I was curious so I looked into his title, especially after his unimpressive Jeopardy showing. He is very smart. He is a Mensa member for instance. He won a competition in front of a TV audience against other elite competitors from various fields of study. The competition attempted to test them in different areas of intellect. I think he is very analytical and trivia is not his strong suit.
Too bad the other two contestants To win on Jeopardy you not only have to be intelligent, you have to think quickly and have a wide body of knowledge about almost everything. When I watch the show I get a lot of answers right about things I really know next to nothing about. Questions about things like opera, which I hate. How I would guess the question to the answer about something like 17th Century German Literature I have no idea how I am able to guess correctly so often. I would love to go on the show, as long as my opponents weren't some supertrivia freak like Ken Jennings or the supercomputer that beat both Jennings and some other supertrivia freak. (I should know his name) There is less of an element of luck in Jeopardy than there is in other TV game shows but there still is the luck of the draw. I like the strategy used by recent big winner Arthur Chu who finally went home with $297,000. He was widely criticized for it, even by Alex Trebek himself but I see nothing wrong with it. He played within the rules. Here is Ken Jennings' take on it: 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. a 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 toJeopardy! 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 nonrandomly 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.
