Planet Money - How Uncle Jamie Broke Jeopardy (Update)

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

James Holzhauer took a math degree, a gambling career, and a buzzer, and turned it into a fortune on a game show. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. This past November, the world lost an icon, Alex Trebek, longtime host of Jeopardy. And this season on the show, there's been a run of guest hosts behind the lectern. Everybody from Ken Jennings to Katie Couric, Aaron Rodgers, Anderson Cooper. We haven't even gotten to LeVar Burton yet. But sometime in the next couple of months, one of these guest hosts will become the new host of Jeopardy. And it'll be a bittersweet moment in the evolution of one of America's favorite game shows. And it's got us thinking

about an episode that we did a few years ago about the evolution of how Jeopardy is actually played, like the strategy. And also it was an episode about a petty beef that I had with a then-emerging New Jeopardy star named James Holzhauer. This episode originally aired back in 2019 in the middle of Jeopardy James' historic run. Stick around for a brief update at the end. James' historic run. Stick around for a brief update at the end. Maybe you've heard that this guy named James Holzhauer is absolutely dominating Jeopardy. You've become a celebrity now

because of your accomplishments on Jeopardy. Going to be a lot of pressure on you. Thank you. I appreciate that. James is sort of a relative of mine. 13 years ago, his only sibling, Ian, married my only sibling, Julie. And since then, I have been keenly aware that James is kind of a better version of me. We're the same age, but James skipped a grade. We were both math majors.

I still have nightmares about it, but James apparently didn't even need to go to class and made money playing online poker in the meantime. I went into public radio. James got really good at analyzing sports data, became a very successful sports gambler, retired at like 27, traveled the world, climbed Mount Fuji in a typhoon. And look, I can handle being less cool than Jamie. But now there are nieces and nephews involved. Here, you want to sit down? Uh, sure. Wait, is this recording? Oh, yeah, for sure.

What? Not yet. This is Jack and Scarlett. And James and I are their only uncles. And it is irrationally important to me that they think I am the cooler uncle. And this recording was the moment I was sure I had won. Jack and Scarlett were visiting me in New York. I let them play video games, Zelda Breath of the Wild.

I had just taken them to the Harry Potter play on Broadway. And now I had gotten them into a real NPR studio. You interview me first. Fine. Okay. Hello. So, um, Jack, do you have any hobbies?

I like playing Minecraft and watching Uncle Kenny play Zelda. Watching Uncle Kenny play Zelda. Of course, two months later is when James shows up on Jeopardy.

James Holzhauer is our Holzhauer. I've been saying it for 34 years. Now, in the beginning, I felt like this isn't going to matter. Like, kids don't care

about trivia. It's boring to them, right? It's not like James is going to, I don't know, find a way to use this national platform to, like, send messages directly to Jack and Scarlett.

Right? The game was a runaway for our champion, James. Let's see if he came up with a correct response. He had Madonna and Happy Birthday, Scarlet. Pretty soon you're going to run out of birthday friends. Yeah, past month, not great for the Uncle War. Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Kenny Malone. And what makes Uncle Jamie so great at Jeopardy? No, seriously, what makes James Holzhauer so good at Jeopardy? Today on the show, I talk to all kinds of Jeopardy champions to find out what they did to get so good at the show and about how James Holzhauer has completely reinvented the game by applying techniques of statistics and probability that he developed as a professional gambler, a math prodigy,

and, you know, the best uncle in the world. An internal investigation found that a cop with the California Highway Patrol sexually harassed 21 women. But those findings were kept secret until a new state transparency law passed. We dug through hours of tapes to find out what happens to officers who cross the line.

Listen to On Our Watch, a podcast from NPR and KQED. James Holzhauer is from Las Vegas. He is a professional sports gambler. April 4th, James episode number one. What does that mean exactly? Oh, I will bet on anything. Why, are you looking for a little action on the cup this year? I like the lightning.

Oh, really? No, I'm not looking. James has unretired from gambling. And I just want to point out here, the Tampa Bay Lightning wound up getting crushed. One of the few things James would get wrong on Jeopardy. Here we go. Categories now in play are the highest capital city. Watching this first episode, we are all very nervous.

The returning champion is really quite good, a guy named Alex, and it's clear right away, Alex is playing the traditional style of Jeopardy. Remember, Jeopardy is played on this giant grid, and Alex starts in the top row with the easiest, least valuable clues. And finally, you're going to love it, don't tread on meme, Alex.

Let's start with highest capital city for 200. Canberra,'re going to love it. Don't tread on meme, Alex. Let's start with highest capital city for 200. Canberra, Kathmandu, Kingston. Alex. It was Kathmandu. Good. Capital city, 400. See, now Alex stays in the same category and then moves to the next clue. Slightly harder, slightly more valuable. But as soon as James gets control of the board, he does something totally different. James. What is Addis Ababa? Yes. Ballpark Cuisine, 1,000. He goes right to the hardest, most valuable clues.

James. For the Diamondbacks. Yes. U3, 1,000. See, he jumped to a whole new category, again, directly to the hardest clue. And I'm checking Twitter as this is on TV, and parts of Jeopardy! Twitter hate James' style. It is jarring. It is hard to play along at home to it. I will later learn that this style is key to how James has been able to rack up unprecedented amounts of money.

Yes, and now the last clue. So this first episode is wrapping up. I dreamed a dream from this show. Alex. Liz Lynn is a robber. You're right. And that takes you to 18,000. Ordinarily, that would be remarkable, but James has 40,412.

It's a runaway game. It's a runaway game, Alex Trebek says. James has such a huge lead that nobody can catch him in Final Jeopardy. Players, here's your clue. Catch him in Final Jeopardy. Players, here's your clue. The Jordan, Bear, and Weber rivers deposit over a million tons of minerals into it annually. Much of that chloride and sodium.

30 seconds. Good luck. I was aware that at some point James decided to get very good at trivia. He had been on this other show called The Chase and done absurdly well. But clearly on Jeopardy, it is not just about trivia. James is using some sort of strategy. There are tactics here. So the question I had was like, what does it actually mean to be good at Jeopardy? What specifically are you good at? That was the question I wanted to find answers to after, of course, this episode was over. James had turned this game into a runaway. Did he get the correct response, though?

Up pops the Great Salt Lake on his screen. He most certainly did. But Uncle Jamie has written a little extra something. Happy birthday, Jack. All right. Is a version of my reaction that evening. And your wager will add $32.68. James wagered $3,268. James wagered $3,268.

March 26, 2008, Jack's birthday. James and I share four nieces and nephews. Yes, and happy birthday, Pete. And happy birthday, we're down to Katie now. He would get to each of them at least once. Happy birthday, Scarlett, again. You ready to go? You want to roll? Yeah, I am recording now. Why don't we start? Why don't you just introduce yourself for me?

I'm Ken Jennings. Ken Jennings is the greatest Jeopardy! champion of all time. But to understand what made him great, you have to understand that he got on the show at a key moment in its history. For the first 20 years of Jeopardy, contestants would get bounced after winning five times. Right. I think towards the end, you would get a car and see ya. Here's a car, drive away. Literally get in the car and we don't want to see you again.

Yeah. And they changed their format to what we currently have, which is a champion can win indefinitely. After I tried out in 2003, before I went on the show. Ken says anecdotally he heard the show was like, oh, it would be cool if someone won, I don't know, 10 games. Ken would win a lot more than that. And let's be clear, it's partly because he is better

than an average contestant at trivia. But according to Ken himself, that advantage is marginal because by the time people get on Jeopardy, they're very good. Most contestants know most of the answers. And so according to Ken, the big advantage is the ability to buzz in before everyone else. The deal with the buzzer is this. The buzzer is not live until Alex finishes reading the question. And if you buzz in before your buzzer goes live, you actually lock yourself out for a fraction of a second.

So the big mistake on the show is people who are all adrenalized and are buzzing too quickly, too eagerly. Okay. To some degree, Jeopardy is kind of a video game and a crappy video game where it's like, light goes on, press button. That's it. Is that true? I do like to think of it as a beautiful art and not a really crappy video game. Ken says the art comes in with internalizing the rhythm of Alex Trebek. Ken grew up in South Korea, and he says the only English language station there played Jeopardy right after school. So from a young age, like a second language almost,

Ken internalized Alex Trebek's voice, how he reads clues, what it sounds like when he's about to finish reading the clues. So when Ken gets on Jeopardy, he is very good at the buzzer. He is getting in first on 60% of the clues. And then the more he wins, the more practice he gets on the buzzer. And the new contestants, they are just like lambs to the slaughter. After 48 wins, the show steps in and institutes more in-depth buzzer training for new contestants.

And it really did make a difference. As soon as they did that, you could see the aptitude gap really lower and the market became a lot more competitive. I mean, did they tell you they were going to do this? Were you pissed? I don't think anyone ever said, hey, Ken, we're going to let the challengers practice more. It did not anger me. I mean, I was flattered. hey, Ken, we're going to let the challengers practice more.

It did not anger me. I mean, I was flattered, you know? It's like the NBA adding different lane violations to stop Wilt Chamberlain from doing those tip-ins. Ken wound up winning $2.5 million over 74 straight Jeopardy games. No one has come even close. The next closest is James, who is currently at 22 games. So arguably, the increased buzzer training has evened out the competition. But savvy players practice the buzzer

before they get on the show. They know that Jeopardy is a trivia game second and a kind of crappy video game first. James, episode number four, we need to talk about daily doubles. He's a professional gambler who's used to betting large amounts. If he hits those daily doubles, watch out. Daily doubles are the hidden clues that let a player wager as much of their money as they want. There are three of these per game, and in this game, James found every single one of them. Yes. Architecture 800. And to their daily double. This was not a fluke. I had been watching James at this point for four

episodes, and he consistently found most of the daily doubles, like at a rate that seems statistically impossible to me. And then when he found them, he would wager enormous amounts of his money. So this daily double, for example, this is late in the game. James has a huge lead and lots of contestants in this situation would wager like nothing. Preserve the lead and keep that money. It will turn into real money if you win. But in this case, James bets so much, you can hear one of the audience members whistle in disbelief. It's $25,000.

All right. Here's the clue. In Andalusia, Arabic calligraphy represents this style named for medieval visitors from Africa. What is Moorish? Moorish is right. James did not miss a single daily double clue throughout this game. He had bet huge, and as a result, at the end of the first two rounds, he had won a huge amount of money.

James. What is Austin? You are right, and that takes you to 72,600. 72,600, Alex Trebek says. The one-day record is 77,000. 4,400 off the one-day record, James. Okay, I'll try. Final Jeopardy, coming up.

Ironically, it's a metaphor meaning a huge step forward. But this two-word process only occurs on a subatomic scale. 30 seconds. Good luck. James is going to break this record. But what will make headlines the next day is how brutally, yet thoughtfully, James breaks the one-day record. 72,600 going into final for you, James. We need to find Quantum Leap. We do.

Happy birthday, Bodger? Booger. Booger? His nickname for his daughter. And how much did you risk? 38,314. A new one-day record. 110,914.

Not only had James destroyed the existing Jeopardy record, he wagered so that the new record would be his daughter's birthday, 11-09-14, November 9th, 2014. He's back tomorrow. Join us then. We hope you're going to. How are you feeling about the record falling? I'm, you know, I'm totally cool with the record falling. I think it's great. Roger Craig won $77,000 in a single Jeopardy game. The record that James obliterated. A lot of people texted me or called me or whatever and said condolences, and they were really sad.

And I was like, I get to just say I have the highest score other than James Holzhauer. So that's going to be my claim to fame there. other than James Holzhauer. So that's going to be my claim to fame there. Roger will also always be famous as one of the first players to approach Jeopardy as a data problem, an approach that was impossible until there was data. Let's start with the Jeopardy archive.

Sure. The Jeopardy archive is, it's an online website that all these super fans, God bless them, created. They have tapes of the show and put all the questions and answers into a web page for each episode of Jeopardy. All right, I'm going to pull it up here. Okay. Random, like, episode.

Oh, my. It's laid out like a board. Mm-hmm. And then if you mouse over the dollar amount of the clue, it will reveal the answer. This is incredible. So I knew about it in either 2005 or 2006. You know, very soon after, decided to scrape it and download the website. Download every single clue?

Yes. There were 200,000, 250,000. I think now it's up to 300,000. 250,000? That's right. Yeah up to 300,000. 250,000? That's right, yeah. Roger has a PhD in computer science, and he was curious, like, now that I've downloaded all of Jeopardy, what categories is this show actually asking about? So the most frequently at a high level is history, geography, literature. Yeah, not surprising probably, I guess, those three.

Yeah, that's the bread and butter of the show. But Roger says you can then dig down into those categories. Like, within history you need to know American history, and then within that you need to know the presidents, like backwards and forwards. Equally important, this analysis showed Roger the kind of stuff

that wouldn't be worth his time to study. That's right. So it's much more important to know Abraham Lincoln and Phantom of the Opera than it is to know all the cheeses that they might ask about. The Jeopardy! Archive is a huge innovation. It has allowed a whole new generation of players to hunt for these exploitable parts of the game. So here's all my scraping code.

Luckily, I just, I ran it once. It took like half an hour. I was like, I'm going to go like make some dinner, come back, and then this will be done. What dinner did you make in just a half an hour? Send me the recipe. This is Monica Tiu. She won Jeopardy's 2012 college tournament as a high schooler taking college classes. Her half hour dish, by the way, cacio e pepe.

So what I'm going to do here, this should work. Come on. little laptop. Let's go. You can do it. Monica is showing me how she scraped 10 seasons of Jeopardy! archives to look at daily doubles. Are they placed randomly? Is there a pattern?

So here we go. Okay. All you really have to do is look at this top row to see. The daily double never comes up in the top row. Yeah, never. Turns out daily doubles not randomly distributed at all. But essentially you can see this same pattern pop up that row three and row four are most likely to have daily doubles. Daily doubles are way more likely to show up in the row with the second hardest clues and the row with the third hardest clues.

And if you know this, you can go daily double hunting, bouncing from category to category in the second and third to last rows. Monica has used this strategy. Roger Craig used this during his record game. It is also the key to James Holzhauer's game. This is how he seems to find a magical number of Daily Doubles. Nevada, James Holzhauer, whose 17-day cash winnings total 1,275,580. So, James, episode number 18. Things are starting to get absurd. Alex Trebek just starts the show this way. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome everyone to the James Holzhauer Show. James, episode number 19.

He wins so profoundly that one of his opponents just writes this in Final Chapter. Now over to Libby Wood. She had 7,400. Her response was, what is congratulations to James? Yeah, I know the feeling. Did you lose anything?

No, I didn't see anything. Don't tell me anything. Hey. I've started FaceTiming with my sister, brother-in-law, and the kids during Jeopardy, and it is sincerely the best part of James' run, although it occasionally does just turn into Uncle Jamie is awesome stories. Scarlett was telling me about how her substitute today. Scarlett's substitute teacher told a kid he should go on Jeopardy like the James guy.

Then the three-year-old weighs in. What's her turn mean? Oh, my God. It is hard to overstate just how dominant James has become. He is still on the show. It's just on break right now for the teacher's tournament. But as of this writing, James has won 22 straight games and $1.7 million. He is averaging nearly $77,000 an episode, nearly as much as Roger Craig's old record.

Walked out of the Louvre with it. What is the Mona Lisa? What is the Mona Lisa? Yeah. Okay, Okay, hold on, my brother-in-law says. We have this tradition where we pause the game right before Final Jeopardy. We try and figure out whose birthday James will wager based on his lead and what he can safely bet. He could do 30 comfortably. 36,494. Yeah. it. 36, 494.

Yeah. Jack. Jack, why'd you come here? 32,608. I don't know why Uncle Jamie's going to bat, but it could be your birthday. Oh. I don't know why Uncle Jamie's going to bat, but it could be your birthday. After the break, we talk to Uncle Jamie.

On NPR's Rough Translation. There's just fewer people that know somebody that's in the military. After 20 years of war, are civilians and military farther apart than ever? They were asking me, do you want to hear this? Do you want to know us? Listen to Homefront, the new season of Rough Translation. I don't even remember what the... How how good your memory on what the answer actually was the first the first episode the answer was great salt lake yeah and then you wrote i wrote happy birthday jack and i believe alex trebek was like and happy birthday jack all right and i was

just like oh like this is a whole new level of thing that i can't touch i will tell you i went to go visit the kids the week before i was on Jeopardy, and they still accidentally referred to me as Uncle Kenny a good 20% of the time. So I think you're doing just okay. That's sweet of him to say. Of course, all of that is before he was on Jeopardy. But James has been trying to get on Jeopardy since 2011. He's taken the online test like 13 times, got called for in-person auditions once for Sports Jeopardy, twice for Real Jeopardy, and then finally, last January, he got the call. Congrats, you have three weeks to prepare. So James would queue up episodes of Jeopardy!, play along at home with a makeshift mechanical

pencil buzzer, wearing shorts, but also the dress shoes he was going to wear on the show. I think that was possibly more important preparation than actually learning any facts or figures. The buzzer timing. I think making sure you're comfortable in your elements. And also, I discovered I really needed Dr. Scholl's insoles for my dress shoes. I assume at this point in your career, you're not wearing dress shoes a tremendous amount. No. They are in the closet specifically for use on game shows and maybe weddings.

You don't even see them on TV. That's the stupid part. I talked to them about this. You know, they're like, can I just wear some jeans and tennis shoes back there? I'd be a lot more comfortable. But they said no. When you talk to other Jeopardy champions about James, they will say that he is the quintessential modern champion. He's great at the buzzer and getting better.

James says Guitar Hero helped with that. He's got an absurdly broad knowledge base. James says he studies the kids' books versions of things, only what he needs to know, plus pictures. But the way James has broken Jeopardy is how he is using daily doubles. Because to a gambler, a daily double is an absurdly good deal that would be irrational to bet small on. This requires a bit of explanation. So remember that a daily double allows James to wager the money he's earned. For every dollar he bets, if he gets the clue correct, he wins a dollar. Bet $10,000, win $10,000. And that has like a name in gambling parlance, right?

Yeah, we call it an even money proposition when you get paid the same amounts for winning as you will lose for losing. Bet a dollar, make a dollar at a casino is usually the payout for playing roulette and betting on black. Just about half the time, black is going to come up. About half the time, it won't. Even money payouts are for things

that are like a coin toss, where you're going to be wrong about half the time. Think about a daily double. It's paying out even money as if a player is going to get it wrong half the time. But that is definitely not true for most players. And it is certainly not true for James. And, you know, in my career, if I find an even money proposition that wins 52% of the time, I'm very happy. Whereas on Jeopardy!, the average contestant gets 70% of their daily doubles right.

And, you know, I think that I have to be over 80%. So if I found an opportunity like that in my work, I would bet as much as the sportsbook would let me. Yeah, you'd go borrow. I mean, it's the kind of thing if you could borrow money to do it, it'd be like, this is probably a good thing to invest in. Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

Hitting a daily double with no money is relatively useless. And this is why James does that kind of crazy thing at the beginning of every show. He intentionally avoids the rows where daily doubles tend to be, but he does not start with the easiest, least valuable clues. What I do that's different than anyone who came before me is I will try to build the pot first. You know, the daily doubles actually don't come up that much in the $1,000 clues, but those are where the big money is, obviously. And maybe the opponents are not ready for this to answer the big money questions right away. They don't feel comfortable with it, but, you know, it's in my comfort zone. So that was possibly an advantage there. Yeah. In an ideal game, then,

James would work his way across the bottom $1,000 row, rack up money while his opponents are still kind of in a daze. Then he would find a daily double and bet everything. Within five minutes of play, he has opened up an insurmountable lead. And you can see James manage his risk based on how much game is left. So early on, he'll take huge shots because the upside is that he can basically put the game away. The downside is, yeah, he loses a lot, but there is a ton of game left. He's very good. He will probably catch up. Towards the end of the

game, though, James is more risk averse. There's less time to recover from a bad loss. By the way, this is how you're supposed to manage your retirement portfolio. Riskier stocks when you're younger, safer bonds when you're heading into retirement. James, the sports gambler, has a different analogy. Well, I get mad at football coaches who are afraid to call for a big play early in the game, you know, because they want to still be in the game at the end. And then it turns out they have no chance but a Hail Mary or something similar to that at the end. Really, they would have done better to do some more gambling earlier.

For me, it's about gambling earlier, so I don't have to sweat Final Jeopardy so much. Yeah, well, look, man, I am 99.9% of the time just very happy for you. Well, look at it this way. If I lose to Ken Jennings in their death match, maybe we'll both be second and third place to Uncle Ken after that. Oh, God. Yeah, if he starts elbowing into the family,

I think we'll just put together a concerted effort to stop that. All right, quick update. After this episode aired, James extended his streak by 10 more games to give him a total of 32 wins and $2,464,216. Both of those are second most all time in Jeopardy history behind, you guessed it, Ken Jennings. And James says that Jeopardy did eventually say, OK, blanket rule, no more personal messages in final Jeopardy responses. Now, of course, by the time they did this, James had already managed to shout out all of my nieces and nephews at least one time. We would love to hear how you or anybody else cracked a different game show. You can email us. We are planetmoneyatnpr.org.

We are also at planetmoney on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. This original episode was produced by Darian Woods. The rerun was produced by James Sneed with help from Gilly Moon and Serena Golden. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's supervising producer. Bryant Erstadt edits the show. Special thanks this week to Andy Saunders, who runs the incredible website, thejeopardyfan.com, which is where I've gotten buzz in statistics and also to Matthew Amster Burton.

And I just want to say, Ken Jennings has a new book out. It is called Planet Funny, which is not consciously inspired by planet money, Ken says. I'm Kenny Malone. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Hey, sorry, everybody. Hey.

I am here. My apologies. Guy Raz. Great. Can I ask a quick favor that I may or may not? I can give you the long backstory. This is Guy Raz, host of a podcast called How I Built This. They put our shows together and put them on the radio.

So during this James run, I was whining to my sister about being the less cool uncle. And she goes, at least you know Guy Raz. Why do the kids care about Guy Raz? Because Guy Raz hosts a kids podcast called Wow in the World. Wait a minute. These packages are addressed to Mindy, not Guy Raz. Yeah, apparently the nieces and nephews love Wow in the World, love Guy Raz. Perfect.

All right, here we go. Hey, Scarlett, it's Guy Raz here. Hey, Jack, it's Guy Raz here. Birthday messages for everybody. Hey, Katie, it's Guy Raz here from Wow in the World. Hey, Pete, it's Guy Raz here from Wow in the World. Hey, Pete, it's Guy Raz here from Wow in the World. And I just got out of the time machine only to discover that it is your birthday. So happy birthday to you.

Mindy sends her regards, and so does Reggie and Dennis and the whole gang on Wow in the World. Hey, Guy, in that time machine, have you learned anything about, I don't know, Jeopardy or anything? No, I haven't even heard of it. Interesting. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.