Originally published at: Jeopardy! contestant unintentionally predicted her winning dollar amount in a doodle before the show | Boing Boing
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Jeopardy! contestant unintentionally predicted her winning dollar amount in a doodle before the show
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Extrasensory Perception for $500
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OK, but given probability theory, this really isn’t so weird. The theoretical maximum winnings is $208,000, and the theoretical maximum loss is [mumble] so, she only had to pick the right number out of 200-mumble-thousand and … holy hell!
(Still, that’s about three orders of magnitude more likely than winning the PowerBall Lotto).
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Fine, cool and all. But she spent a YEAR studying “wager theory” (is there such a thing?) in order to figure out that from a commanding first place you wager $1 more than the max the opponent could win? You could just watch, I dunno, Jeopardy for a year and figure that out.
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I watched one episode where the person in the lead set his wager, and accidentally waged an amount to LOSE by one dollar. He just stood there stunned.
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Clearly needed a few more weeks of wager theory
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The trick is she was really nervous and made hundreds of thes doodles with different numbers. Then she just had to pick the right one afterwards.
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Contestant in question here! Totally fair - how to wager when leading certainly didn’t take a year. How to wager when in 2nd or 3rd is a fair bit trickier and dependent on just how big the gaps in scores are (and I was in each of those situations in my first 2 games).
But the real backstory on the reference to a year of studying was that I was originally supposed to be on the show a year ago, but was rescheduled when COVID shut everything down. So I spent that year studying a lot of things, but a weekly review of a potential Final Jeopardy! scenarios and the optimal wager for each contestant was definitely part of that!
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Wow, thanks for the kind response! I was kind of a jerk and you did not respond aggressively. I appreciate that. And, to be fair, I could probably claim that I was talking about bad journalism (not by of Boingboing, who are aggregators) but I honestly didn’t think that deeply about it.
ETA: And congratulations on your success and the cool side story!
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Congrats on your win!
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Thanks! (And thanks to @mindysan33 as well)
Trust me - you didn’t come off as a jerk. After my tweet spread around and got picked up by various news sources, I quickly learned NOT to venture into the comments. The ones here have been the nicest 
(and the only ones where folks seem to understand that I was betting what I needed to do to win – and not to match up with my drawing in order to make a tweet go viral; winning was the only thing on my mind in that moment!)
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Sadly, most comment boards on the internet are dumpster fires… we’re lucky to have good moderation and a bunch of smart, geeky posters who don’t put up with that kind of thing.
We hope you stick around! Welcome to boing boing!
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