns $10 million per year); besides, a spike in ratings should bring a spike in advertising cash.
And on JBoard, a brightly enthusiastic Jeopardy! forum, some fans have worked out that Holzhauer’s streak, should it continue, will be nearing Jennings’s 74-game landmark just as the current series ends. The ad sales for the next run would be healthy enough.
This is a mentality of hard numbers and cold blood, but for all his remorselessness, there are moments of sentiment in Holzhauer’s play. On April 9, he aimed to win exactly $110,914, because his daughter was born on November 9 2014; this represented (at that point) a higher score than any in Jeopardy! history, but he managed to pull it off. “I wanted to show [my family] love,” he told the Washington Post, “in an unconventional way.”
While talking to Devon Ivie, Holzhauer recalled his childhood too. He would watch Jeopardy! with his grandmother; that was when he first became hooked. “Granny”, he said, was “the most beautiful person the world has ever seen”. Her first language wasn’t English, and as a contestant she would never have stood a chance; still, she watched Jeopardy! every day, for her grandson’s sake.
