Purists might quibble about the
finalists for the 2025 Jeopardy Masters being ‘pedestrian’ given how we
started. And in a technical sense the three finalists: Victoria Groce, Yogesh
Raut and Juveria Zaheer don’t have the track records of James Holzhauer or Matt
Amodio. Set aside the fact that the first two have beaten so many other Masters
over the past two years and that Juveria has had to beat some of the greatest
Jeopardy players of all time – including Brad Rutter, Roger Craig and Matt
Amodio – to make it to this point.
But the lineup represents a new look among the kind of Jeopardy
finalists that have made up not just the Masters but the Tournament of
Champions winners in the post-Trebek era. The finalists of the 2022 Tournament
of Champions was won by Amy Schneider, a transgender woman and a lesbian. The
lineup of the 2023 Masters included Schneider, the non-binary Mattea Roach and
the Asian-American Andrew He.
The finalists in the 2024
Tournament of Champions which Yogesh Raut ended up winning, included Ben Chan
an Asian-American. Yogesh was only the third person of color in the history of
Jeopardy to win a Tournament of Champions to that point.
And now for the first time in the
short history of the Masters and the longer history of Jeopardy Tournaments two
of the players are female and two of them have Hindi ancestry. Combined with
Nilesh Vinjamuri’s win of this year’s Tournament of Champions, it is clear that
Jeopardy is finally evolving to reflect America more accurately (and yes I know
one of the finalists is Canadian). Watching Juveria, Yogesh and Victoria, all
three automatically returning for next year’s Masters it was impossible not to
watch them and see three players who had definitely earned the right to call
themselves Masters.
As a reminder the finals are a
two-game total point affair with the highest total being the winner.
Part of the interview segment for
the first game was a discussion of the charitable donation: Jeopardy would
donate $100,000 to a charity of the winner’s choice. For Juveria, it was Doctors
Without Borders. For Yogesh, it was the Equal Justic Initiative. For Victoria,
it was Partners in Health.
GAME 1
Victoria found the Daily Double relatively
early in the Jeopardy round in BLANK OF THE BLANK. She wagered the 1200 points
she had:
In an early chapter of an 1864
book, ‘the very idea of going down’ here ;was simply absurd’
Victoria figured it out: “What is
The Center of the Earth?” (by Jules Verne). She doubled her score.
After that it became as is
tradition in their matches, a back and forth between Yogesh and Victoria for
the lead. Yogesh moved ahead in the middle of the round and finished with 6600
points to Victoria’s 5400. Juveria had moved up to 2600 points.
In
Double Jeopardy Victoria got to the first Daily Double in GO, FISH. At the time
she had 10,200 points to Yogesh’s 9400. Saying it felt dangerous, she wagered
4000 points:
“A Florida City is said to have
gotten its name after Mary Ormond Boyer saw these fish springing from a bayou.”
Victoria struggled before guessing:
“What is Pompano? It was Tarpan (apparently there’s a town called Tarpan Springs).
She dropped to 6200 points.
A few clues later Victoria found
the other Daily Double in LET’S HIT THE ROAD. This time she went all in betting
the 7400 points she had:
“During World War II, this
historic highway carried vital supplies from Lashio to Kunming.” Again a long pause: “What is the
Burma Road?” Then Ken told her: “The Burma Road is correct. She jumped up to
14,800 points. Victoria admitted: “I was not sure.”
Juveria got into the red early in
Double Jeopardy and never got out of it. By the end of the round Victoria was
still in the lead with 21,200 points to Yogesh’s 13,000.
The Final Jeopardy category Yogesh
and Victoria had to deal with: PEOPLES OF THE WORLD. The clue:
Heard often in the film ‘The Conqueror”,
the name of a once nomadic people came from a Latin word used for hell
Yogesh wrote down: “What are Tatars?”
That was close, but it was incorrect. It cost him everything he had. Victoria
wrote down: “Who are the Mongols?” (which is what I wrote down. It was in fact
the Tartars, out of the word for Tartarus, a Latin term for Hell. Victoria
lost 6800 points, dropping her to 14,400 points.
So at the end of Game 1, Victoria
was the only one with any points at all and Juveria was going to be starting
Game 2 dead even with Yogesh. With a lead this relatively insignificant, the
old adage of Alex’s about a player in a distant third at the end of the first
game coming back in the second to win the entire tournament seemed very
possible.
GAME 2
In the Jeopardy round Juveria got
to the Daily Double ahead of Victoria and Yogesh. Though she had but 800
points, she risked the 1000 she was allowed to in WORLD HISTORY:
The Piagnoni, fanboys .of Girolamo
Sayonarola, were the main instigators behind these events; one took place on
Shrove Tuesday. Somehow
Juveria figured it out: “What are Bonfire of the Vanities?”
The battle was joined and the
Jeopardy round was far more evenly matched her than in game 2. Again Yogesh
finished in the lead with 7000 points to Juveria’s 5200 and Victoria was, for once,
in third with 4200.
Double Jeopardy was going fast
and furious. Juveria got to the first Daily Double in LET’S SET SOME BOUNDARIES
and she nearly hid under the lectern. She had 10,800 points. Asked by Ken what
she wanted to wager:
Juveria: What I want to wager?! 10,800, pray for
me.
We kind of were by now.
The Western limit of the Mediterranean
is a line drawn between Cape Spartel in Africa and this Spanish cape famed in naval
history.
Juveria hesitantly said: “What is
Trafalgar?” Now she had 21,600 and for the first time in the finals was in the
lead.
After that Yogesh went on a run
and then got a 1200 point clue about Broadway correct when Juveria mistook
Hannibal Burress for Titus Burgess. A moment later Yogesh found the other Daily
Double in the category appropriately called THE ‘END’.
Acknowledging ‘this might be the
end for me,” he bet the 16,600 points he had.
Polonium, radium and uranium were
all discovered in this ore. Yogesh
knew instantly what it was: “what is pitchblende?” He was at 33,200 points.
There weren’t a lot more correct
answers after that, indeed many of the 400 and 800 point clues gave our competitors
trouble. Still by the end of Double Jeopardy of Game 2, the tables were very
much turned. Yogesh had 36,000 points, Juveria was in second with 20,400,
Victoria in last with 11,000. For the first time in Jeopardy Masters history,
it was anybody’s ballgame going into Final Jeopardy.
The last Final Jeopardy clue had
to do with PAINTINGS: The artist saw the subject as a kindred spirit and in
1890 depicted him flowers used to treat heart disease.
All three players knew the
correct response: Who is Dr Gachet? (a subject of the work of Vincent Van Gogh.
It came down to wagers. Victoria (who offered congratulations to Yogesh and
Juveria) bet everything she had, giving her 22,000 points. She wat 36,400.
Juveria bet 16,200 points. She moved up to 36,800 points and into the lead.
It was all on Yogesh. His wager
was 4001 points. That moved him up to 40,801. It was only the second time in
this year’s Masters that Yogesh had managed to get the better of Victoria, but
it was won that counted the most as he became this year’s winner of the
Jeopardy Masters and received another $500,000 in what is to date the closest
finish in the Tournament’s history and a much deserved win for the only winner
of a Tournament of Champions who made it all the way through.
With the third different winner
of the Masters in as many years, the Jeopardy Masters is also reflective of how
tournaments continue to evolve in the post-Trebek. Whereas so many of the ‘super-tournaments’
inevitably ending with Brad Rutter becoming the victor the viewer can tune in
to every tournament where the only certainty is that anything can happen.
Victoria, last year’s winner, found herself in the exact scenario James Holzhauer
did at the end of last year’s finals, albeit in a more competitive third place
than James was in. And Juveria Zaheer has now officially joined the ranks of
most lovable Jeopardy player in a way to fill the gap that Sam Buttrey vacated
when he retired from the game last season. Her $250,000 has made her the bar
that any Second Chance Tournament player must now overcome for the foreseeable
future.
This year’s Masters brought a
feeling of humor, spontaneity and joy that was occasionally missing in last
year’s due to some of the controversy of the participants. It didn’t hurt that
Ken really does seem to have the complete command of Jeopardy in a way that is
very comparable to Alex Trebek at his best: he’s even starting to get a handle
on the dramatic pauses Alex mastered over the years.
Before we return to the remainder
of the Jeopardy season let’s see how the results of this year’s Masters have
effected the rankings of the all-time Jeopardy money winners. I will go in
order of eliminated:
Adriana Harmeyer: $441,600 (20th
place)
Roger Craig: $656,200 (12th
Place)
Matt Amodio: $1,954,691 (4th
place – this year he moved ahead of Amy Schneider)
Isaac Hirsch - $390,390 (27th
place)
Juveria Zaheer - $441,000 (21st
place)
Victoria Groce - $773,601 (9th
place – her third place finish moved of Larissa Kelly and Cris Panullo)
Yogesh Raut - $1,098, 403 (6th
place all time)
Yogesh has now become only the sixth
player in Jeopardy history to surpass $1 million in total wings. He has played
against and beaten three of the others, has been on stage with the fourth and was
in the same field of the fifth, Brad Rutter.
Brad’s total is $4,968,436, still
first all time. It’s still going to take a LOT of postseason tournaments for
Matt and Yogesh to catch him. James Holzhauer still has the best chance, assuming
he returns to the field in the near future.
As for Neilesh Vinjamuri, it will
be a long time before he manages to climb on to the list of even the top forty
of all time money winners but one suspects he’ll get a shot down the road.
We will now return to regularly
scheduled Jeopardy coverage from this point forward. I’ll be back next Saturday
to look at Jeopardy after 200 games.
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