What I Didn’t Know Then

If you look up the season 1989 episode 45 of Jeopardy! (March 3 of that year) you’ll see what I looked like at age 42. I had studied hard for that appearance, but it turned out that I neglected to master a critical aspect of the game.

The rules were a bit different than they are now. Back then you could win up to five times in a row and then you were retired. Starting in 2003, you could keep going as long as you kept winning.

If you came in first place, or tied for first place with a greater-than-zero score, you got to keep the money you earned and come back and play in the next episode. If you didn’t win, you received no money. You were offered consolation prizes — which you paid taxes on, if you kept.

From the beginning of the contest, it was a back-and-forth match with all of us getting some answers correct and missing others. The part of the game that I hadn’t mastered was how much to bet during Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy. I thought it was fairly straightforward. I was wrong.

Early in the second half of the game, I landed on the Daily Double in  “Astronomy” when I chose the bottom answer of that category — meaning it would be more difficult to get correct than if it had been one of the earlier answers. Choosing the Daily Double allowed me to bet any amount up to the total amount of my accumulated score. If I missed the question, the other contestants didn’t get a chance to get it correct.

While I haven’t seen a video of this episode in a while, this is what I remember: I was in third place going into the question, and if I bet everything and got it correct, I’d temporarily be in first place — with about a third of the game still to go.

If I bet everything and got it wrong, I would be wiped out and there was insufficient time left to recover and have a chance to win the game. If I bet less than everything, I’d at least have something left if I missed the question and could fight on from there.

Astronomy wasn’t my best subject. While I had taken an Introduction to Astronomy class in college more than 20 years previously, I didn’t remember much of what I had learned. I knew the planets in order (back then Pluto was still a planet!) and the names of some of the constellations. I certainly didn’t know the names of all the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. There were some questions I could answer, but not many.

The question became: How much should I bet? To simplify, I’ll give you three choices to consider:

A. “True Daily Double” — meaning I bet the maximum I could. This gives me the best chance to win the game if I get it right and wipes me out if I get it wrong.

B. Bet about 2/3 of my total — saving some money “in case” I got the question wrong. And I believed that I was probably going to get the question wrong.

C .Bet a minimal amount so my score wasn’t affected much whether I got it correct or not.

What would you bet?

I bet option b. The answer was something like: “Built on the palace grounds of Charles II beginning in 1675.”

I guessed, “What is the Greenwich Observatory?” and it turned out to be correct. I never knew when or where that observatory was constructed, but it seemed to be a momentous enough event to be worthy of a Jeopardy! question. My answer turned out to be correct — but my bet turned out to be wrong.

What I didn’t sufficiently realize at the time was that to win at Jeopardy!, you have to take your chances when they come. If I had missed the question, even if I had $1,000 left to play with, I would essentially be out of the game. Since I wanted to win (otherwise why would I be there?), I should have bet the farm and taken my chances.

As it turned out, had I bet everything and the rest of the game went as it did (big assumptions!), I would have tied for the lead following Final Jeopardy and come back to play on the next episode. Since I hadn’t bet everything, the leader going into Final Jeopardy was able to bet enough to shut me out if I bet everything and we both got the Final Jeopardy question right (which is what happened.)

So, I came in second place — got a Lazy Boy recliner (which didn’t survive the cut when I next got married) and a framed lithograph (which did). My first day of competition turned out to be my last day.

After the round was over, it was easy to calculate that I would have tied had I bet the Daily Double properly. While I couldn’t have known that was going to be the result when I made the bet, I should have been able to figure out that if I was going to win, betting everything on the Daily Double gave me the best chance. It was a small chance (I first had to get a difficult question correct) but it was my best chance.

Oh well. Spilt milk, and all that.

In case you want to test yourself on the Final Jeopardy question from that day in the category of “American Revolution,” the answer was:

One of the two people Paul Revere was attempting to warn when he made his famous ride.

While I didn’t know the correct question before hearing the answer, I knew that Revere’s ride was in the Boston area and one of the revolutionary firebrands in that part of the country was Samuel Adams, so that was what I guessed (in the form of a question.) It turned out to be correct and John Hancock would also have been correct.

I never watched the following episode to guestimate how well I would have done had I bet correctly and gone on. All in all, even though I didn’t win, I felt I had done pretty well — with one exception.