Short Takes: Wednesday, November 8
Season 40, Episode 43 / Production No. 8968 / The last one isn't quite so short
Emily Sands joins Josh Saak as winners of $100,000 and qualifiers into the next Tournament of Champions from these Season 37 & 38 Champions Wildcard events. Sands fended off a strong challenge throughout from Jilana Cotter, who had to come through the Season 37 Second Chance competition just to get into this bracket. And about the third finalist…
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Aaron Craig, after taking an absolutely necessary risk by betting everything on the final Daily Double of yesterday’s game, couldn’t rally back into positive territory. It is only the seventh time in the history of the syndicated edition, or its ABC primetime versions, that a player didn’t participate in a Final Jeopardy! in one of the games of a multiple-game, total-point affair. Only two of the others happened on Day 2, and they were both in the last four years: Brad Rutter in the second match of Jeopardy!: The Greatest of All Time, and Alisa Hove in the final of the Professors Tournament in December 2021. And Aaron’s second place finish overall is the first of those seven in which the player missing out on a Final didn’t finish third.1
My page about comebacks in two-day total-point affairs is now updated with the Diamonds final, the 140th such event in show history.
About the order of finish of the runners-up
Back in Spades, Lucy Ricketts risked falling to third by wagering too much in Final Jeopardy! in the second game of the final, but remained in second. Likewise here, Jilana’s all-in from second allowed her to fall behind Aaron on the total scores.
A wager of $16,000 would have been ideal. In such an instance, Jilana goes up to $40,000 in Game 2, and $43,000 overall, if she’s right; that takes her above the $42,199 that Emily ended up with. (If Emily had gotten Final correct, of course, she locks out Jilana and ensures she wins.) But with that bet and the incorrect response, Jilana would’ve fallen to $8000 in Game 2, and $11,000 overall, keeping her above Aaron (who is locked on his $10,000 score from Game 1).
In an earlier round of this tournament where there’s no difference in money between finishing second and third, or in a regular play game (what’s that?) where the difference is only $1,000, going all-in from this scenario is the generally accepted play (the situation being one where you cannot win with an incorrect response). But here, it cost Jilana $25,000. It’s unfortunate, as she really battled throughout this final, getting back to a position where she had a shot to win after two massive swings against her the previous day (missing the last Daily Double, and mis-reading the clue in Final). Even with that sum of cash left behind, though, I’m sure she’s proud of how her Jeopardy! return went — as she rightly should be.
A clue I wished I’d seen
The majority of the Jeopardy! Round category L____O was a repeat from 2009; two previously unseen clues were swapped in. With new material available to go into it, I would’ve liked something like this: “‘Party Rock Anthem’ was a Billboard No. 1 hit single for this duo in 2011.”2
Champions Wildcard continues, but we mark an important transition
The Diamonds bracket of CWC was taped September 12, 13, & 14. The upcoming Clubs, which begins today, was filmed on October 17, 18, & 19. Between those, of course, the Writers Guild of America reached a new collective bargaining agreement with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers; thus, today marks the first game of Season 40 with material written since Jeopardy!’s writers returned to work at the beginning of last month, and the first with them back at the judges’ table.
As Andy Saunders notes in yesterday’s game recap, “…this is the last game that required crossing a picket line in order to tape.” Andy and many show alumni3 are among those who objected to the Second Chance, Spades, and Diamonds players crossing the WGA picket line to come back to record their appearances that have aired thus far this season. Is that concern now a dead letter? Is it inapplicable to the Clubs and Hearts players, now that writers are back?
Not entirely. It depends on when the returning contestants accepted their invitations to return. If it was on or before September 25, then by agreeing to come back while Jeopardy! remained struck, they still indicated a willingness to cross a picket line — even if, as things played out, they ended up not doing so. For Andy and those who believe that everyone who has been on Jeopardy! thus far this season actively undermined labor solidarity, the position of any Clubs or Hearts player who accepted the invite in that time frame should be no different than the Second Chance, Spades, or Diamonds competitors.
This having been established, I take note of an interesting comment from February 2022 1-time champion Nick Heise:
Yeah many of the contestants starting in the Clubs bracket (taped 10/17-10/19, airing starting 11/9) initially declined the invitation to participate in order to support the WGA, but then the invitation was re-extended to them once the strike ended.
That’s a great gesture by the show, one I wasn’t sure it would undertake. Heise’s remark clearly establishes that the final two CWC brackets will both be composed, at least in part, of players who didn’t accept an invite to come back while Jeopardy! was struck.
Because all of these contestants could have started studying for a return appearance as soon as Michael Davies announced the Season 37/38 Champions Wildcard events on Inside Jeopardy! on August 7, when they got The Call again is irrelevant to establishing their amount of lead time to prepare — the Clubs players all had ten weeks, the Hearts players thirteen. If any of them discloses when they were invited back, very well. I will not engage with any of them on social media to determine when that was, and I don’t think anyone else should either. Such a question serves no purpose other than a “gotcha!” to establish whether or not, in the minds of at least some of the show’s fans, any such contestant did or didn’t support the WGA. I instead give them the benefit of the doubt, and default to the assumption that they all did, and do.
The other four, all of whom finished with $0 or less after Double Jeopardy! in Game 1 of their two-game matches, are: Irene Grzywacz, 1987 (S3) Senior Tournament; Courtney Bennis, 2004 (S20) Teen Tournament; Hans von Walter, November 2010 (S27) College Championship; Roger Craig, Battle of the Decades (S30)
Correct response: who are LMFAO?
Including Season 36 player (and actor) Cara Moretto, who last week made a request of the players from Season 40’s first thirty-eight games: that they “[donate] to the Entertainment Community Fund or another writers relief organization. Since they already won piles of money from their first appearances and additional money this time around and all. I myself lost a not insignificant amount of my income during the strike and I barely work, so I can only imagine how tough it was for WGA members.”