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December 01, 2004

Congratulations, Ken

Last night, as expected (I knew at least a month ago via Kottke), Ken Jennings lost on Jeopardy! but what a run! I was rooting for Ken the entire time and entirely positive about his graciousness and composure always. I am sorry to see him go and only time will tell whether I keep watching now.

The rest of this is going to go into a bit of minutia on the betting of the final game and in general as I find it strategically interesting, probably much more so than most so be warned ;) .

I was also quite surprised at the way he lost honestly. I figured he would lose to someone hitting several daily doubles and betting it all (as Alex [accurately but I don't really think appropriately] was urging them to do against him) successfully. Instead, Ken found all three but missed the latter (and larger bets) two and of course Final Jeopardy. I believe he would have had a runaway if he had always bet zero on the DDs. So, unfortunately, Ken basically lost the final game more than his opponent beat him (and this would have been even more true if she had played the odds correctly in FJ (below)).

I also thought the winner made a huge betting error in Final Jeopardy. The third player was out of the game and she had more than 2/3 of the money Ken did. In a situation like this, Ken (to be assured of winning if he gets it right) must bet an amount greater than the difference between his and her scores and so if he does and gets it wrong she will be ahead, betting nothing. As such, if she thinks he will do this (and I thought it was a certainty that Ken would for a number of reasons), she massively increases her chances to win by betting $0. Doing this she just must hope Ken gets it wrong. By betting as she did, she can only win if both Ken gets it wrong and she gets it right. Hoping (as you must in either case) that a player of Ken's calibre gets it wrong is one thing (a 32% chance according to TV Game Shows .NET) but also needing to get right something he gets wrong makes the odds much worse (my estimate based on the above site's statistics suggest her chance to win goes from 32% to about 10% [a little hard to calculate as there are usually 2 opponents in FJ, not just one but usually at most one is in reach of Ken]). Of course, she got away with it but I think her bet was crazy unless she is an absolute expert at the category.

Ken was an amazing champion and player throughout, with an immense and immensely broad knowledge, great speed with the signalling button, great skill in knowing and always sticking to the category he was answering and incredible graciousness in winning and losing. My one and only criticism of his play was his DD and FJ betting strategy. He almost always bet an amount to put him at the next $5000 multiple if he needed to bet around $3000 (or something like this) or more to get there and an amount to put him at the next $5000 multiple beyond that if not (thus he almost always seemed to bet between $3K and $8K to put him at an even multiple of $5K). This seemed a fine (and fun in an idiosyncratic way) general rule but I felt he should have let the categories influence him more than he seemed to. Yes, his knowledge is amazingly broad, but still he is much stronger at some areas than others and only rarely would he let this influence his betting. Even in runaway situations where he had a broad option of betting, he seemed much too consistent (Example: in a game that ends DJ 42001-10000-3000, Ken could bet up to 22000 with no risk and how much he bets up to that should be massively influenced by how strong he thinks he is in the category but Ken seemed to always bet in the $8K or so region in situations like this). Once in a long while he made an exception to this but I didn't think it was nearly often enough. His broad strength (apparently he was only shut out in 3%!!! of all the categories during his entire run) makes his consistent betting strategy a vastly better move than it would be for me but still really isn't the most efficient betting.

Posted by aarondf at December 1, 2004 10:13 AM

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