Short Takes: Monday, September 18
Season 40, Episode 6 / Production No. 8931
The first overturned host ruling of the young season came on the 14th clue of the Jeopardy! round: “Native American leaders at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn included Sitting Bull & this Oglala chief, killed the following year.” Deanna Bolio’s response of “Chief Joseph?” was accepted; that was reversed to a miss at the interviews, as Crazy Horse was the warrior in question.
The original ruling raised my eyebrow when made; I couldn’t pull “Crazy Horse,” but I was fairly certain that Chief Joseph was Nez Perce, not Oglala. It feels like more of a whiff by the show than recent previous cases when a response had to be overturned against a contestant. This wasn’t close to the correct response — originally, the show flat-out credited a completely different person, one who died twenty-seven years after the year of death in the clue. No way to tell if the responsibility for this one lies with Ken or whoever on staff is putting together the boards. Either way, I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come as we proceed further into the season without the writers on set.
Hindsight might be a little bit better than 20/20 in respect of Matt Walks’s wager on the final Daily Double. Having lost $3,000 each on the previous two, he bet that amount again (out of a possible $5,000). This time the clue went his way, but when the Double Jeopardy! round concluded, his score was less than one-half Deanna’s total. With that potential additional $2,000, he would have been within striking distance — and as the only player to correctly respond in Final Jeopardy!, likely would have won the game.
Frustrating as that was to watch from home, it wasn’t as stinging as a clue earlier in the round: ACTIVISTS $2000. Matt rang in, gave the correct first name, hesitated, and finally went with “Carrie Hatchet”; after Elliott Goodman missed also, Deanna picked up “Carrie Nation.” Matt told me on Twitter that he had “Nation” in mind, but second-guessed itself. That proved quite costly, as it ended up causing a $6,000 swing between himself and Deanna on that clue alone.
Playing along, I thought that the set of categories in Double Jeopardy! might be favorable to me. And was it ever. When the first Daily Double in the round was found, I noticed I had only circles on my score sheet, meaning correct responses. That kept going afterward. Eventually, the picture of Texas’s state shrub wasn’t familiar; I opened the round with 19 straight gets until that one. I only clammed three more times, ending with a $32,000 Coryat for the round, and $41,400 for the game. I figured that might be a record for difficulty of regular play of higher (that is, excluding College Championships and the HSRT, Teen Tournaments, and Celebrity Jeopardy!).
It was — and in fact, it was my highest Coryat in any 61-clue game since I started keeping track at the beginning of 2015-16. (I did go higher a few times in last season’s Celebrity Jeopardy!, but those are 91-clue games.) I had cracked the $40,000 mark on six previous occasions; twice in regular play in Season 37, and four times in various Teen Tournaments. But this was my first time over $41k. I’ve been a bit uneven to kick off the new season; scored $38,600 last Tuesday, $25,000 both last Thursday and Friday, and under $20,000 on Monday and Wednesday of last week. As yet, I don’t see anything in those scores to indicate whether the boards are playing easier for me under the different circumstances.