‘Jeopardy!’ Fans Think This Is Why There Have Been Few Multi-Day Champions Lately
With a little over a month into the season of Jeopardy!, there have only been a handful of multi-day champions. None of them had gone more than four games. Fans think they know the reason why.
Matthew Riggle, a community college math professor, who started out the season as a two-day champion, wound up winning four games and took home $95,602. Anthony Cantor, a television and podcast producer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, also won four games this season. He won a total of $77,199. Rian Robertson was a four-game winner with a total of $64,101.
Another multi-day champion is Greg Monson, who won three. Others have won two or one games. While five games gets a guaranteed spot into the Tournament of Champions, some four-game champions also sneak through.
Fans think they know the reason why no one has made it to the postseason yet. “Is Jeopardy! getting harder, or am I just getting dumber?” a Reddit user asked. “Love the show and have been watching it for years. I used to be able to get maybe 65-70% of the questions, sometimes more on a good night. Lately, I feel like the contestants on the old SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! skit.”
Others chimed in about how much they agree with this statement. “They’re not only harder, but a lot of categories are confusing to the point I only get them once they hit the lowest amount (most players now start from the bottom),” one said.
“This. I don’t know if it is because nobody starts at the top so we don’t get the hang of the structure of the category right away, or if it’s because some of the categories lately just seem like a far reach in terms of a cohesive ‘theme’,” another replied.
“I can tell you for sure that the questions are getting less comprehensible. Really indirect sentence structure and poor syntax. Especially in some final clues,” another wrote.
“The questions are harder, and the way they jump around the board now makes it harder for us at home, at least me, cause I never know what category we’re in,” one said.
“To me it’s gotten wayyyy harder. These days there are more topics I don’t know at all, and the way clues are written I find tougher to make a quick educated guess,” a Reddit user said.
“It’s definitely been getting harder, in regular play and tournaments. I revisited the GOAT tournament recently, and I think it’s easier than current TOC boards. I think probably since the pandemic a lot more people have gotten into trivia, so the average level of player has gone up, and the writers feel like they have to increase the difficulty to compensate,” a former player said.
Some fans suggest watching Celebrity Jeopardy! to feel smarter. Do you think Jeopardy! has gotten harder? Let us know in the comments.
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As one of the comments above noted, and as I've said for a while, too many of the questions are poorly written and/or confusing. Many of the questions are so poorly constructed that they don't lead the players in any direction that might help then figure it out... so they have to *immediately* know it and aren't able to make what might be considered an educated guess based on the information provided.
As far as the headline for this article, considering that every four-time champion has been included in the last few TOC (and at least one year, nearly every three-timer, too), a few champions *have* essentially qualified for the tournament. Early in the season, even Ken pretty much said as much on the show that four-timers would be there, but the producers must have told him not to say that anymore (even if it's surely true) since they prefer to hold onto what has become a falsehood that players have to win five. Since they now schedule the TOC to take place at a certain time of the year, rather than only when enough players have qualified (which was the case before the current momentum-stopping, tournament-clogged seasons), it's almost impossible to have enough qualified players to field a tournament filled with five-time champions.