Film Theory: How One Man BROKE Jeopardy! (Jeopardy is Rigged Part 1)

the category for Final Jeopardy today is needless analysis of classic game shows here's the clue jeopardy champ James Holt's our 1:32 matches and broke the game of Jeopardy using this secret method we had a strategy I thought it was just a robot [Music] hello Internet welcome to film theory the show that gives you your daily double of pop culture and incisive research most of the time on film Theory I cover movies and shows that really capture the imagination Marvel superheroes Disney's Darkseid internet creepypastas but today I'm going back to my roots that's right I'm talking about game shows for really the first time since I tried it like eight years ago on a one-off episode of game theory where I'm like here let's talk about these games in this game show and everyone was like these aren't video games and I'm like yeah but they're games any game show format actually probably more useful cuz I could teach you how to win tens of thousands of dollars on like The Price is Right and everyone's like no that sucks and I'm like all right well I guess I don't get to talk about that thing that I really like to talk about so bottle it up inside man until today and in a part two episode that will undoubtedly underperform on this channel but you know what I just thought it was really interesting because jeopardy is rigged anyway rant over back to my pre-scripted intro game shows were one of my earliest TV loves little matpat spent many a day curled up in front of the glow of Wheel of Fortune prices right especially and the king of them all jeopardy now I know that not many of you watched jeopardy because let's face it not many of you are over 75 but jeopardy is having a huge cultural resurgence I mean first off Netflix just picked up like every episode of Jeopardy ever created because people are just really excited to watch jeopardy on Netflix reason but also and more importantly because NBC's 7 p.m. grandma bait has been playing out like a telenovela of the gameshow world over the past year picture this professional sports bettor James comes on to jeopardy for the first time on April 4th 2019 no one knows that he's taken a full year off to study and prepare for these games he comes in completely up ends how the entire game of Jeopardy esplen psa's with his bold and weirdly charming yet robotic social awkwardness he goes on to win 32 games in a row and even Alex Trebek feels badly for people who have to play against him he breaks every Jeopardy high score record known to mankind since the show began in 1964 single-handedly redefining what it meant to win big on a TV game show with a total payout of two million four hundred and sixty-two thousand two hundred and sixteen dollars who wants to be a millionaire eat your heart out he wanted to be a millionaire twice over and did it he accomplishes this massive total by averaging get this seventy six thousand nine hundred and forty four dollars of winning every single game the previous single day scoring record for a game of Jeopardy was seventy seven thousand dollars a record that James himself broke 16 times during course of his run but just as he's one game away from breaking that all-time earnings record of Jeopardy taking over the crown held by the famous 10 Jennings himself who did it in over 70 games he is suddenly unceremonious Lise knifed by a research librarian the story leaves us with two main questions one how the heck did James managed to reinvent jeopardy a game show that's been running for the better part of a century and - was he really defeated or did NBC rigged the game to make sure that he was kicked off before he basically bankrupted the show did James just have a lucky run with an unlucky ending or was there a lot more going on here behind the scenes than all the Jeopardy viewers could see through their heavily bifocal Glenn's ins get ready my friends because at the end of this two-part series we might just have exposed the greatest conspiracy to ever happen show history final jeopardy indeed let's talk about James's strategy first there has been a lot of jeopardy contestants over the years and if you've watched the show you know that 99% of players play in a very low-risk way as a refresher on Jeopardy you have five trivia categories with five questions each and the questions get harder as you go down each column you pick which category and dollar amounts that you want to go for get the question right get the money choose again get it wrong and lose the money because losing money is an option in this game most players tend to bed pretty conservatively at first testing out the category by picking the easy low value questions first except for James he was one of the first players ever to take the completely opposite approach first he almost always started at the highest value clues way down at the bottom of the board and then he would move his way up to the smaller numbers this allowed him to get ahead fast very early on not only racking up his own score but also keeping the other players from catching up because all the high-value questions were already taken next he also jumped from category to category now most people will find a category that they're comfortable with and then try to run through all the questions in it this makes sense because instead of switching from one topic to the next you can think all the way through a category and hopefully answer all the questions right but rather than let his opponents get into a groove on a specific topic James forced them to jump from pop music to European history to rhyme time a method that seemed to work for him but often discombobulated his opponents James has said in interviews that he used children's books to study facts about everything from pop culture to geography practice quizzing himself across a huge range of subjects giving himself the flexibility to hop from category to category well his opponents were still trying to remember that European capital city from two questions ago the strategy that he's exploiting in this case is a function of the brain called task switching which is the brain's ability to switch attention from one thing to another it's well-documented in psychology research that when people do the same task over and over and over and over again their speed will increase and their errors will decrease make them shift back and forth and they suddenly get both slower and worse at the tasks taking this and applying it to jeopardy there's only two categories like ends a nation and British monarchs it's both easier and faster for your brain to figure out each additional answer when you stick in the same category you're in the groove or on a roll but James of course didn't do that by constantly moving around the board he triggered in his opponent's what's called a switch cause which in this case is the additional time and effort it takes the brain to process information when there has been a switch of some form so James whose entire training was all about switching topics very quickly was much more adept and able to do this on the fly but his opponents who weren't trained to that gameplay style were left holding the bag they were left at a disadvantage and tripping over their own feet so already James is not only playing the statistics of jeopardy by choosing high-value items at the bottom of the board but he's also playing the meta game of Jeopardy by playing the other players using the human brains built-in weaknesses against his opponents on top of all of that whether it was intentional or not James didn't just jump around he looked like he was trying to do it as fast as possible before alex trebek was even done telling James his last answer was right he usually had lined up what clue he was choosing next he'd spit it out as fast as possible one example from game 23 of James's run after getting a question right James called out his next choice as sports eight instead of the real name of the category let's go to that sports thing for 800 maybe James just didn't want to say a category name as goofy as let's go to that sports thing for 800 but a much likelier explanation is that he's just trying to use a breakneck pace against his opponents he's switching and he's switching quickly using this sort of strategy from the very first question James was in the lead by over $8,000 on average after the first round all those things combined make that player of force to be reckoned with but James wasn't content with just that he had one more card up his sleeve a trump card that made him unbeatable he bet what seemed like reckless amounts on all his daily doubles he bet way larger amount than almost anyone in the history of the show so that when he'd get a Daily Double right his score would double putting him so far in the lead that it was literally literally impossible for any contestant to catch up with just the remaining dollar amounts on the board now here James was also playing with an advantage he stated that because of his job as a sports bettor literally someone who is paid to play smart bets on sporting events and players he's used to gambling with huge amounts of money he said that for him seen a $60,000 wager doesn't faze him because he's become desensitized to numbers that large where for most of us we'd look at that number and see it as a down payment on a house or 60,000 single hamburgers at McDonald's just something that's way too precious to bet away on a whim so he was the only one willing to make bets that big because he was psychologically primed to do it luckily for him though that strategy doesn't just work psychologically it also works out mathematically over James's 32 wins he got to answer 75 of the 96 daily doubles and he answered him correctly at a ninety four point seven percent accuracy rate he almost never missed them so frankly for him there was much less risk to betting big odds were that no matter how much he wagered he gets an answer right but even when James did miss the answer the rest of his statistics indicated that he would be able to make a comeback James was the first to buzzin to answer fifty eight point three percent of the time which is pretty darn impressive we didn't consider that the other 41.7% was split monks to other opponents so on average he was getting to answer more than double the number of questions of his other two opponents and when James buzzed and he wasn't likely to miss his overall accuracy rate over the course of the run was a mind-boggling 97 percent it can be hard to contextualize just how crazy that correct answer rate is but remember when I mentioned Ken Jennings earlier who won 74 consecutive jeopardy games he is the most famous gameshow player in history and his accuracy rate was ninety one point seven percent meaning that he missed questions about three times as often as James that's insane imagine the greatest player in any sport or game or other quantifiable contest whether that's Muhammad Ali in boxing or Serena Williams in tennis or Grand who bear and video games speedrunning now imagine someone else coming along and making one third of the mistakes of the person consider to be the best of all time that is crazy sure it's just a difference of ninety-one percent to ninety seven percent but that is eight huge difference there James just comes in and crushes the game with a level of knowledge that no one has ever seen before but to sum up what that insane accuracy and buzz rate means in the context of a Jeopardy game if James made a big bet on a Daily Double early on in the game and lost everything based on his statistics he was gonna answer about six of the next 10 clues correctly whereas his opponents would only get one or two piece people who watched James knew that when he got a lead he tended to keep it and expand it aggressively but the data would also suggest that in the rare instances when he was coming from behind he could make up a deficit quickly so you can see how all the pieces of his strategy work together to make him a crazy difficult player to beat 32 times in a row and that sort of record leads to James's biggest edge of all intimidation bully didn't step into his very first game with the reputation of being a jeopardy wizard it didn't take long for James's reputation as a high scoring big betting buzzer swinging outlaw to be established part of the reason for that is that jeopardy films several episodes in a day meaning that the players that James would face on Friday got to watch him annihilate the poor saps from Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday before diving into the deep end with him and even when those players put up a fight it didn't seem to make that big of a difference take it from Marshall Shelburne who described playing against James like this quote my main emotion during the game was frustration there were many many times where I felt like I timed it just right hit it right on the lights in every single time he was one step ahead of me and now I'm not accusing any of James's opponents of intentionally giving up but behavioral psychology would suggest that they were probably inclined to and subliminally to some extent they might have been the theory of learned helplessness says that when we experienced repeated negative stimuli such as getting beaten on the buzzer for the 12th time in a row we eventually just accept our own powerlessness in the situation and we stopped a tempting to avoid whatever negative stimulus that is a rat trapped in a box where the floor is electrified every once in a while and has nowhere to escape he just gives into it he's like well yes I'm getting electrified this time sucks actually it's a really sad thing for the mice same thing in a game of Jeopardy the TLDR here is when you get smacked around in a game of Jeopardy for long enough and you see it happen to other people you stop putting up that much of a fight don't take my word for it either Alex Trebek has got me covered after one particular record-setting game Trebek apparently instructed James to look at the next contestants coming out of the audience and said quote look at them they're going Oh poop we have to face James next you can get everybody's favorite mild-mannered television trivia uncle to start dropping expletives you know that you've won the intimidation game none of these things individually is gonna guarantee a win at best betting big and switching categories and answering faster gives players small edges but that's the thing about James has a professional gambler it's his job to recognize and exploit small edges he knows that betting on a team that'll win fifty five percent of the time is vastly superior to betting on a team that'll win 52 percent of the time and that this edge will be magnified the more repetitions there are and James kept repeating and repeating and repeating so with all of this in mind with odds literally in James's favor and a massive winning streak under his belt and a massive amount of money in his pocket and a massive amount of knowledge in his brainy head of his how did he lose did someone just get lucky or as many on the internet have suggested it's something fishy happen James lives and works as a gambler in Vegas and if there's one thing that happens in Vegas is that the house always wins when you hit too many jackpots or win too many hands a blackjack at a casino the only thing you can count on is a tap on the shoulder that's gonna tell you you've played enough and it's time for you to take your betting somewhere else the casino or in our case NBC isn't in the game to lose money and in the next episode we'll be talking about all the ways they tried to intentionally roust James from the game so don't touch that dial go grab your fix it in and your gold Bond medicated powder and join us for part two of this theory where all questions will be answered just think of this as a multi-day commercial break that you can't fast forward through in the meantime though I have a Jeopardy clue for you answer is this is the best way to stay informed of all the loads happening on this channel what is subscribing and ringing the bell yes oh my gosh you're totally right Final Jeopardy winner is you you should ring that Bell hit subscribe make sure you're notified of when part two of this theory happens as well as all the other awesome theories that we have here on this channel we really run the gamut of literally every topic that you could possibly cover from YouTube webseries to horror movies to Disney theories to Marvel superhero it's literally anything and everything goes here on the channel so if you enjoyed this episode you're gonna like the next one and everything else we have come and hit that subscribe button help us reach the 10 million mark so we can get the glorified diamond paperweight film theory deserves it and in the meantime remember that's just a theory Oh film theory now here's a Jeopardy question for you this is the best way to stay warm and stylish this winter what is the new round of game theory merch that is correct I knew you're smart James didn't let me down and once you know it Holliday Theory where is available right now below this video be our handy dandy merch link in the top line of the description we've got everything from a game theory switch case to a new version of one of our most popular items of all time the hoodie dress for girls want to be comfy and cozy this winter snuggle up in our black and green lounge pants planning on heading out into the cold check out our flight jacket one part hoodie one part windbreaker it's even got patches that you can swap around with your friends so you can make it a film theory and game theory jacket or just a gamer jacket or heck a game theory and jacksepticeye and markiplier hoodie or it could just be for nap it's omni merch because we made it modular I'm just very excited about modular merch hey did you really hate a certain theory like a lot of the Star Wars theories that end up wrong well you could do what Stephanie did during the merch shoot hit me with the box or you could take it out on the map hat collectible tumbler there's more to like a t-shirt and ugly Christmas sweater to wear to all your holiday parties all of which are available right now just click the link below or go to creator dot-com hi NK comm forget Black Friday make it theorists Friday quantities are limited though so once they're gone they're gone thank you all so much for watching we'll see you next time for jeopardy part 2 and remember is all just

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 4,946,558

Rating: 4.8675833 out of 5

Keywords: jeopardy, alex trebek, tournament of champions, jeopardy tournament of champions, jeopardy snl, i lost on jeopardy, how to win, rigged, broken, tom hanks jeopardy, watson jeopardy, jeopardy questions, trivia, trivia game, strategy, strategy game, jeopardy show, game show, game show winner, winner, loser, film theory, film theorists, matpat, matpat game show, film theory game show, film theory jeopardy, james holzhauer, james holzhauer final jeopardy

Id: _CzBvNJeIsU

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019

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[u/_The_Bomb]

Six months late too on this theory. Cheddar already made a great video about this.

[u/NewClayburn]

Jeopardy is owned by Sony, not NBC. /u/MatPatGT messed up!