'Jeopardy!' contestant surpasses $1 million mark in record time
The Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay weighs in on the skills and strategies used by James Holzhauer to surpass the $1 million mark on Jeopardy.
I'm Stuart Varney and this is “My Take.”
"James Holzhauer is a menace to ‘Jeopardy!’"
Really?
That was the headline in a Washington Post opinion piece Monday.
What nonsense.
The writer has a problem with James Holzhauer, the man who wins night-after-night. He's won $1.3 million. Perhaps Lane was writing kind of "tongue in cheek".
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Lane's criticism rests on the following: "Holzhauer's streak reflects the grim, data-driven competition". He says "Holzhauer substitutes cold calculating odds maximization, for spontaneous play." Ok, so he has a strategy. A winning strategy. What's wrong with that?!
Holzhauer chooses the most difficult questions to answer first, so he makes the most money.
He switches categories to keep his opponents off guard.
And he looks for the daily double that lets him maximize his winnings. That's his strategy.
It works, he is a professional gambler from Las Vegas, and he knows how to calculate odds. On five occasions, he's set the record for one night's winnings.
But all this strategy, all these calculations are all useless if you don't answer the questions correctly. The Washington Post writer thinks "Jeopardy" is no fun these days because of Holzhauer's relentless wins.
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Sorry, I find it exciting. And I take my hat off to anyone who knows as much as he does, and is as fast as he is, and as dedicated to winning. He's an American!
That's “My Take.”
Adapted from Stuart Varney's "My Take" monologue on Fox Nation on April 30, 2019.
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