Will that guy on Jeopardy ever lose?

kinda interesting to see Richard Sherman mentioned here. I drew a similarity too, as Chu is another guy who I see being defended all over the internet even though I'm not really sure what he's being defended against. probably just the (internet) circles I'm hanging around in.

yeah most of the references to this guy I see are 'this guy broke jeopardy with game theory!' and not 'omg look at this asshole asian nerd'

tho I am sure if he were an attractive white guy he would be called the billy beane of game shows and have a movie deal in the works

joe morgan everybody

I mean it is rather striking because even if every Jeopardy contestant knows that hopping around categories is the best strategy, very few actually do it, it makes for a disjointed and odd viewing experience, and some of the categories are written thinking that someone's going to go straight through. I watch the show maybe once or twice a week and a guy like this really does stand out.

between the three week break and all the press this has gotten i wonder if someone will try to flip this strategy back on him when they come back

yeah this is interesting to me - other players knowing you are aggressively hunting for the daily doubles means they should be doing the same, but other players knowing you are 'playing for the tie' makes wagering potentially trickier for contestants going into final jeopardy in second place.

I can speak to this: Jeopardy tapes five episodes per day, two days per week - they'll schedule a group of ten contestants from around the country for a given taping day, and use alternates from the LA area if somebody cancels and they need to fill out a day. About the only thing you know entering a taping day is how many games the returning champion has won - the contestants are randomly drawn, and the ones who haven't played yet are waiting in the audience as the day progresses.

So it's likely that Arthur's opponents in later games have seen him play a game or two and know that he plays an unorthodox style (at least the Forrest Bounce part of it, if they're canny enough to recognize a Forrest Bounce - many contestants have no idea how to properly wager in FJ, so the wager-to-tie stuff may not be quite as obvious). Given the lead time of the average Jeopardy episode, which can be as long as four months from taping to airdate, it's impossible for anyone Arthur competes against to know about Arthur-as-Jeopardy-phenomenon. Obviously when they introduce someone as an x-time returning champion it's a little intimidating, but it doesn't imply anything about their style, just their skill level.

I think that people saying that he "broke Jeopardy with game theory" is just dumb. He is applying well known and often used strategies to gain an advantage, I don't see how that constitutes "breaking" Jeopardy. Can't think of any other reason why he would be getting press for this other than that he's Asian. Keep in mind that the person who actually broke Jeopardy with game theory, Roger Craig (a white dude), got about 1/100 of the press, even though he actually won the TOC.

Most people don't do this because the producers strongly encourage you not to. Even though there's nothing they can do about it, I think most people respect the wishes of the show's producers.

To head off any responses, I know that the "play to tie" strategy is not often used, but 90%+ of the articles I've seen have focused solely on his DD hunting.

Also Jeopardy fan culture is SUPER weird - if you look at jboard.tv or even check out #jeopardy on Twitter after an episode's aired, people are sometimes, uh, overly blunt in their assessment of contestants.

The fact that Arthur is willing to wager next to nothing on DD's he doesn't know - that hockey one, where he bets $5 and immediately confesses he doesn't know it - is gonna come off as smug/rub people the wrong way even though it makes perfect sense defensively. (Sports and pop culture stumpers invariably elicit the biggest howls online - they usually aren't the wheelhouse categories of your average contestant, but they're categories with which viewers are very familiar.)

(please forgive my extraneous apostrophe there)

when I find myself able to "run the table" in a sports category while the actual contestants all look absolutely stumped it makes me wonder what I'm doing with my life

I think that people saying that he "broke Jeopardy with game theory" is just dumb. He is applying well known and often used strategies to gain an advantage, I don't see how that constitutes "breaking" Jeopardy. Can't think of any other reason why he would be getting press for this other than that he's Asian. Keep in mind that the person who actually broke Jeopardy with game theory, Roger Craig (a white dude), got about 1/100 of the press, even though he actually won the TOC.

yeah but that was before moneyball/fivethirtyeight etc were super prominent in pop culture

Anyways, the Battle of the Decades tournament this week has been pretty fun.

also these kind of stories have tended to create an ever-worsening feedback loop in the last couple years

yeah but that was before moneyball/fivethirtyeight etc were super prominent in pop culture

Roger Craig was on Jeopardy in 2010 and 2011.

moneyball came out end of 2011 and 538 became a 'thing your mom knows about' in the 2012 election

i just turned on jeopardy hoping to see chu but i guess he's done?

I thought they were doing some kind of tourney and he'll be back at the end of February.

yeah they're doing best of the 80s & 90s for the next few weeks

heh, i did the exact same thing.

Arthur Chu talks to HYPHEN mag about his success:

http://i.imgur.com/A48SNs5.gif

Oh whoops why was that in my copypasta. Anyway: http://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2014/02/haters-gonna-hater-jeopardy-winner-arthur-chu-bucks-naysayers-and-their-asian-s

I think it makes more sense with the gif

“I pushed myself really hard […] I became a Jeopardy machine, and that’s probably why I acted weird when I was at that taping," says Chu. I told myself that as long as I have confidence that I’m doing the right things and making the right choices […] as long as I did everything I could to win the game and controlled everything that was under my control, I can walk out of there with my head high.”

What sucks in a really evil way is that many viewers of Jeopardy are hating on Arthur and making racist, offensive comments (surprise, surprise!), hurling just about every insulting Asian stereotype at him, most frequently on Twitter. I ask if he thinks it’s because he defies people’s expectations of the “meek and humble Asian,” and he says: “To some degree I think I’m unfortunately living up to a certain Asian stereotype – Asians are supposed to be very nerdy, very competitive in academics and I was raised in that sort of environment. […] They would have reacted differently had it been somebody else. A lot of what they say about me, ‘this guy is creepy,’ ‘this guy is a robot,’ ‘this guy is flat and emotionless’ you can’t deny that it’s there, but I try not to fixate on it. ”

And instead of laying low in the hopes that the hating will eventually go away, Chu asserts himself and responds to the nasty comments on Twitter. In one case, he responded with “The next time you realize you won $37,500, we’ll see how humble you are.” Chu says: “I think the big part of the fact that I can show a different side of myself on Twitter to an extent defies people’s expectations […] it’s easier for me to do it online than on camera. They imagine that I must be this one-dimensional nerd who’s only good at Jeopardy. […] [B]ut you can’t assume that about anybody when you only watch them for 20 minutes on a game show where it’s about winning. […] And I think that [talking back] was a big part of humanizing me to people who were watching Jeopardy and making a different kind of narrative out of it.”

Chu explains very well why he is how he is. It's rare to find a person as intelligent as he is self-aware, and in reality, Chu comes off as a really good guy. “I spent a lot of my life unwilling to take chances and I think that’s a common story for kids who kind of grew up with a certain kind of tiger mom upbringing […]. “ [B]ut at this point in my life, I’ve learned a lot of things will never happen to you if you never take the risk, and failing is not as painful as it seems, the pain you imagine from failure is actually a lot worse than the actual experience itself.”

So I agree with everybody that none of the sites that have published pieces on him have said "look here is this Asian nerd let's laugh at him." But it takes two to tango for something to go viral and I do think that race was a factor in how the internet see this kid even if we all disagree on how much of one it is. To ILX's credit everybody here has been focused purely on the game theory aspect of it and that's great and shame on me for thinking otherwise? Never was my intent to implicate anyone in this thread for having impure motivations, merely wanted people to be aware that there was this other issue. And that's probably the last I'll have to say on it unless I go buy some more ice cream.

I hate to admit that CNN's headline—"Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game"—is precisely correct.

I don't worry about this guy, he seems totally chill and reasonable and smart and funny and nice. I find all of this more interesting than just watching a game of Jeopardy, and frankly I enjoy the hell out of Jeopardy (not the kids' games though, those are crazy boring).

Didn't realize this dude was from my neck of the woods. Here's a local article: http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2014/01/31/team-arthur-local-trivia-buff-highlights-the-finer-and-controversial-side-of-jeopardy

Chu trails off at this point and mentions that, maybe, after all, the good folks behind Jeopardy! wouldn't want many of those off-camera antics getting out. He references an ill-timed joke that Trebek cracked about a student shooting up his school after his teacher gave him a measly 98-percent on a test.

Hah this is actually a well-worn joke about studious Asians on both sides of the Pacific

I mean, not the school shooting part. But the part about not getting 100%

Arthur Chu is at least the third guy to win a handful of Jeopardy games using the Forrest Bounce just in the last year. One of them was this super smug guy from Georgia who was a big Ric Flair fan. The wager-to-tie biz is way less common.

the thing about this guy's "strategy" is he still needs to be really fast and know basically all the answers right? so it's not like he's gaming the system in a way that undermines the basic game itself

it's a little unsportsmanlike to hunt for daily doubles in a category you know nothing about just to deny them to the other contestants (cf sports) but who cares it's fucking jeopardy

Dang I didn't know balls was on Jeopardy xxp

Interrupting Alex is also bad form.

alex seems like a guy who seethes w/ rage once the cameras stop rolling

been down with the "fuck alex trebek" cause ever since that college jeopardy episode where a girl said she wanted to be a music journalist after seeing Almost Famous and he went off on an "ohhhh a GROUPIE!" tear

oh shit, that happened? Fuck him forever.

there are more than a few anecdotes like that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4ogS9Ifpjs

there's like a minute of obnoxious fanfare from the poster before the clip

i still like jeopardy, because I play along and get to pretend i'm smart for 22 precious minutes.

lol, the thing that struck me watching clips of jeopardy this week was wow trebek's a bigger dick than i remembered. canadians that come to america and become republicans are the weirdest kind of toothless cranks.

Christ, that's even worse than I imagined it would be. Smug asshole.

xp

lol at trebek's 'and what did he do - say it comeon say it, i got the best followup'

Trebek is frequently a smug asshole, I love his sarcastic sum up of bad stories and subtle takedowns of annoying contestants, but this was in bad taste, ugh.

http://i.imgur.com/NP9MpmD.png

Boom. Damn

Playing for the tie does seem like kind of a dick move though. The benefit is extremely marginal at best, but it's way worse for the show and you deny a slot on the show to one person who flew all the way out to LA for the taping.

if they really have people fly out and tell them to fuck off if there's a tie, i'd say that's the show's problem. not sure how it's "worse for the show" in any way that would matter.

They only pay 2nd place people $2,000 whereas for a tie they pay them the amount they won, usually a lot more. They only tape every two weeks, so whoever was scheduled for the last taping goes home and I don't think it would make too much sense to fly them out 2 weeks later. At the very least they are out the airfare and hotel.

And keep in mind this is only a benefit to the extent that the person you tied is worse than the average Jeopardy contestant, a highly questionable assumption

Playing for the tie does seem like kind of a dick move though. The benefit is extremely marginal at best, but it's way worse for the show and you deny a slot on the show to one person who flew all the way out to LA for the taping.

― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), Friday, February 7, 2014 8:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isnt this actually nice for the person who would otherwise be in 2nd place?

And keep in mind this is only a benefit to the extent that the person you tied is worse than the average Jeopardy contestant, a highly questionable assumption

it's not though, and there's a link above that illustrates why
http://thefinalwager.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/The-Final-Wager-Guide-to-Game-Theory-dominance-Slide-11-1024x576.png

basically if 2nd place winds up wagering a small amount banking on leader not getting the question right then you tie there as opposed to losing because you bet $1 more than you really had to. It's pretty dependent on the way 2nd place should wager