On the Play-In Games
How the selections were determined, and some suggestions to improve them
Before I get into the two audio-only games that TuneIn dropped on Friday evening, some public service announcements regarding tomorrow’s last Second Chance episode of the season.
We already had significant preemptions on the table due to ABC’s broadcast of Eagles at Buccaneers and its pregame show, as well as Fox’s coverage of college basketball, bowling, and the Primetime Emmy Awards.1 Thanks to Mother Nature, CBS is joining that party. The Steelers at Bills NFL playoff game, originally scheduled for 1 pm Eastern today, has been moved to 4:30 pm ET tomorrow (Monday, January 15) due to heavy snow overnight and throughout today in western New York State. The four hour coverage block (4-8 pm, including The NFL Today preceding) preempts Jeopardy! in 56 media markets — including Birmingham, AL; Memphis; San Antonio; Dallas-Fort Worth; Columbus, OH; Milwaukee; Boston; Tampa Bay; and Cleveland. Viewers should check their local listings to see if the show will be airing at another time or on another station.
The two Play-In Games
Thirty-one 1- and 2-day Jeopardy! champions returned to Culver City in the first week of this month to duke it out for a spot in the next Tournament of Champions. Starting next Tuesday and running through February 2, twenty-seven of them will do so on the syndicated program in the now-familiar 14-episode format. In order to reduce the field, two games were played by six contestants. Hosted by Buzzy Cohen, they were released on TuneIn this past Friday; they are available on-demand here.
Overall, I thought they came off really well. They had the same pace and feel as televised episodes; that familiarity is most helpful in this format gaining acceptance. Indeed, because the commercial breaks are shorter, the games actually go quicker.
In some cases, it takes a clue or two to pick up on what a category title actually is and what that means for the responses. The Jeopardy! Fan noted this in its recap of Game 1; that game had categories titled OVER CASTE and IAMB WOMAN in Double Jeopardy!. From Buzzy’s initial reading, one would incline to think they were “CAST” and “I AM,” respectively.
The big issue for me about these two games — and honestly, the only really major one — was the frequency of scoring updates. We only got the figures for all three players at the end of the Jeopardy! and Double Jeopardy! rounds. During her stint as host, Mayim Bialik came in for some criticism for reading all the scores out at various points in the show. But without the ability to actually see them, there are junctures where having them stated is key. Specifically, the mid-Jeopardy! round break and before each Daily Double. Giving all the players’ scores at those points would be quite helpful to viewers listeners in ascertaining the state of play at those critical points, and thus assessing the wagering of the players. This can, and should, be implemented as soon as this upcoming week, when the second Champions Wildcard group will tape (and which will have one play-in game).
One last point — on Friday night, one of the play-in participants confirmed to me that they were informed of placement in that round before traveling out to Southern California. Good on the show for doing that.
Who played in them
When the show released the field for Champions Wildcard Group 1 this past Tuesday evening2, one thing was immediately apparent to me — “least money won by one-game champions” was not the criterion used to determine who played in them. Devin Lohman, who at $1,200 was the lowest money-winner of last season, didn’t have to play that extra game. So, I wondered, what did determine who was picked to play them? Was it simply a random draw, or did the show employ some metrics to decide?
I had thought the former initially, but after compiling some numbers yesterday, I don’t think so. It seems to me it was much like selecting and seeding at-large teams for the NCAA basketball championship — data is used as a starting point, but an “eye test” comes into play also. To demonstrate this, I’ll share those numbers I put together for all 21 of the 1-game winners in this bracket. There were seven stats I assembled:
Score at the end of Double Jeopardy!
Final score
Coryat score
Buzz attempts
Successful buzzes
Successful buzz percentage
“In first on buzzer” percentage3
The first three come from J! Archive; the next three come from the show-provided box scores; and the last comes from The Jeopardy! Fan.
I compiled these seven metrics for the game each one-day champ won, and for both their win and their loss (averages for the three scoring metrics, aggregates for the four buzzing metrics). The table below presents those numbers and players’ rankings on each. Rankings in boxes indicate the six players who were put in the play-in games; underlined rankings indicate the bottom six on that metric, including ties.4 (And yes, being as there are seven stats, I chose the rainbow colors intentionally, substituting cyan for indigo for readability.)
This helped me to understand two decisions that, from a glance at the leaderboard alone, would not seem to make sense — Matthew Ott going to the play-ins even with the fifth-highest winnings total, and Johanna Stoberock avoiding them though she had the third-lowest.
In every column but final scores, Ott is in the bottom half of this cohort; his win came because he nearly doubled up in Final, and did so on a clue that on its face seems like a layup, but Sriram Krishnan couldn’t come up with. Stoberock, on the other hand, was bottom six only on Final score, and top half in every other metric save for attempts. She led entering Final Jeopardy, and remained on top following a Triple Stumper.
What these numbers don’t shed any light on — and indeed, serve to raise questions about — is a rationale for putting Daniel Ciarrocchi into the play-ins, vice either Holly Hassel or Devin Lohman. Ciarrocchi won his game on a solo Final get from the lead, making the standard cover bet. He’s in the top half on many of the rankings. The one thing that does come to my mind here is that Daniel’s win was in the first game after Ben Chan’s unexpected absence following his first three wins; thus, Ciarrocchi did not defeat a defending champion. Hassel did defeat six-game winner Suresh Krishnan; I wonder if taking down a 5+ game winner carried extra weight. (It can’t be “beating a ToC direct entrant”; Rachel Clark prevailed over Brian Henegar, and she had to play-in.) Every other player here who beat someone with five or more wins avoided the “outbracket.”5 For Lohman, on the other hand, I can make points to support both sides. In favor of putting him in the play-ins: not only did he have the lowest winning total of Season 39, he only won because of an ill advised all-in from defending champion Deb Bilodeau. In favor of keeping him out of them: he led entering Final in that game because he was willing to risk big, including a True Daily Double and one that was 60% of his total just two clues later.
Personally, I would have put Ciarrocchi into the main Champions Wildcard bracket, and Lohman into the play-ins, but that’s just my own subjective call.
When the participants in March Madness and the College Football Playoff are announced each year, the chair of the selection committee appears live on CBS or ESPN respectively, and is questioned about the decision process. If Michael Davies or a member of the Jeopardy! staff were similarly grilled about how it was determined that these six particular players would play an extra game, that person would not have to totally contort themself in knots to justify those calls, unlike Boo Corrigan last month trying to explain why undefeated Florida State was excluded from the CFP.6 What the show came up with here is completely defensible. I look forward to doing this analysis again for the second group when it comes out in two weeks or so.
Your own thoughts on who should have been in the play-ins? Questions? Concerns? Rants and/or raves? The comments below are open. Follow me on Twitter [at]mfc248 for live Jeopardy! Tweets in the 7:00 pm Eastern half-hour most nights. For those on Bluesky, mfc248.bsky.social. I’m also [at]mattcarberry on Instagram and Threads, though I don’t use the latter much.
Congratulations to Jeopardy! on winning the Emmy for Outstanding Game Show, and to Keke Palmer of Password for taking Outstanding Host for a Game Show, over both Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik. (As part of a reorganization announced a little over two years ago, the game show categories moved from the Daytime to the Primetime Emmy Awards beginning this year; these awards were given at a ceremony on January 7.)
Including, initially, the winners of the two play-in games; their identities were obscured a few hours later. Still, a major error in the reveal.
An explanation of the difference between these last two is in order. “Successful buzz percentage” is (successful buzzes / buzz attempts), and rebounds are counted as distinct from the original attempt. “In first on buzzer percentage” is (successful buzzes / total number of non-Daily Doubles), and rebounds are disregarded.
Example: in a theoretical game with no rebounds where all the clues are played, a player attempts to buzz in 38 times and successfully gets in first on 19 occasions. The “buzz percentage” here is 50% (19/38), while the “in first” percentage is 33.33% (19/57).
For example, if three players are tied for 14th in a ranking, that tie spans 14th to 16th places. 16th being a bottom-six place, all three players in that tie get underlined.
Andy Tirrell over Cris Pannullo; Kelly Barry over Stephen Webb; Lynn Di Vito over Ben Chan. (Lloyd Sy over Ray Lalonde also, but Sy is a 2-game winner.)
Corrigan was hamstrung by the necessity of not making the Kinsley gaffe of saying on-air that the Southeastern Conference has way more pull and sway than Florida State University and/or the Atlantic Coast Conference, so of course Alabama, as SEC champion, had to be in the playoff (and thus, so too did Big 12 champion Texas, as the Longhorns beat the Crimson Tide head-to-head in Tuscaloosa in September).