Reaction: Masters Season 2, Episode 1

Coincident (intentionally?) with the 100th anniversary of Art Fleming’s birth¹, the second season of Jeopardy! Masters got underway last night. And the two players qualifying through tournament wins in Season 40 reprised the skill that allowed them to punch their tickets here. Both won in runaways — Victoria Groce in the first, Yogesh Raut in the second. Defending champion James Holzhauer finds himself in third place, having been defeated for only the second time in Masters competition.

There appears to be a clear separation at the midpoint of the pack — Victoria, Yogesh, and James in one tier, and Mattea, Matt, and Amy in another. But we’re a long way from anyone being cut just yet. Once we get to the end of next week – by which we’ll have seen everybody play four times, including once on the second tape day of the quarterfinals – we’ll have enough information to make some definitive statements.

Another surprise in Game 2 last night came in the form of James’s wager — which did not cover a double-up from Amy Schneider in second. As James would have fallen to 7,190 if he’d missed, his bet did defend against the zero wager Amy made. But as the wagering suggestions in the TJ!F recap note, Amy could have put 600 at risk and won the Double Stumper, assuming a 3,801 cover wager by James. A check of the stats in the Archive shows that 3,010 was James’s bet on the only Final Jeopardy clue he missed in his 33 regular games, and he did wager 31,010 on two other occasions during that stretch, plus two wagers of 310 since². Might it be, like many other totals he’s chosen to put on the line, something of significance to him? And on that topic…

…specifically, the other way players send such messages — shout-outs in place of, or alongside, their responses. Recall that this came up on “Inside Jeopardy!” as recently as a few weeks ago in the interview with Katie Nolan. I incline toward Nolan’s opposition to shout-outs — and I’m on record as having said the show should consider making it policy that everything on the screen is part of the response, and that as such, a shout-out is additional information that would void an otherwise correct one.

This comes back to the fore with James and Victoria in the same event, and likely going head-to-head at some point down the line. The JIT and last night’s opener of Masters make clear that unless directed otherwise, Victoria is going to include “Hi, Nora! [❤️]” in every Final response she gives. If James has decided of his own volition that he no longer wishes to use Final Jeopardy as a vehicle to tip his cap to family and friends, fair enough. But if he remains bound by whatever he was told after his 17th win, that’s not cool at all. Jeopardy! cannot³ really shouldn’t have one standard on shout-outs in place for James and another for Victoria (and presumably the other four Masters) — that would be grossly hypocritical. And in a tournament where total correct responses is the second tiebreaker (and that tiebreaker came into play last year), such a double standard would also be manifestly unfair.

We’ve had some presentation and “cosmetic” changes to Masters between Seasons 1 & 2:

• The disclosure of the Daily Double locations to the home audience at the start of each round has been scrapped. I don’t think this is any great loss. I was never high on bringing this into the regular syndicated program — not least because on days when the game is running slow, it could cost a clue, maybe two, being unplayed.

• The highlight of the category being selected – but not the players at the right of the screen as it’s being chosen – has come over from Celebrity Jeopardy!. I thought this was a positive addition to Season 2 of Celebrity, and I’m glad to see it maintained here. I was also a big fan of keeping the clue on screen when it was time for the responses in THE KERNEL OF THE CLUE; that was helpful to viewers who, like myself, were still trying to parse out the half of the correct response contained within the clue text. (It wasn’t helpful enough for me to actually get any of them, though.)

• A change that I wish they’d made, but didn’t: using the mix of “Think!” From The Greatest of All Time in Final, as opposed to the standard version. I think that the GOAT cut is befitting of play of this level of quality, as it was in early in 2020. Here it is on 10 hour loop.

Loose ends from this week thus far

• In Monday’s game, I got a laugh at Ferdinand calling “lust” a “restrained virtue.” Then again, earlier in that very game, I said “E” was the single dot in Braille letter, confusing it with Morse Code; and despite writing down “Fictional Groups” as the Final category the following day, I managed to entirely block that out of my mind during the 30-second response interval, thus getting nowhere close with “The Three Tenors.”

• On Tuesday, it seemed to me that Ken got the call right in ruling against Laura Bligh for saying “forest” instead of its plural, leaving it open for Amy Hummel to successfully rebound. Yesterday, I initially thought the call against Hummel on the final Daily Double was too harsh; to my ear, the first “e” being pronounced as long and not short shouldn’t have been enough to ding it. But after listening back to it a few times, and seeing how the Archive put it in (“me-ter-o-lo-gy,”) I think the ruling is justifiable. “Metrology” has only four syllables, and what Amy said came out as five. And as there was a pause immediately following the response, I don’t think Ken made that ruling on his own, making sure to get guidance from the judges’ table.

• The “bold prediction” that The Jeopardy! Fan made on March 16 – “At least half of April’s regular play games will see more than 9 Triple Stumpers” [emphasis in original] – did come to pass, with nine of fifteen regular games last month having a double-digit TS count. Interestingly, the first six regular-play games (all taped on March 12) each had ten or more, while the next five (the entirety of the March 13 taping) had nine or fewer.

1. And surely not intentionally coincident, the 43rd anniversary of mine.

2. 31,010 — in his seventh and twenty-fourth regular games; 310 — in his ToC semifinal and in Episode 6 of last year’s Masters.

3. Of course, the show can do whatever it wants, within the bounds of legality. But putting one contestant under a restriction on shout-outs and not the others would be like, say, oh… suggesting that those opposed to the current Executive Producer’s overall vision for Jeopardy! Should self-censor, when the one so suggesting spent an entire season speaking out against the previous EP, including on matters strictly confined to programming choices, and explicitly rejected the thought of ceasing to watch. Things like that can be quite damaging to credibility, be that possessed by the show or anyone else.