Why We’re
Actually Mad At Ruthless ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Arthur Chu
(By Caitlin Dewey,
Washington Post, 27 February 2014)
The question
isn’t why Arthur Chu brought his peculiar, buzzer-smacking brand of game play
to “Jeopardy.” The question is why, in 50 long years of the show’s history,
more people haven’t done the same. Chu,
if you haven’t heard of him, is the “Jeopardy” contestant nonchalantly
bulldozing America’s collective nostalgic vision for how game shows should
work, who cruised to his eighth straight victory on Thursday night. The
insurance compliance technician from Ohio who is is also a
“stand-up comedian, Shakespearean actor, improviser, tour guide,
genius and, most importantly, voiceover artist,” according to his Web site- has
used his renegade style to earn $238,200 in winnings to date. And it’s that
style, not his success, that has inspired so much negative reaction.
Since time immemorial- read: at least September 1984, when
the Alex Trebek-hosted daily syndicated version of the show launched- “Jeopardy”
has almost always followed a simple pattern: Contestants pick a category; they
progress through the category from top to bottom; they earn winnings when they,
through their hard-earned and admirable knowledge, get the questions right. Chu, who has turned 30 since the current
episodes were taped, has flipped that protocol upside down … and shaken the
change out of its pockets. For one thing, he sometimes plays to tie, not win,
thereby guaranteeing he brings a lesser competitor to challenge him the next
day. He skips around the board looking for Daily Doubles, gobbling them up
before competitors find them, in the process monopolizing all the high-value
questions.
Most unforgivably to many, Chu tries to squeeze in the most
questions per round by pounding the bejesus out of his buzzer and interrupting
Alex Trebek. This is Alex
Trebek, North American icon (he’s Canadian by birth), we’re talking about
here. Chu’s strategy wasn’t part of some
long-brewing master plan, but simply the result of some Googling. He did some
searching once he found out he would appear on the show and was inspired by
what discovered about Chuck Forrest, a 1985 contestant whose similar Daily
Double hunting even earned a phrase to describe his method of play, the
“Forrest Bounce.” “There’s no logical
reason to do what people normally do, which is to take one category at a time
from the top down,” Chu told the Web site Mental Floss. “Your only point of
control in the game is your ability, if you get the right answer to a question,
to select the next question — and you give that power up if you make yourself
predictable.” In 1985, of course, angry
viewers didn’t have the option to take to social media to complain about an unorthodox
contestant who disrupted a beloved and orderly daily routine. Chu’s secret
weapon may be the fact that he can look past the show’s iconography and decades
of sentimental baggage and see it for what it is: a game. And the purpose of
playing a game is to try to win, generally through some combination of skill
and strategy, regardless of whatever arbitrary etiquette is attached to it.In that way, what Chu is doing isn’t so different than the principles of “Moneyball.” In the book/film of that name, as in real-life, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane took a much-romanticized process (picking players in major league baseball’s annual draft) and turned it into something stark and evidence-based (focusing on statistics and formulas instead of the traditional and more subjective scouting). In fact, when you zoom way out, Chu’s strategy seems to fit into a larger cultural pattern: Now that everything can be measured, quantified and reduced to statistical probabilities, there’s no space for romance or instinct anymore. A scientific formula predicts hit songs; Big Data determines who directs our favorite shows. And all of these approaches have been adopted because they work: As Chu earned another victory on Thursday night, he became the show’s third-highest earner ever. (He has said he will donate some of his winnings to fibromyalgia research; his wife suffers from the condition.)
Chu, like Beane and Netflix and Warner Music Group, isn’t breaking any actual rules here. He’s just being ruthlessly, idol-killingly pragmatic, in a space where we don’t want pragmatism — we want pure genius! We want Ken Jennings! Jennings, who set a “Jeopardy” record with 74 consecutive victories while winning $2.5 million in 2004, thinks Chu is “playing the game right.” “In sports, players and fans love it when teams shake up the game with new techniques: the basketball jump shot in the 1950s, the split-finger fastball in the 1980s, four-down football today,” he wrote over at Slate. “Why should Jeopardy be any different?”
Arthur Chu Is
Playing Jeopardy! the Right Way
(By Ken Jennings, Slate.com, 10 February 2014)
Ken Jennings is a
74-time Jeopardy! winner and is the author of six books.
It didn’t take long for Arthur Chu to become Public Game
Show Enemy No. 1. Within days of his Jan. 28 debut on Jeopardy!,
the 30-year-old Cleveland-area insurance analyst was making America very, very
angry. “Arthur Chu is the worst jeopardy contestant of all time,” one
viewer tweeted. “I can’t wait until someone beats his joyless, smug
ass,” seethed another. Even the JBoard, normally a collegial
hangout for the top-rated quiz show’s most dedicated ex-contestants and
fans, got ugly. “There is no need to disrespect the game,” one
poster scolded Chu. This all took me
back to the heady days of summer 2004, when I began my own run as a Jeopardy! contestant
and fans soon tired of my presence behind the leftmost podium. In ESPN
the Magazine, Bill Simmons called me “a smarmy know-it-all with the personality of a hall
monitor.” (My company is, to this day, called Hall Monitor LLC.) On Jeopardy!,
a rigidly formatted show in its 30th year, the only real breath
of fresh air is the endless parade of new contestants. Familiarity, on the
other hand, quickly breeds contempt.
It’s true that Arthur Chu is a buzzer-waver, a
button-masher, a Trebek-interrupter. But between rounds of gameplay and in
the many subsequent interviews he’s done—Chu is clearly enjoying
his 15 minutes—he comes across as perfectly pleasant, chatty, and self-aware.
Given the low bar of Jeopardy!-contestant charisma, he is a normal,
likable guy. The sudden wave of Chu-mosity is largely just a symptom of
our modern news cycle, where one spate of hostile tweets can spawn a million
repetitive reaction pieces before the feedback loop dies. There’s an obvious racial angle as well. Chu,
a bespectacled man with rumpled shirts and a bowl cut, plays into every
terrible Asian-nerd stereotype you’ve ever seen in an ’80s teen movie.
Charmingly, he seems to enjoy the role of the scheming outsider. Ina recent Wall Street Journal interview, he
pitted his own eccentric genius against me, “the angelic blond boy next door,
the central casting ‘nice boy.’ ”But in fact, plenty of nice white boys on Jeopardy! have been pilloried by viewers for using Arthur Chu’s signature technique: bopping around the game board seemingly at whim, rather than choosing the clues from top to bottom, as most contestants do. This is Chu’s great crime, the kind of anarchy that hard core Jeopardy! fans will not countenance. The technique was pioneered in 1985 by a five-time champ named Chuck Forrest, whose law school roommate suggested it. The “Forrest bounce,” as fans still call it, kept opponents off balance. He would know ahead of time where the next clue would pop up; they’d be a second slow.
More recently, skipping around the board has evolved into an art form. Jeopardy! luminaries like David Madden (19-game winning streak, 2005) and Roger Craig (Tournament of Champions winner and single-day winnings record holder, 2010–11) have used “the bounce” as a strategic way to hack an underappreciated key to Jeopardy! success: the Daily Double. In any game of Jeopardy!, three clues have been secretly earmarked as Daily Doubles. The player who finds each one can bet any or all of her winnings on responding to it correctly. By and large, Jeopardy! players are a risk-averse bunch. Unless a player is in need of a big comeback, the Daily Double wager is usually a smallish one.
Strategically, this is crazy. Like a poker player trying to
increase the size of the pot when he has a good hand, Jeopardy! contestants
should maximize their upside when the odds are in their favor. Historically,
the odds of getting a Daily Double correct are very good: Between 65 and 70
percent. Too many players instead let games come down to Final Jeopardy, where
conversion is much less predictable. (Less than half of all Final Jeopardy
responses are correct.) Finding the Daily Doubles becomes more important the
stronger a player you are, since it lowers the influence of chance on the
outcome. Crunching some numbers, I see that my own Daily Double
conversion during my Jeopardy! run was about 83 percent. In
hindsight, my wagers were almost always too small.
So when Arthur Chu bobs and weaves around the board, he’s
chasing those game-changing Daily Doubles. (The Jeopardy! contestant
coordinators recommend playing the game in top-to-bottom order, mostly to make
life easier on Alex Trebek and the techs who run the game board, but it’s not a
requirement.) Hunting is possible because Daily Doubles may be hidden,
but they’re
not distributed randomly. For example, they’re much more likely to be in
the fourth row of clues (36 percent of the time, in recent years) than the
second row (just 10 percent). Roger Craig even discovered that Daily Doubles
are distributed non-randomly by column as well, and played
accordingly. He put the 2011 Tournament of Champions away early with an
incredibly ballsy pair of Daily Double bets that still makes my sphincters
clench when I watch it today.
Arthur Chu has been lauded in headlines as the pioneer of Jeopardy! “game
theory,” but Craig is the one who designed his own computer software from scratch to
allow him to game Jeopardy! “moneyball”-style. Chu, by his own
admission, just Googled “jeopardy strategy.” If he has seen more Daily
Doubles than other men, it is because he stood on the shoulders of giants. I was converted to Daily Double hunting
during my
2011 match against the IBM supercomputer Watson. During a practice round,
Watson took the clues in order, like a good citizen; I won the game in a
runaway. But during the televised match, Watson’s minders switched it into
“game mode,” which of course involved smart strategies like hunting for Daily
Doubles. This time, Watson roared into a huge lead. I had a chance to come back
near the end of the match when I found the first Daily Double in the round—but
my next clue selection wasn’t quite the optimal one, and Watson found the
second Daily Double instead. Lights out.
Arthur Chu is on the Jeopardy! bench for a
couple of weeks while a college tournament airs, but he’ll back on Feb. 24, and
the Daily Double hunt will begin anew. In sports, players and fans love it when
teams shake up the game with new techniques: the basketball jump shot in the
1950s, the split-finger fastball in the 1980s,four-down
football today. Why should Jeopardy! be any
different? Strategic play makes for a more complex, exciting show. Don’t listen
to the Internet kibitzers. Arthur Chu is playing the game right.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/02/ken_jennings_on_jeopardy_champion_arthur_chu_and_daily_double_hunting.html
Every Single
Question Arthur Chu Got Wrong On Tonight’s ‘Jeopardy!’
(By Caitlin Dewey, Washington
Post, 12 March 2014)
The
astonishingly polarizing Arthur Chu- who reinvented, and maybe ruined, the
way “Jeopardy!” is played - ended his winning streak tonight after
stumbling on a question about the British monarchy. This might mark the royalty’s biggest
contribution to public life since spawning Prince George. But it wasn’t just
the monarchy that brought Chu down! In fact, the so-called “Jeopardy hacker”
stumbled and stalled constantly on tonight’s show, with him even entering the
big-question Final Jeopardy in last place.
Here, for reference/gloating, is every single question Chu got wrong
or ceded to another player (the exact phrasing is approximate — Trebek talks
fast!):
FINAL JEOPARDY: He was the last male monarch who had not
previously been Prince of Wales. (Who is George VI.)
With 40,000 cases in 2011, Australia was hit by an epidemic
of this respiratory ailment that can be fatal in babies. (What is whooping
cough.)
You with your cute hat, you’re just troppo! (What is
“too much.”)
Don’t bother me, I’m affacentato. (What is “busy.”)
The H pylori bacterium causes this type of ulcer, from the
Greek word for “digestive.” (What is peptic.)
Coveted by every speechwriter-turned-columnist, this is an
award named for the woman seen here. (What is “The Peggy.”)
Philosophers distinguish between two kinds of knowledge: “a
priori,” from thinking, and this — from experience. (What is empirical or “a
posteriori.”)
Taza, son of this chief, tried to honor his father’s peace
agreement with the army, but couldn’t unite the Apache bands. (Who is Cochise.)
Antisthenes began this “ism” with the view that
self-interest is the primary motive of human behavior. (What is cynicism.)
This Ottawa chief’s drive to capture Fort Detroit might’ve
been successful if he hadn’t been betrayed. (Who is Pontiac.)
Pass the lasagna, I’m affamato. (What is hungry.)
This people’s old Oraibi pueblo in Arizona may be the oldest
inhabited village in the U.S. (What is Hopi.)
This principality in southwest Europe is roughly 370 acres.
(What is Monaco.)
You want to buy my truck for $100? What am I, pazzo?
(What is crazy.)
We were lucky to catch the bus back to Rome, it was the ultimo.
(What is last.)
This viral disease that causes inflammation of the liver has
A, B, C, D and E types. (What is hepatitis.)
This Dane proposed that people go through three stages:
aesthetic, ethical, religious. (Who is Kierkegaard.)
This word, originally meaning shaman or medicine man, now
means a council or meeting. (What is powwow.)
Mr. Gilliam or Mr. Jones inspired this award for a British
comedy troupe member. (What is “The Terry” or “The Monty.”)
The title of this 1979 No. 1 hit by the Eagles warned of one
of these tonight. (What is heartache.)
In this 1984 Prince song, things were so sad these title
birds were crying. (What are doves.)
Solid Mr. Walesa. (Who is Lech.)
Last name of Lorenzo who, on January 5, 1537, decided the
Duke of Florence needed to breath a lot less. (Who is Medici.)
“Dust to Dust” is a 2013 song by this country-folk duo,
whose name suggests the discord that broke them up. (Who are the Civil Wars.)
Find the queen, find the nice lady in this street gambling
game with a trio of face-down options. Sorry, try again! (What is three-card
Monte.)
Fred Smith, of this company, took $25.3 million — not bad
for an overnight delivery boy. (What is FedEx.)
Bet Mr. Schultz’s employees in this company spell “Howard”
correctly on cups. (What is Starbucks.)
The commissioner of Scotland Yard resigned in 1888, the day
before the final murder attributed to this man. (Who is Jack the Ripper.)
“Hell,” in polite company. (What is heck.)
St. Francis Cathedral was built by the St. Francis who
became the model for a character in this book. (What is “Death Comes for the
Archbishop.”)
Annie Fitzgerald Stephens was the model for this Southern
belle. (Who is Scarlett O’Hara.)
This character is Charles Dickens’ most autobiographical.
His initials are the reverse of the author’s. (Who is David Copperfield.)
Mrs. Honeychurch in his “Room With a View” was based on his
grandmother. (Who is E.M. Forster.)
This Kurt Weill musical drama was called “Die
Dreigroschenoper” when it debuted in 1928. (What is “The Threepenny Opera.”)
Middle-class pretensions! Despair! You want them, you got
them in this Chekhov play. (What is “Three Sisters.”)
Fifty percent of the core melted down in this U.S. facility.
(What is Three Mile Island.)
“2 Broke Girls” helped this network earn several million
dollars. (What is CBS.)
Not Marco, but certainly Polo: He wore it well, drawing $60
million. (Who is Lauren.)
And here are the ones Chu got right:
The same virus that causes chickenpox in kids might reemerge
in adulthood as this. (What is shingles.)
It’s the capital of Maharashtra, a state on the Deccan Plateau.
(What is Mumbai.)
The largest national lake in South America, this is an inlet
of the Caribbean Sea. (What is Maracaibo.)
Fleetwood Mac’s Ms. Nicks gave the name to this award for
most diaphanous dress. (Who is Stevie.)
Her descendants through her son Thomas Rolfe number in the
tens of thousands. (Who is Pocahontas.)
The name of this philosophy that began in Russia in the
1850s is derived from the Latin noun for nothing. (What is nihilism.)
This island is separated from the coast of Africa by the Mozambique
Channel. (What is Madagascar.)
The award for best sister in a comic strip gets its name
from her. (What is Sally.)
Given for the cutest boy in an ad, it’s named for the
4-year-old in a Life cereal commercial. (What is Mikey.)
In this 1988 hit, Poison lamented that every rose has one of
these. (What are thorns.)
A unit of dry volume equal to a quart. (What is a peck.)
Holy Shatner, Jeff Boyd got a great deal for this .com at
$5o million. (What is Priceline.)
A tanker on the rocks. (What is wreck.)
After a 2013 chemical attack near Damascus, the French
president called this man a war criminal. (Who is Assad.)
In her No. 1 hit “Someone Like You,” she thought you’d see
my face and be reminded that for me, it isn’t over. (Who is Adele.)
F. Scott Fitzgerald probably drew on the bootlegger Max
Gerlach for this title character. (Who is the Great Gatsby.)
On July 26, 1794, this Frenchmen called for an end to
violence, though he’d killed so many already. (Who is Robespierre.)
The tenure of this first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish
Inquisition saw 2,000 stake burnings. (Who is Torquemada.)
A body block on ice. (What is check.)
In 1938, this trio made the short film “Healthy, Wealthy and
Dumb.” (Who are the Three Stooges.)
Chu hasn’t fared so badly, though. At the end of his
11-episode winning streak, he departs with $297,200 in winnings — the third-highest
of all time, and qualifies for the show’s Tournament of Champions. He also knew
he had it coming; the episode was recorded back in November.
Meanwhile, Diana Peloquin can look forward to some
unexpected, and much-deserved, fame. The grad student (and synchronized
swimmer!) correctly answered the last question, keeping her first-place spot
and booting Chu in the process. By some accounts, she’s practically a national
hero.
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