Tag: Brad Rutter

Brad Rutter on the ‘biggest factor’ behind his shocking Jeopardy! GOAT performance

Brad Rutter explained an often overlooked aspect of winning Jeopardy! games.

Ken Jennings won Tuesday night’s episode of the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament, marking his third match win of the tournament and officially earning him the title of Jeopardy! GOAT. In the first-to-three-matches format, James Holzhauer won one match, while Brad Rutter consistently finished in third.

For people who aren’t diehard Jeopardy! fans or casual viewers just tuning in for the GOAT tournament, it’d be easy to wonder how Rutter earned his spot on stage with the others. But trust us: Brad earned it.

But throughout the tournament, Rutter noticeably struggled and got some bad bounces. To combat Holzhauer’s aggressive betting strategy, Rutter and Jennings agreed they’d have to go all in on each Daily Double, and while Rutter picked several of them, he had a lot of incorrect responses, which would regularly drop his score back down to zero and make it nearly impossible for him to catch either Jennings or Holzhauer.

Following the final episode of the GOAT tournament, Vulture spoke with Rutter about his experience. While the second runner-up said he will “absolutely” remember this tournament fondly — even though it was the first time he lost to a human being on Jeopardy! — he explained why his performance lagged.

Here’s an excerpt from Rutter’s Q&A with Vulture this week:

Looking back at your matches, was there a moment when you realized things weren’t going in your favor? Was it missing all those Daily Doubles?
No, not really. It was just going that way from the beginning and never stopped. [Laughs.] If James had won last night’s game, I’d still be alive but have to win three matches in a row. I’ve done stuff like that, coming from behind, before in a show. I think the reason I’ve been successful at this point is staying focused on what was in front of me. I was just thinking, Okay, if I can get to match five, we’ll see what happens. Since it was going to be a new week, maybe my buzzer skills would magically come back. You never know.

Do you think your buzzer reflexes weren’t as sharp?
Yeah, I do. It’s more timing, really, with the buzzers. We’re probably talking about hundredths of a second here. I’ve played a bunch of times before with Ken and I was always getting just as many responses as he was. Throwing another very quick buzzer into the mix hurt me. It’s impossible to figure out unless you have access to the actual buzzing-in data. In any sort of evenly matched match, the buzzer is going to be the number one thing. Ken and James were able to get the timing right and I wasn’t, and that was probably the biggest factor.

(Poor Brad. No, Rich Brad.)

An often overlooked factor about winning a Jeopardy! game is the buzzer. And buzzing in first is not as easy as immediately doing it one the clue comes up. It’s much more nuanced than that, as Jennings recently explained to Good Morning America.

“The timing of the buzzer is very tricky on Jeopardy!,” Jennings told GMA on Tuesday. “You can’t buzz when you know it. You have to wait for Alex [Trebek] to finish reading the question. If you buzz early, you get locked out for a tiny second. So what you need to do is to find this exact second and for me it’s just following the rhythm of Alex’s voice. We’ve heard him read tens of thousands of clues over the years, and you just know how he’s gonna say it, and then there’s gonna be one beat and then you buzz! But if I think about it, I can’t do it. It’s kind of a zen thing.”

Harder than it seems, and Rutter just got beat by the buzzer — and by a few tricky Daily Doubles.

While Jennings has a record 74 consecutive Jeopardy! wins and Holzhauer owns the top-10 single-game winnings records, Rutter, even after the GOAT tournament, still has the record for most money earned on Jeopardy!

He entered the special series with $4,688,436 earned and walked away with another $250,000 as the second runner-up. He would probably have more records or long win streak, but when he first appeared on the game show in 2000, contestants were limited to five game wins before having to retire undefeated. So Rutter won his five games and earned most of his money from winning tournaments, during which he beat Jennings multiple times.

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Jeopardy! GOAT: The strategy behind Ken Jennings’ 0-point wager in Final Jeopardy

Jeopardy! betting strategy is as important as trivia skills.

Ken Jennings officially became the Jeopardy! GOAT on Tuesday night after winning the fourth match of the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament. It was a first-to-three format, and Jennings won the first and third matches in the episodes that aired last week, while James Holzhauer won only the second and Brad Rutter comfortably finished in third place each match.

But the way in which Jennings — who holds the record for most consecutive regular-season wins with 74 games — won might seem a little puzzling. He wagered nothing in Final Jeopardy, which was his best available option, and won.

While on Good Morning America on Wednesday after the last Jeopardy! GOAT episode aired, Jennings was asked about that strategy, which surprised a lot of people, including George Stephanopoulos.

So the GOAT explained:

“There’s a little bit of math that goes into wagering on Jeopardy! Generally what happens is the person in second should often make a very small wager. You’re counting on the person in first to make a big wager, so it doesn’t matter at that point.

If they get it wrong, they’re out. So it doesn’t matter what you wager. You want to risk as little as possible for that eventuality.”

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If that still doesn’t totally make sense, let us break it down further.

Each match is divided into two regular Jeopardy! games, and the point totals from both games are combined to determine the winner of the match. So after Game 1 of the fourth match Tuesday, their scores were…

Ken Jennings: 65,600
James Holzhauer: 34,181
Brad Rutter: 0

(Poor Brad. No, Rich Brad.)

After winning Game 1, Jennings entered Game 2’s Final Jeopardy round trailing Holzhauer, who bet big on a Daily Double and got it. Here were their scores going into that Final Jeopardy…

Ken Jennings: 23,000
James Holzhauer: 44,000
Brad Rutter: 1,400

Jennings said because he was in second place, he needed to assume Holzhauer in first would make a large wager. If Holzhauer went all in and got the question right, his Game 2 total would be 88,000 points. Combine that with his 34,181 from Game 1, and he’d finish with 122,181 points and would win the match.

With 23,000 in second, even if Jennings also went all in and had the correct answer, his 46,000 points combined with his 65,600 from Game 1 would give him 111,600, which wouldn’t be enough to beat Holzhauer (still assuming he went all in).

So, as he told GMA, Jennings doubling his total in Final Jeopardy wouldn’t matter if Holzhauer got the question right. And that meant his best option was to bet as few points as possible, banking on Holzhauer betting big, being wrong and losing enough to fall behind to second place.

And as it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.

The Final Jeopardy category was Shakespeare’s Tragedies, and the clue was:

He has 272 speeches, the most of any non-title character in a Shakespeare tragedy.

The correct response is: Who is Iago? (He’s also the antagonist in Othello.)

Jennings got it right with his zero-point wager, Holzhauer got it wrong after going all in, and that’s how Jennings became the official Jeopardy! GOAT.

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Ken Jennings: James Holzhauer’s Jeopardy! strategy ‘puts the fear of god’ in competitors

Ken Jennings is officially the Jeopardy! GOAT, but he said any one of them could have won the tournament.

Ken Jennings managed to keep a massive Jeopardy! secret to himself for the few weeks between the taping and airing of the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament. He told no one that he won the tournament, was crowned the Jeorpardy! GOAT and earned $1 million.

Well, almost no one.

While speaking with Good Morning America on Wednesday following Tuesday night’s airing of the fourth match of the Jeopardy! GOAT, Jennings admitted that while he didn’t tell his kids or his parents about how he fared against James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter, he did tell his wife.

“My wife knew,” Jennings said on the morning show from Seattle. “I didn’t want her to divorce me. I told my wife immediately. But my kids didn’t know, my parents didn’t know. We totally kept it under wrap. I just thought it would be more fun for them to have the surprise, and it was a lot of fun watching it together.”

In the race to win three matches (made of two regular games combined for one-hour episodes), Jennings won the first game, Holzhauer won the second and Jennings won the third.

Then during the fourth match Tuesday night, he bet big on a Daily Double on his way to winning Game 1. And in Game 2 as he tried to fend off hard-charging Holzhauer, he didn’t have to wager anything in Final Jeopardy. The category was Shakespeare’s Tragedies, and Jennings, who entered Final Jeopardy in second, bet nothing, while leader Holzhauer went all in and got the question wrong.

Because of that with their combined earned points from the match’s two games, Jennings won his third match and officially became the Jeopardy! GOAT. Rutter finished third in all four matches.

“It was not a dominating win at all,” Jennings told GMA about the tournament. “I think all three of us are very experienced Jeopardy! players, and if you run this back 10 times, you’re going to get a different winner. You’re never going to get the same winner twice in a row.”

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Each of the three GOAT contestants left their marks on the game. Jennings has the longest win streak ever with 74 regular-season games, Holzhauer owns all the top-10 single-game winnings records and Rutter has earned the most money on Jeopardy! with $4,688,436 prior to the tournament. (While Jennings won $1 million, Holzhauer and Rutter each earned $250,000.)

Particularly with Daily Doubles and sometimes in Final Jeopardy, Jennings and Rutter adopted Holzhauer’s aggressive strategy of going all in. By doing that during his regular-season run in 2019, Holzhauer was often able to put the game out of reach for his competitors early on.

About adjusting their strategies to follow Holzhauer’s lead, Jennings said:

“It’s really just a credit to James, how much he’s changed the game of Jeopardy! that Brad and I both came in realizing we were going to have to play like him if we were going to have any hope of containing him. That’s just how smart and demoralizing his strategy is. You’ve gotta make those big bets even if it scares you because he puts the fear of god into the other two contestants.”

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The Jeopardy GOATs gave us one more round of trash talk and Ken Jennings congratulations

One more round after the GOAT was named.

Throughout Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time, the one constant away from the show we had was James Holzhauer, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter talking trash to each other — in a good-natured way with much respect — on social media.

On the night that Jeopardy GOAT ended with Jennings claiming victory we got one more round of trash talk and some congratulations for the newly-minted GOAT.

Let’s start with Holzhauer, who did some of his best trash talking on the air. He did some trash talk to himself, changing his Twitter avatar to a picture of Iago, the bird from Aladdin, but also his namsake was the answer to the Final Jeopardy Holzhauer missed in Game 2 on Tuesday night: “He has 272 speeches, the most of any non-title character in a Shakespeare tragedy.”

He started out with some memes:

Then some congrats:

He even kept telling fans who the real GOAT was:

On to Jennings, who was humble in victory:

Rutter totally got Holzhauer back and congratulated Jennings:

We’ll miss these guys being on television together.

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Jeopardy! GOAT: James Holzhauer coldly roasted Brad Rutter for finishing with zero points

Ouuuucchhhhh!

Jeopardy! legend James Holzhauer always likes to have a little fun when he’s playing the game and he did just that during Tuesday night’s episode of the Greatest of All Time tournament… at the expense of fellow Jeopardy! legend Brad Rutter.

The three players were heading into the night’s second game when Alex Trebek stated that they would clear the points from the first game. Rutter finished that game with zero points, which is something that Holzhauer was too happy to point out.

We’re going to miss this tournament when it’s over because boy has it been some great television.

Check out this sick burn by Holzhauer:

Ouuuuuuuuuch.

Why every Jeopardy! GOAT fan should be rooting for Brad Rutter

You can do it!

The wait for more of Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time is finally over on Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, with James Holzhauer, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter going back to battle for the GOAT title in primetime for a fourth time.

When we last left these three, Jennings went up on his opponents with two wins to Holzhauer’s one. That meant Jennings could clinch on Tuesday night and end the thrilling tournament that’s captured the nation.

As much as that would be cool, it would mean we would have only gotten four days of Jeopardy! GOAT out of a possible seven.

Which means … it’s time to root for Rutter. A lot of fans already feel bad for the guy after watching Holzhauer and Jennings completely dominate and seeing Rutter miss a bunch of Daily Doubles … but let’s all remember he’s won nearly $5 million from Jeopardy! over the years and will cash in for another $250,000 when all is said and done.

Rutter has finished in third on all three days, and the ideal scenario would be watching him come back and win a couple, for Holzhauer to claim victory on another night, and for all of us to get our popcorn for an all-out wild Game 7 of epic proportions.

So COME ON BRAD YOU CAN DO IT!

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James Holzhauer’s hysterical trash talking now includes giving Brad Rutter a participation award

James Holzhauer is the GOAT of Jeopardy! trash talk.

We won’t know until next week if James Holzhauer will be crowned the Jeopardy! GOAT by beating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament. But one thing that is absolutely clear is that the professional sports gambler is the Jeopardy! GOAT trash talker.

And it started on Twitter months before this tournament did.

But in addition to taunting Rutter mid-game the other day and teasing Jennings about never winning a Jeopardy! tournament, Holzhauer has been on fire on Twitter with his trash talk since this special tournament began Tuesday.

(Remember, this is all in good fun, and these guys are clearly joking with each other and having a good time competing. The two runners-up also get $250,000, so no one’s really a loser here.)

For this tournament, the first player to win three matches (made up of two regular Jeopardy! games) will be named the GOAT. So far, Jennings has won two — he won the first match Tuesday and the third Thursday — Holzhauer has won one and Rutter is still looking for his first match win.

Although Rutter — who has the record for most money won on Jeopardy! with $4,688,436 — has struggled this week, including missing several Daily Doubles after he and Jennings have followed Holzhauer’s lead to go all in every time.

But while Jennings has capitalized on the chance to double his totals, falling back to zero on Daily Doubles is a large reason why Rutter has consistently finished third each night.

And Holzhauer has had a little fun with that, honoring Rutter with a participation certificate.

Holzhauer is also still making jokes about himself, especially after Rutter got back-to-back Daily Doubles correct during Thursday’s episode.

During Holzhauer’s 32-game win streak on regular Jeopardy! in 2019, he employed some gambling moves when going all in on his Daily Doubles, which is how he’d regularly separate himself from his opponents by tens of thousands of dollars. He would often pretend to push all his chips in as a way of risking everything, and Jennings has since adopted that move.

However, Holzhauer had some hilarious criticism about that.

The Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament continues Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

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Jeopardy! GOAT: James Holzhauer needs to pull it together!

It’s do-or-die time for Jeopardy James.

This is the online version of our morning newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning.

I don’t know if you watched the third episode of the Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time tournament Thursday night so I’m going to give you a warning – I’m going to provide a spoiler in just a second so turn and run away if that’s something you don’t want to start your Friday with.

I told you to get outta here! What are you still doing here?

OK, here comes the spoiler.

Ken Jennings rolled to victories in both games on Thursday night and is now one episode victory away from winning the whole thing and collecting a million bucks.

To which I say – and I respect the heck out of Jennings – James Holzhauer has to pull things together and not just bow down and let Jennings win this thing in just four shows.

Because that would be brutal.

Holzhauer become a hero last spring when he racked up 32 straight wins. His strategy was incredible. His personality was fun. He was a star.

Now he’s just one loss away from letting a huge opportunity to be the GOAT of Jeopardy slip out of his soft, professional gambler hands. This isn’t what I expected from Jeopardy James. This is not what I wanted to see from him. I wanted to see this great champion put up a fight and win this thing.

Now he’ll have to do just that if he wants to be the GOAT.

Holzhauer has had a lot of fun in the first three episodes and his tribute to Alex Trebek’s during Thursday night’s show was pretty awesome.

But now I need him to focus on the task at hand. And yes, I know these shows were shot back in December so I’m asking a man from the past to focus on the now, but whatever!

It’s clear that we Jeopardy fans want this tournament to go on for as long as possible. It’s never fun when we get to a championship series and one team just runs away from it.

That could very well happen tonight, which would be a shame.

Jennings is a great champ and we all respect the you-know-what out of him. But this is boring old January and we need more of Jennings vs. Holzhauer (and Brad Rutter) in our lives.

Not less!

So come on, Jeopardy James. Buckle down and get the job done for us. Because if you do, next Tuesday night’s fifth episode will be insane.

 Thursday’s biggest winners: Russell Westbrook and OKC Thunder fans.

(Photo by Jeff Haynes/NBAE via Getty Images)

Westbrook returned to Oklahoma City on Thursday night for the first time as a member of the Houston Rockets and man was the crowd happy to see their former star. The video tribute was really awesome and the ovation he received upon being introduced was even better.

Quick hits: LSU’s great hype video… A fun “FOOTBALL GUY” quiz… Time for Ben Simmons to step up… And more!

– LSU’s hype video will make you run through a wall.

– You need to take Steven Ruiz’s great/hilarious quiz about Giants coach Joe Judge, who is a big “FOOTBALL GUY.”

– Mike Sykes says it’s time for Ben Simmons to prove that he’s a star, now that Joel Embiid is out with an injury.

– We’re going to see Tiger Woods back on the golf course very soon, which is always good news.

– Mike Leach and Lane Kiffin are about to make the SEC even more fun.

(Follow me on Twitter at @anezbitt. It might change your life. Just don’t tell me about your fantasy team.)

Jeopardy! GOAT: James Holzhauer paid a sweet tribute to Alex Trebek with Final Jeopardy answer

What is GHOST?

The third episode of the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament is in the books, and it was another fun night of trivia between three very smart people.

I won’t play the role of spoiler here, so if you want the results check out my pal Charles Curtis’ great recap of the episode right here.

I will tell you about a fun moment when James Holzhauer paid a sweet (and funny) little tribute to Alex Trebek with his Final Jeopardy question. Jeopardy James didn’t know the answer so he wrote down “GHOST: Greatest Host of Syndicated TV.”

But he also had some fun with it, as did Trebek:

Well played.

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Jeopardy! GOAT: After rough night, Brad Rutter is approaching his first loss to an actual human being

Brad Rutter has never lost a tournament to a human being, but it’s not looking good in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time one.

Brad Rutter has never lost on Jeopardy! — well, to a human being at least. But he’s on his way to being defeated in a tournament by a person for the first time and has some work to do in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time series if he wants to beat James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings and be declared the Jeopardy! GOAT.

Going up against the contestant with a 74-game win streak (Jennings) and another with the top-10 single-game winnings record (Holzhauer), Rutter more than deserves to compete among his fellow GOATs because he has the record for most money won on Jeopardy! with a cool $4,688,436 — and counting because he’s guaranteed at least $250,000 from this tournament.

Now, the vast majority of his winnings came from tournaments because when Rutter first appeared on the show in 2000, contestants were limited to five game wins before having to retire undefeated. So he won his five games and walked away with $55,102 and two Chevy Camaros. So he never lost in regular-season play.

Since then, Rutter has returned to Jeopardy! for several special tournaments and won nearly all of them. He won the 2001 Tournament of Champions, the Million Dollar Masters in 2002 (he won by $1), the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005 (Jennings finished second) and the Battle of the Decades in 2014 (Jennings was second, again). In 2019 in the team-oriented All-Star Games, Team Brad came in first ahead of Team Ken.

The only time he wasn’t on top at the end of a tournament was in 2011 when he and Jennings competed in The IBM Challenge, facing off against Watson, an IBM computer. Naturally, Watson won, while Jennings finished second and Rutter third.

So again, Rutter has never lost to a human in a Jeopardy! regular-season game or tournament.

But in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament, Rutter hasn’t been off to the best start, and because of that, it’s fair to wonder how exactly he’s still never lost to a human competitor after finishing third in the first two matches (each match consists of two games with a combined score).

Despite ultimately winning the aforementioned tournaments against people, Rutter lost a game during two different tournaments, according to J! Archives, but still ended up with titles.

In the first of two final games in the 2001 Tournament of Champions, Rutter finished second. But in the last game of the final, he destroyed his competition to win the tournament championship and $100,000. Then in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, Rutter tied for second in the Round 4, Game 3 contest before eventually winning the whole thing.

So when he finished third in the opening game of the first Jeopardy! GOAT match Tuesday — and in the second game that day, plus both games Wednesday — it was not the first time he’s lost a game within a tournament.

And although it seems like he’s solidifying his position as the third-best Jeopardy! player ever, he could still win this tournament.

Ahead of the third GOAT tournament episode Thursday, Jennings and Holzhauer each have one match win. They’ve both capitalized on Daily Doubles — much like Holzhauer did during his 32-game win streak in 2019 — while Rutter’s deficits have been largely tied to doing the opposite.

(Eric McCandless/ABC via AP)

For a while during Wednesday’s match, Rutter was playing better compared with the previous episode. He hung around with Holzhauer and Jennings for a little, and when he fell behind, it still wasn’t by a totally insurmountable amount. And then came the Daily Doubles.

In the second game, Rutter got a Daily Double off the first clue of Double Jeopardy. He went all in with his 3,800 points and gave an incorrect response about DNA. Then he got multiple clues wrong and was suddenly at -5,200, and he couldn’t dig himself out of the hole fast enough to have points to wager in Final Jeopardy. That ensured he’d finish third in yet another game.

Rutter’s past game losses didn’t prevent him from winning tournaments, and neither do his defeats in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament. But based on his performance compared with Holzhauer and Jennings, it looks like his undefeated streak is going to end.

That said, he’s going to walk away from this tournament with just shy of $5 million earned overall from the game show — at a minimum. He’s a GOAT, even if he doesn’t have the official title.

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