In my more than thirty
years of watching Jeopardy, I have watched nearly as many Tournaments of
Champions. And one of the things you learn after enough time has passed is that
how any of these champions did in their original appearance will have nothing
to do with how well they’d do in the Tournament.
During the era when the
limit was five wins and the dollar figures ran from $100 to $500 in the
Jeopardy round, it was somewhat easier to expect the unexpected. That didn’t
make it any more shocking when it happened. One of my earliest memories of a
major upset in a Tournament of Champions came in the semi-finals of the 1994
Tournament when Steve Chernicoff and John Cuthbertson, who’d each won over
$82,000 in five games were defeated by College Champion Jeff Stewart in Final
Jeopardy. That tournament was eventually won by Rachael Schwartz, the first
female to win a Tournament of champions. Of the three female players who
qualified, she had by far won the least amount of money, so I’m pretty sure
that anyone who thought a woman would win the TOC that year, Rachael would have
been third on the list.
There were similar upsets
over the next several years, albeit none quite as striking. The one that had
the greatest context was in 2001 when Doug Lach, who’d won $85,400 in five
games – one of the highest five game totals to that point - was absolutely
demolished in his quarterfinal appearance by a 23 year old recent college
graduate named Brad Rutter, whose $55,102 in five games was one of the lowest
totals of any of the participants in that year’s Tournament. Anyone who
told you, even after he won the TOC in 2001, that they thought he was going to
win more money in Jeopardy history back then, would have been lying through his
teeth. I certainly didn’t think so.
When the dollar figures
were doubled and the five game limit lifted, if anything, it became harder to
predict how was going to win a Tournament of Champions. This was made clear in the first Tournament
of Champions in the post Ken Jennings era when David Madden won 19 games and
just under half a million dollars, both of which would be the second to
Jennings for more than a decade. I remember thinking that the 2006 Tournament
of Champions was an exercise and that David Madden would waltz to the $250,000
grand prize. Instead, he didn’t even make it to the finals where he was
beaten – flattened is really more accurate – by Bill MacDonald, who’d won four
games and $75,399 the past November.
Over the last ten years,
even as we have seen the slow but steady
rise in the number of super-champions, we have seen this play out time and
again. Arthur Chu, who won eleven games and Julia Collins, who had managed to
win 20 in the spring and summer of 2014, respectively, did both make it to the
finals of the 2014 Tournament of Champions. Both, however, ended up losing to
Ben Ingram who back in 2013 had ‘only’ won eight games and ‘merely’ $176, 413.
The following September
Matt Jackson began to put together a run that reminded many of Jennings when he
won 13 games and $411,612. He got to the finals that year – and was absolutely
destroyed by Alex Jacob, who’d only won six games and just under $150,000
(albeit in a similarly destructive fashion.)
Two years later, the 2017
Tournament of Champions featured a pair of 12 game winners Seth Wilson who’d
won $265,000 and the more dynamic Austin Rogers who’d won $411,000. Admittedly
the field of competition that year had some of the most impressive champions in
a very long time, and few could argue that Buzzy Cohen, who ended up the
ultimate winner, was not a similarly impressive player.
In the first Tournament of
Champions in the post Alex Trebek era in 2021, many thought that Jason
Zuffranieri, who had managed to win 19 games and more than $500,000 in the
midst of what would be the last two full seasons of Trebek, would waltz to the
finals. He only qualified for the semi-finals via a wild card and in his
semi-final match was defeated by Jennifer Quail, who’d won eight games and just
over $228,000.
So you’d think by this
point in my history of watching Tournaments of Champions I would be prepared
for these kinds of upsets. The thing is, no matter how many times it happens,
no matter how much you know about Jeopardy, you still go in to
every tournament with a narrative that the biggest winners are going to
dominate. Like all of you who watched in 2022, I was certain we were going to
see Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach face off in the finals. The
idea that any of them would lose in their semi-final match – and in the case of
Mattea be flattened by an opponent – was unthinkable. Yet that is what
happened to Matt in the case of Sam Buttrey and Mattea in the case of Andrew He.
(Though considering how last year’s Masters Tournament played out, both of them
got revenge on the players who’d beaten them.)
Similarly I was sure that
last night Cris Panullo – who in the fall of 2022 had won 21 games and just
under $750,000 – was going to dance all over his two fellow champions Ben
Goldstein and Jared Watson. I might have been willing to give shorter odds had he
been facing Ray LaLonde or Stephen Webb, but a five game player who hadn’t cracked
the $50,000 mark or a three game winner who I had dismissed just last week? Not
a chance. It was in the bag. I had every reason to keep thinking this in the
first half of the Jeopardy round as Cris built up an early lead. I kept
thinking until Jared managed to get to the Daily Double near the end of the
round. At the time Jared had half Cris’ total so he bet everything he had in a
$400 clue in ALL THINGS DISNEY:
“At Walt Disney World in
1975, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper and Jim Irwin attended the grand opening
of this ride.” Jared knew it was Space Mountain and the game was tied. It was
still tied at the end of the round: Jared and Cris had $8800 apiece. A
temporary condition, I thought.
I was right on that.
Absolutely wrong as to how it would play out. Cris couldn’t even manage to ring
in until the twelfth clue of Double Jeopardy. By that point Jared had found both
Daily Doubles. The first was in WORLD CITIES:
“Fittingly, this capital
is the Yukon headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police.” Jared somehow
knew it was Whitehorse and gained $6000. Two clues later he found the other in
ALLOYS: “This 7-letter word for an alloy used in dentistry is also used to mean
any combination of 2 or more substances.” He knew it was an amalgam and gained
another $5000. By that point Jared had $27,000 and there was no possibility
that Cris could close the gap even had he been at peak condition.
For the record after his
return, he wasn’t. He managed to give 22 correct responses to Jared’s 21. But
Cris also gave a whopping five incorrect answers where as Jared didn’t make a
single mistake. In all the games watching him, I don’t remember him making this
many errors, even in the game he eventually lost. The end result was that by
the end of Double Jeopardy Cris Panullo had been flattened in a way I’d never
seen. He had just $14,000 to Jared’s $32,000.
And as a further sign of
how much he had lapsed, he also got Final Jeopardy wrong. The category was ART
HISTORY: “The Royal Academy of Arts has this man’s ‘La Fornarina’ & in the
1800s the RAA’s love of him made some artists retreat to an earlier style.”
Cris thought it was Botticelli, which was wrong. Jared knew the correct
response: “Who is Raphael?” (the pre-Raphaelites)
What happened, I imagine
millions of Jeopardy fans are asking? Was it simply a level of fatigue due to
having been absent from the show for more than a year? Jared did win his 3
games comparatively recently (the summer of 2023) but Ben’s five wins game two weeks
after and he played horribly in comparison to Cris.
The answer is…there is no
answer. Cris has merely fallen victim to the same rule of every Tournament of
Champions since they began; that trying to handicap them based on their
previous performance is a fool’s errand. It played out to a similar extent in the
previous tournament even before we got to the semi-finals. Not only did
Jonathan Fisher, who had managed to win eleven games (and had defeated Matt
Amodio to begin his streak) end up losing in Final Jeopardy to none other than
Andrew He, but in the previous quarterfinal match Ryan Long, who had managed to
win 16 games that year could never truly get started against Megan Wachspress
or Maureen O’Neill. He ended up getting into the red early in the Jeopardy
round, was in third by the end of it, and never managed to get going. He was
essentially out of it by the end of Double Jeopardy.
The fact of the matter is
that even the best Jeopardy champions will one day have a mediocre day or run
into a player who is significantly better than them. Frequently that will
happen in the Tournament of Champions when the best of the best are all
assembled. No one manages to qualify for a Tournament of Champions because they
are a terrible player. (Well, you know that I think the Second Chance Tournament
may be damaging that concept but the recent play of Juveria Zaheer is causing
me to rethink even that.) Is it difficult to believe that Cris, who as he told
us was an alternate for the first Masters Tournament, would end up meeting his
demise this early in the Tournament of Champions? Perhaps, but no less
unbelievable than what has happened to David Madden and Jason Zuffranieri in
earlier Tournaments and Mattea Roach and Matt Amodio in the one just past.
Like with all sporting
events, every Jeopardy champions knows that somewhere out there is a player who
will end their streak. Even Brad Rutter, who for eighteen years was the only
undefeated player in Jeopardy history, had moments in his career where there
were players (some of whom I’ve even listed above) nearly unseated him before
he finally met his demise at the hands of both Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer.
That is equally true in the Tournament of Champions as was proven just last
night and will no doubt be proven a few times more even before we get to the
semi-finals. I’ll give a full report on that when the first round ends next
Wednesday but we should be prepared for the fact that we can’t be prepared for things
to go as planned.
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