Tag: James Holzhauer

James Holzhauer had a wild Jeopardy! Masters exchange with Ken Jennings: ‘Keep it in your pants’

“Keep it in your pants, Ken!”

Jeopardy! Masters is into its second week, with James Holzhauer ahead of the rest of the field of legends.

He’s also winning when it comes to bantering with host and former rival, Ken Jennings. Last week, we saw Holzhauer use his Final Jeopardy board to joke with the host: “Stop ducking a rematch, Ken.”

Then, there was a clue that flummoxed the competitors. Jennings jokingly said that he refers to Holzhauer as “elegantly erotic and full of enchanting terror,” as the clue said.

The reply from Holzhauer?

“Keep it in your pants, Ken.”

LOLOL! Can’t wait to see more of this as the week goes on:

James Holzhauer trolled Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! Masters with a hilarious Final Jeopardy answer

This is too good.

Ah, the James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings “rivalry.”

The two Jeopardy! all-time greats have exchanged so much trash talk in the past, leading up to and after Jennings won the GOAT tournament.

Now, we’re up to Jeopardy! Masters, featuring Holzhauer — the professional sports gambler — and Jennings is the host. James ended up winning one of the rounds, but before he did, he trolled Jennings with his Final Jeopardy answer, and it was very funny.

Instead of answering the clue that would have gotten you “What is the Manhattan Bridge,” Holzhauer wrote down, “Stop ducking a rematch Ken.” And their exchange is delightful:

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The new Jeopardy! Masters tournament and format, explained

What to know about Jeopardy!’s latest tournament of stars.

Welcome to FTW Explains, a guide to catching up on and better understanding stuff going on in the world. We here at For The Win are big Jeopardy! fans, and the Jeopardy! Masters tournament is no exception. What’s that? Glad you asked.

Ken Jennings is the ultimate Jeopardy! GOAT — remember a few years ago when he topped James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament? — but that’s not stopping him from hosting a new best-of-the-best Jeopardy! tournament.

Monday kicks off the first episode of the Jeopardy! Masters tournament, which will pit some of the shows most successful candidates against each other to see who will become a different kind of Jeopardy! champion.

James Holzhauer playfully roasted Ken Jennings ahead of Jeopardy! Masters

James Holzhauer playfully roasted Ken Jennings ahead of Jeopardy! Masters

James Holzhauer is back on his trolling ahead of Jeopardy! Masters.

Jeopardy! champion James Holzhauer has cultivated a reputation for being a phenomenal trash talker, and he’s at it again ahead of next week’s Jeopardy! Masters competition.

Holzhauer will be squaring off with fellow Jeopardy! heavyweights like Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, Mattea Roach, Andrew He and Sam Buttrey, with former Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings hosting the shows.

Well, Holzhauer found a hilarious way to warm up his intimidation tactics by roasting Jennings’ standing as host.

First, Holzhauer takes aim at the way that the game shows are being marketed with Jennings front and center. He compares it to the NFL advertising a Super Bowl with a referee as the main draw. Ouch.

Next, Holzhauer pokes fun at Jennings by comparing him to legendary Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek.

Having competed against him, Jennings knows how effective Holzhauer can be once he’s on the Jeopardy! stage. He’s now the warm-up target for Holzhauer’s trolling ahead of next week’s marquee games.

James Holzhauer zings Joe Buck over ‘Jeopardy!’ hosting with trolling tweet

Lots of other reaction to the guest host ahead.

Joe Buck is the latest Jeopardy! guest host, and that means fans on Twitter are going to have a lot of opinions about his performance, which isn’t really anything new given how people dissect his play-by-play calls every time he’s on the mic (a reminder: our Andy Nesbitt once wrote Bucks was the GOAT).

One of those opinions came from James Holzhauer, the Las Vegas sports bettor and one of the greatest Jeopardy! champions the game show has ever seen.

His tweet? It’s a zing of Buck, and maybe Holzhauer is saying it tongue-in-cheek? Here’s what he had to say, and we’ll throw in some moments from Buck’s night and other reaction:

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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Ken Jennings is now one of the greatest athletes of our time, there’s no debate

Ken Jennings is the GOAT.

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.

OK, so if you didn’t get to watch the Jeopardy! Greatest of All-Time tournament on Tuesday night then you might want to run away right now… because I’m going to spoil the heck out of it.

You gone now?

Good.

Let’s get to spoiling.

Ken Jennings won. He won the whole darned thing. And he did it with ease. It took the legend just four nights to beat James Holzhauer 3-1. Brad Rutter was also in this tournament, but he didn’t win anything. Well, xxcept for our respect for living the Jeopardy! dream, that is.

Jennings had to watch last spring as Holzhauer, with his 32-straight victories, won the hearts of Jeopardy! nation with his brash strategy and large personality.

Then Jennings left his Seattle house last month, made the trip down south to Los Angeles for the tapings of this show, and laid an absolute Jeopardy! beatdown on Holzhauer. In doing so, Jennings cemented his status as the best Jeopardy! player to ever do the darned thing.

He might also be one of the greatest athletes of our time, too.

I know what you’re thinking – he’s not an athlete! He’s just a smart guy who can answer tough trivia questions!

To that I say – OK, you might be a little right but let’s not allow some details to ruin our fun.

This game of Jeopardy! takes strategy, skills, and the ability to rise to the occasion under heavy pressure. Just like sports.

This game of Jeopardy! isn’t for the weak and those who are weak will get exposed rather quickly. Just like sports.

This game of Jeopardy! had bigger TV ratings over the past week than some major sporting events.

So yeah, Ken Jennings is an athlete. You can’t argue my math on this one, random Twitter user with an egg as your profile pic who is still mad that yesterday I had the gall to suggest college athletes get paid! I won’t hear it! Not today! No way!

If poker and darts and billiards can be shown on sports network and be considered sports, then Jeopardy! can, too.

It belongs.

Ken Jennings is now up there with LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Mike Trout as the sports greats of our time.

He’s a champion whose legacy will never be debated again.

He’s a GOAT who will never be matched again.

And he should get a gosh darn championship parade through our entire country.

Because he deserves it.

Tuesday’s biggest winner: Luke Kuechly.

Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports

The 28-year-old linebacker surprised the NFL world Tuesday night when he announced his retirement from the game after eight Hall of Fame seasons. Kuechly suffered a number of concussions during his years and this seems like the absolute right decision for him. The NFL world rightly sang his praises after his announcement.

Quick hits: Mahomes mic’d up… Dale Earnhardt’s return… Chiefs fans reward one of their own… And more!

– This great mic’d up video of Patrick Mahomes shows what the QB told his teammates on the bench when they were down 24-0 to the Texans.

– Dale Earnhardt Jr. is coming back for one NASCAR race in 2020.

– Chiefs fans have been doing some great things for the one fan who left Sunday’s game because he thought he was a jinx.

– Henry McKenna’s first 2020 NFL mock draft has the Patriots picking a QB.

– The internet roasted Stephen A. Smith over an awful trade proposal.

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