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: Peanut Butter Burrito

Ask the Champion

By Andrea

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I asked Dan to write "a few lines" about why he made such a small bet ($201) in his quarterfinal game, since a couple people have asked, and he got a little carried away, but I'm going to post the whole thing anyway, for the curious. All other fan questions are welcome, and we'll get his answers up ASAP :) I also updated my game recap below.

Dan writes:

So, the TOC quarterfinal is not like a regular Jeopardy game. There are 15 contestants, 5 games, and 9 spots in the semifinals. The 9 people who make it through are the 5 winners and the 4 highest non-winning scores. Getting in as a wild-card is just as good as winning your game, although it does mean you have to sweat out the rest of the games and hope that four people don?t outscore you.

In the last couple of TOCs, the cutoff for a wild-card slot was about $10-12,000. At the end of Double Jeopardy, I was leading 16800-12400-8500, so I was way over what I presumed would be the cut-off. With that high a score, my best chance at advancing would be to bet nothing, which gave me three ways to advance: (a) if no one else got the Final Jeopardy right; (b) if someone got the Final Jeopardy right but didn?t bet to pass my score because they were positioning themselves for a wild card berth; or (c) as a virtually sure wild-card if someone did bet to beat me and got it right.

So I wanted to bet zero, but third place had only 8500, which, if she bet it all and got it right, would put her $200 ahead of me. Because there was virtually no difference between $16,800 and $16,599 in terms of getting a wild-card, I bet $201 to ensure that even if third place bet everything and got it right, I could stay ahead of her by getting it right myself.

As it turned out, third place left herself $1500 in case she got it wrong, which is arguably the right thing to do but which assured that she couldn?t pass me. This turned out very lucky when she got it right and I missed it!

Full post as published by Peanut Butter Burrito on March 14, 2009 (boomark / email).