Final Jeopardy! wagering analysis:
Wednesday, March 2, 2016

I was going to wait until tomorrow to post tonight’s video, but… well, you know.

Let’s go right to the Final Jeopardy! category:

Hey! I’ve written about how this tends to turn to dumb wordplay! Maybe one of my hints will come in handy.

Oh, yeah – we have some wagers to calculate:

Let’s go to the analysis.

First-order calculations

Rachel can keep John locked out…

Second-order calculations

…but it puts her at risk to a small wager by Peter. So my recommendation is that John go for everything in case Rachel makes a middling wager, which would still force him to get it right.

Zero wagers

Score differences:
Peter and Rachel: 3,800
Peter and John: 12,400
Rachel and John: 8,600

Then we add a dollar to the minimum wagers, and subtract a dollar from the maximum wagers.

What actually happened

That’s a bummer for John – he made a good wager, and got the only correct response, but Rachel outfoxed him.

Rachel has yet to win big, but coming back tomorrow is all that matters – that’s 2 games and $17,500.

(Somehow this fact didn’t make it into my STATE CAPITALS Fact Primer. Maybe that’s because I had no idea how obscure it was? Now I feel guilty that someone might have missed this because I didn’t put it in there!)

The Final Jeopardy! clue