James Holzhauer Prompted a Fundamental Question About <em>Jeopardy</em>
Jeopardy had never seen a contestant like James Holzhauer before. During his 32-game win streak, which ended Monday night, the 34-year-old professional sports gambler piled up nearly $2.5 million in prize money. He also set a new single-day-earnings record—$131,127—that exceeded the previous record holder’s sum by more than $50,000.
Holzhauer made so much money so quickly thanks to an aggressive strategy: He typically played at a fast pace, picked high-value clues before low-value ones, and then fearlessly bet the money he’d accumulated. “Playing a seemingly risky game actually minimizes my chances of losing,” he told me previously. His style of play also, according to multiple headline writers, “broke” Jeopardy, lucratively departing from convention.
While Holzhauer may be off the show for now (he will appear in a tournament on the program’s next season), it’s possible that he’ll alter the way the game is played in the future—that he’ll leave Jeopardy not broken exactly, but changed.
[Read: How James Holzhauer finally lost]
Andy Saunders, who runs the Fan, anticipates a couple of differences in players’ approaches. “I think you’ll see more people starting at the $1,000 row,” Saunders says, referring to Holzhauer’s favored strategy of picking high-value clues from the bottom of the board instead of working his way down, as is custom. And once they build up some cash reserves and find a tile they can wager on, “I think that people will start to be more aggressive in their Daily Double bets,” Saunders told me. They’ve seen big bets pay off for Holzhauer, he reasoned, and will be less hesitant to put, say, $5,000 or $10,000 on the line.
