What is the "Forrest Bounce" and Why Does it Make People So Angry?
Going over the origins of the notorious Forrest Bounce game strategy and how it grew to be the most commonly used technique among the greatest Jeopardy! champions, including James Holzhauer.
Chapters of Content
1.) Intro to the Bounce
2.) The Origin of the Forrest Bounce
3.) The Pioneering Developers of the Forrest Bounce
4.) The Arthur Chu Affect
5.) Jeopardy James: The Next Great Champion
6.) The Forrest Bounce Courthouse
7.) Post-Holzhauer: The Champions Who Benefited
8.) The Antagonism of a Former Champion
9.) The Current State of the Forrest Bounce
10.) The GOAT Defeats the Creator & the MVP
11.) The Return of Chuck Forrest
“It is WILD to be in a game and realize that Chuck Forrest is Forrest Bouncing against you. I imagine it's like getting punched by Muhammad Ali: it hurts and is a little disorienting, but you're still weirdly grateful for the experience.” - Sam Kavanaugh, 3/28/2024.
(All video footage of the Jeopardy! game show displayed here is owned by Sony Pictures Studios and Jeopardy! Productions, Inc. and is used for educational and entertainment purposes only.)
Intro to the Bounce
It’s been five years since James Holzhauer’s run began. Do you ever wonder, theoretically, how an incredible run from a player like James Holzhauer was able to even happen? In the show’s six decades of gameplay, the show has not only gone through a lot of cultural changes over the years, but strategic adjustments as well. These gaming techniques have captivated and entertained viewers for many years now, but have monetarily benefited only the most elite of players who make it onto the show.
Of all strategies that have developed and evolved over time though, there’s one in particular that everyone is familiar with nowadays, as it’s become the gold standard for success: the Forrest Bounce. Many viewers, longtime and casual, are familiar with that term by now and have become increasingly polarized on how it affects their enjoyment of the iconic quiz show, especially when it comes to the controversial players who adopt the technique for their benefit.
However, there have been a lot of rants I’ve seen and read online about this, often from older fans who are used to the show being played more traditionally, from top to bottom, category to category. In the midst of this, the Forrest Bounce has been often misattributed to certain players due to their insistence upon the use of the strategy, as well as being outliers to the success rate that it actually gives certain players. For today’s article, I’m going to be teaching you all about the origins surrounding this strategy, the most successful and famous players to use it, and the rather troublesome opinion pieces that I’ve run into, why they’re wrong, and what I think they’re wrong about.
The Origin of the Forrest Bounce
An example of established top-down play being used during the Fleming era (4/24/1974).
Debuting just over 60 years ago, Jeopardy! has slowly become the most prominently and passionately viewed and analyzed quiz show, potentially of all time. With Art Fleming hosting the show throughout its first 15 years of daytime and nighttime airings, the show’s beginnings were fairly humble, with clue values being 1/20th of the amounts that they are now (thank you, U.S. inflation rates). Players would nearly exclusively play the game from top to bottom, category to category in hopes of pocketing some quick cash. It wasn’t really the high-stakes and strategy-smothered game that we know it to be now. On September 10th, 1984, the show was revived into a syndication TV slot with Alex Trebek hosting the show. There weren’t any big changes beyond clue values being 10 times the amount they were before, with $100 to $500 in the first round followed by $200 to $1000 in the second round. There were still three rounds and three Daily Doubles in the game, with the second round containing two Daily Doubles.
In the first season, fifteen 5-time champions emerged with Paul Boymel being the top-earning player of the season with $56,200. These players were each brought back in November of 1985 to compete in the very first Tournament of Champions of the syndicated era, which was won by Jerry Frankel. While this was already an upgrade from the typical number of 9 players in a TOC during the Fleming era, there was an even bigger culture shock shot through the airwaves of America’s television screens over a month prior: the debut of Chuck Forrest’s nearly 40-year reign of Jeopardy! gameplay on September 30th, 1985, where he won an astonishing $18,000 in his first game. In his next game, he continued the dominance with winning $12,500, quickly climbing up the ranks and becoming a genuine threat to the stage with his quick buzzing and recall. By his 4th win, he had already surpassed Boymel’s 5-day record with an all-time total of $60,000. After winning his 5th game and accumulating another $12,800, he qualified for the 1986 Tournament of Champions where he would wind up fundamentally changing the way Jeopardy! was played for eternity.
In his quarterfinal game which aired on November 14th, 1986, Chuck selected the first clue due to being at the champion’s podium: Nuclear Physics for $100. Guy Tonti answered the clue correctly and picked the next clue in the category for $200, which Chuck answered correctly. He then switched over to The Queen’s English for $100. It’s far from uncommon for a player to pick another category after answering a clue correctly, but it was a little odd seeing as how Chuck wanted to start with Nuclear Physics in the first place.
The real strangeness came after he answered the clue in The Queen’s English correctly: he went back to Nuclear Physics for $300, a clue which he responded to correctly. After that, he selected The Queen’s English for $200, which he answered affirmatively as well. He bounced back towards Nuclear Physics for $400, then The Queen’s English again, and then finally cleared the Nuclear Physics category. While unorthodox, the strategy was a great success for him as he dominated the game and advanced to the semifinals over his two opponents. He would go on to emulate this same strategy for the rest of the tournament, up until day 2 of the finals. For an example of what this all looks like, let’s take a gander at the first several clues of the deciding game with Chuck Forrest playing against Marvin Shinkman and Paul Rouffa, starting with clue selection #3.
Chuck Forrest bouncing between clues in categories to confuse opponents in the Tournament of Champions finals (11/21/1986).
By the end of the Double Jeopardy! round, Chuck’s lead was so insurmountable that he was unable to be caught by Paul or Marvin. He won the tournament and $100,000 more to surpass Jerry Frankel’s all-time total of $132,650 by $40,000 and change. Along with becoming the winningest money-earner on the show at the time and being called “the Alexander the Great of Jeopardy!” by the LA Times in 1989, he had innovated and pioneered a strategy that would become not only emulated for years to come by many players, but also evolved and expanded upon by some of the most beloved contestants we’ve come to know over time.
In 1992, Forrest and 1988 TOC winner Mark Lowenthal co-wrote a book together called “Secrets of the Jeopardy! Champions” where the two talked about their time on the show, how they became successful, and then gave the readers a wide and diverse amount of trivial facts to help them acquire necessary knowledge to do well on the show. On page 13, both of the players discussed the strategies that are most preferential for them to use. Mark cited starting from the top of the board and making his way down to the bottom. He does acknowledge, however, that this requires a lot of confidence in a category, as well as the ability to build a hot streak. Luckily for Mark, he did have the gameplay ability to back up the strategy, as evident by his 5 wins and TOC victory in 1988. Chuck Forrest, however, cites the strategy that he used to win the 1986 Tournament of Champions.
While he named it as the “Rubin Bounce,” it’s often known to die-hard fans as the “Forrest Bounce,” as he was the first player to successfully implement the strategy on television. Despite pulling this off and being one of the show’s most iconic players to this day, most people took Mark Lowenthal’s traditional and simple approach of going from top-to-bottom for the next 20 years, including all-time money winner Brad Rutter, as well as Ken Jennings, who currently holds the record for the longest streak in Jeopardy! history at 74 wins, which he set in 2004. In the aftermath of Ken’s run, as well as the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, there was a long streak that began at the end of Season 21. It kind of went under the radar due to it not being as long or reported on as Ken’s, and that’s the 19-day streak of David Madden, a student from Ridgewood, New Jersey at the time.
The Pioneering Developers of the Forrest Bounce
David Madden successfully hunting for the Daily Double after bouncing through three different categories (7/22/2005).
In David Madden’s second game, he began the game in an interesting fashion. He started at the $800 clue in “Paying Tribute,” and then went down to the $1000 clue, finding the Daily Double and betting the maximum amount possible. He did the same thing in his 5th game and often closed off these actions by finishing or attempting to finish the category. At the beginning of his 14th game, the final game of Season 21, he bounced through a couple of different categories worth $600-$1000 from clues 5 through 8, before finding the Daily Double on a $600 clue in a different category, where he bet just $200. It seemed intentional that he would hunt for the Daily Doubles in hopes of preventing his opponents from finding them, despite the often conservative bets he’d end up making. This is not something that Chuck’s initial implementation of the technique seemed to account for, but David used it to his advantage even when Daily Doubles weren’t on the board.
A more flashy example of this is what happened in his next game in the Season 22 premiere on 9/12/2005, when Willy Jay held a $13,000 lead over him after finding both Daily Doubles in the Double Jeopardy! round. After clearing the Baltic Cruise category, David decreased his deficit from the lead to $9,400. With two categories left and a lot of ground to make up, David went to the bottom of the board for Poetic Lines. After answering that correctly, David switched over to 2-Letter Abbreviations for $2000, followed by the $1600 clue in Abbreviations, the $1200 clue in Poetic Lines, and continued the rhythm until the end of the round.
While Willy answered a couple of more clues correctly, his lead was no longer insurmountable. By the end of the round, David used the Forrest Bounce to cut his deficit from $13,000 to just $1,400 and then won the game on a double-miss between him and Willy. With $21,400, he had a 15-day total of $354,701. Inverting the clue value selections that we’re used to seeing from Chuck gave the technique new life, as David continued his reign as one of only a little over a dozen champions to win more than 10 games.
Another player who prominently benefited from bouncing around the board was Roger Craig. While he wasn’t a supreme user of the Bounce, he was very noteworthy at the time for capitalizing strongly on aggressive bets whenever he found Daily Doubles. So much so that he ended up breaking Ken Jennings’s one-day record of $75,000 in regular gameplay with a score of $77,000 on his second win before winning 4 more games for a 6-day total of $230,200. Similarly to Chuck Forrest, his full potential was unlocked during the Tournament of Champions in 2011 when he made it to the finals against Tom Nissley and Buddy Wright. What started and developed as a pretty evenly matched game between the three quickly turned into the Roger Craig Show once the category “Anagrammys” was cleared out.
Roger Craig finding both Daily Doubles in Double Jeopardy! and betting it all on both clues, quadrupling his score (11/14/2011).
At this moment, with or without intention, Roger had upgraded the Forrest Bounce. When Chuck pioneered the technique, it was a move meant to confuse and throw off opponents. David elevated the blueprint by using his broader knowledge base to answer higher-valued clues and prevent his opponents from grabbing the Daily Doubles. With Roger, however, not only did he do both of these things, but he took the initiative of going as big as possible to make it to where his opponents had no hope of catching up. As a result of these two big moves, Roger easily won the TOC worth $250,000 and became one of the show’s biggest winners of all-time, surpassing all-time legends like Larissa Kelly and Dan Pawson at the time. With the big streaks and big wins of these players coming into fruition so many years following Chuck Forrest’s groundbreaking run, it was only a matter of time before the strategy would begin catching a lot of wind from upcoming players, as well as the ire of many viewers. It all began on January 28th, 2014, when Arthur Chu made his first appearance.
The Arthur Chu Affect
Arthur Chu immediately and aggressively hunting for the Daily Doubles in his first game (1/28/2014).
In a fashion that immediately emulated other precedents from all-time greats such as David Madden and Chuck Forrest, Arthur bounced right to the bottom of the board on the hunt for Daily Doubles and in hopes of confusing his opponents after answering the first clue correctly in his first game. In the Double Jeopardy! round, he found the last Daily Double of the game and was in third place with $7,600. He put everything at stake on the clue doubled up to $15,200 with a correct response. By the end of the round, he held a narrow lead over Julie Singer, the returning champion.
It was in Final Jeopardy! where he benefited most, when he was the only one to solve the clue. Rather than wagering for the win though, he wagered for the tie, betting $17,200 to win with $37,200, the maximum score that Julie could have acquired. At this time, tiebreakers in regular gameplay didn’t exist, so whenever a tie occurred all players with the same score would wind up returning the next game. In Arthur’s second game, he implored the same Forrest Bounce technique to find all three Daily Doubles, with him betting the $5 minimum in the first round to spite the dreaded Sports category.
Arthur Chu betting $5 after bouncing to a category he hates, Sports Hall of Fame (1/29/2014).
Even though he threw the Daily Double that he hunted for, his opponents no longer had a chance to use it as a crutch against him. In the second round, he bet it all on the second Daily Double he found but lost all his money following an incorrect response. Luckily for him, the Forrest Bounce still came in handy with him as he answered all of the high-valued clues with precision and gained back $10,000 by the 19th clue, where he found the last Daily Double. Arthur put $5,000 at risk and finally capitalized from an accurate response. In Final Jeopardy!, he extended the chaos even further by betting for the tie again, which ended up manifesting as a result. With Carolyn Collins betting it all to win $26,800 with Arthur, he had a 2-day total of $64,000 as well as a co-champion by his side. The next game was nowhere near as lucky for Carolyn, however, as Arthur dominated the game to earn a win worth $18,800, followed by $20,000 the next day…where he wagered for the tie again. As a result of this
With Arthur’s run taking place in the midst of the Battle of the Decades, there were a couple of detours in the middle of his run. But whenever he was on the screen, he was making a lot of viewers mad. As the age of social media began to expand, the likes of Facebook and X formerly known as Twitter™ foamed at the mouth to insult him. Big media outlets such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, tabloids like Medium, and even longtime Jeopardy! archivists such as Fikkle Fame were writing lengthy pieces about how Arthur was impacting the game. At the time, Arthur was very controversial as people were at odds with the way he played, the way he conducted himself on social media, and the attitude that they perceived from him while he was playing the game.
Arthur Chu ended his run with 11 wins and just under $300,000. His gameplay was a stark contrast from the other big streak and high-money earner of the season, 20-game winner Julia Collins, who played the traditional way and picked up $428,100, just a couple thousand dollars less than David Madden. In the 2014 Tournament of Champions, both Arthur and Julia made the finals but lost to 8-game winner Ben Ingram. In order to be competitive with Arthur, both Julia and Ben had to go to the middle of the board and then down, which almost worked for Julia in the first game of the finals when she found the Daily Doubles. However, it was Ben who benefited the most due to being the sole solve of Final Jeopardy in game 1, which was helped by a triple miss in the second game of the finals.
With the big new changes in game strategy coming through from players like Madden, Craig, and Chu especially, more players with tendencies to make aggressive bets and bounce around the board came through, such as 2015 TOC finalists Alex Jacob and Matt Jackson. The latter of the two won 13 games and just over $400,000, while the former ended up winning 6 games and a little bit under $150,000.
Alex Jacob going on a tear at the beginning of his 5th game using Arthur Chu’s alteration of the Forrest Bounce strategy (4/16/2015).
Between the two, Alex Jacob was much more accustomed to using Arthur Chu's specific variation of the Forrest Bounce and the true effect of Chu’s cause. As a World Poker player, when Alex found a Daily Double that he was hunting for, he'd often go all-in to put the game away, or $100 to keep himself safe. This could also be seen as a callback combination of the aggressive style of Roger Craig, as well as the risk-averse style of David Madden, perhaps resulting in a maturation of the already deadly strategy. Unlike Chu, his procedural predecessor, his implementation of the upgraded strategy resulted in him winning the TOC over Matt Jackson in what was described by Alex Trebek as the most dominant performance that he had seen in tournament history.
While other 10+ game winners like Seth Wilson and Austin Rogers tended to start from the top, Austin and 2017 TOC winner Buzzy Cohen often took the initiative of hunting for the Daily Doubles. As this phenomenon of gameplay began to really become more common, Alex Trebek was interviewed by Vulture the following year to talk in depth about a diverse range of topics, which included discussion surrounding the Forrest Bounce and how it developed over time. The passage about it reads as follows:
When this interview portion was mentioned to Chuck Forrest in his own Vulture interview, he made the following statement:
“Sure, I think he’s right to a certain degree. Some of these categories are written so that you need to start from the top. I’ve had experiences where I jumped in the middle and didn’t understand what the category was, and I found myself getting a question wrong. You have to be in a very dominant position in order to use this. People sitting at home might find it confusing. There are a few people who have been able to use it effectively, and many others will try it, hit a roadblock, and wish they wouldn’t have done it. You see people psychologically give up. You’ll see other people claw back into the competition. And it all happens in a very short period of time. If you were to make this show an hour, I don’t think it would be any better or a better way to determine who’s a better player.”
And this was all true. Outside of a few TOC players, there weren’t many players who really grew super accustomed to this way of playing even if they could pull it off. For the longest time, it was just traditional gameplay while Chuck Forrest was very much an outlier in this instance. By the 2010s, it was no longer the same.
With the Forrest Bounce becoming more utilized over time and with new players coming in to constantly innovate and evolve upon what we already know about the blueprint it provided, it was only a matter of time until the Forrest Bounce’s optimal efficacy was maximized. After this interview, the All-Star Games featuring 18 of the show’s best and most memorable players premiered in February of 2019, ending on March 5th. Despite the wholly competitive nature of this tournament, the Forrest Bounce was really only prominently used by one or two players at best since most of the players had competed in an era where this kind of method wasn’t often exposed or put into practice.
Chuck Forrest made this grandiose statement about the state of the Forrest Bounce in 2024:
“When I got to the show on the stage, I could see the physical advantage of it. When you name the category and amount, everybody has to look for it. But you know where you’re looking. That half-second advantage makes a big difference. Now the balance has been turned into a tool for searching for Daily Doubles. I didn’t see the Daily Double as a great opportunity. It’s a risk more than anything else. Some of these new contestants have found ways to keep multiplying and build up huge scores by finding Daily Doubles. James Holzhauer is the prime example of that.”
Jeopardy James: The Next Great Champion
On March 24th, 2019, a promo on television hinted at “the next great champion.”
Upon the announcement, there was a website that popped up in the weeks before this champion’s run began on April 4th, 2019. The webpage hinted at games to be won, records to be broken, and opponents subjected to facing his podium. As these websites and comments kept appearing, more online forums filled with quizzing veterans and other trivia buffs began to exert curiosity and even condemnation, such as Jboard.
When the promo was posted online, Jboard, the oldest surviving Jeopardy! message board, immediately began speculating on who the mystery champion might be. The first person to guess the guy correctly was 2024 TOC participant Jake DeArruda, who stated: “I'll take gun fingers guy, for one primary reason... This is just an observation, but that guy looks quite a bit like James Holzhauer, a 500 Questions/The Chase alum. Appearing on the latter program, he split a record $175k pot and recorded the biggest beatdown in the Final Chase history. He would be a formidable J! contestant, if that were indeed him, but The Chase contestants have not always been automatic superchamps, either.” Some posters were quick to jump on the anti-James train, including CasketRomance who remarked, in light of the “king James Holzhauer” website’s creation, “king james huh? now that personifies douchey.” People on here are quite the wordsmiths.
But the thread took a bit of an interesting turn when one of the people that James apparently faced off against in a trivia league took to the thread. A user named Lampy said on March 26th: “He accused me of cheating at LL on this very forum because I missed some TV questions against him on 500Q and then accused Scott Blish of being a fraud in LL because he lost to Alex Jacob. Aloofness doesn't antagonize people, especially anonymously. There's no reason to excuse an utter lack of class as social awkwardness; we both know plenty of socially awkward people who aren't total jerks.”
UPDATE AS OF 6/6/2024: According to Andy Saunders (The Jeopardy! Fan), Scott Blish has been removed from Online Quiz League for alleged dishonest behavior in gameplay that “secure[d] an advantage for himself.” Tweets about the situation are attached below:
This would appear to vindicate the claims that James Holzhauer made back in 2015 and puts the validity of these Jboard critiques in question.
“LL” in this case refers to Learned League, an online trivia league that a lot of former and wannabe Jeopardy! players participate in. With this in mind, user Austin Powers swooped in to speak his own piece about the matter: “This community is traditionally so accepting, to the point where comments about players - even regarding their obviously poor in-game decisions - have been an excuse to ostracize offending posters in the past. So it’s disappointing that this axis-altering moment in the show’s history is being greeted by posters openly deriding Holzhauer - when he’s not even appeared on the show yet! Be a little generous. Give him a chance. And enjoy being witnesses to greatness.”
People’s hate towards the strategy goes deeper than it just being a little bit inconvenient towards their viewership; it’s also animosity against the players who benefit from it the most. With a player like James Holzhauer, who had an apparent background of making people upset and burning bridges with trivia communities, it seemed a little bit inevitable that this was going to rile at least a few people up. Now keep in mind, this is the same community that made rather unpleasant topics and comments about people who were playing at the time of their appearance. In all honesty, I find the grudges and catty posting to be exhausting, but not necessarily without consideration. I also don’t perceive this to be of the same magnitude of animosity that James received when he went on his Jeopardy! streak.
With all that on the table, let’s discuss the run of James Holzhauer and what further polarized him as a public figure and what further precedent it set for the Forrest Bounce as a strategy.
James Holzhauer going on a run in his first game, building a banked total of $10,000 in the first 15 clues (4/4/2019).
When James made his debut, it all but confirmed what everyone on Reddit and Jboard were suspecting. In the beginning of his first game, as soon as James had control of the board, he went straight to the $1000 clues, selecting the next $1000 clue after each correct response until he found the Daily Double on the 15th clue. He asserted out loud, “all of the chips please” while doing a physical simulation of him pushing poker chips into the pot. Once he answered correctly, it was verification that Jeopardy! would never be the same again.
Let’s rewind real quickly to how this all started. Chuck Forrest appeared in 1985 and won 5 games the traditional way, then came back to the Tournament of Champions in 1986 where he pioneered a technique known as the Forrest Bounce that would be attempted by many but not successfully emulated. 20 years later in 2005, David Madden created the foreshadowing of what the Forrest Bounce could become by chasing down the Daily Doubles. Fast forward to late 2011, Roger Craig planted the seeds necessary to allow the Forrest Bounce to blossom into a serious threat to the future of Jeopardy! gameplay by using the Daily Doubles to put his games out of reach.
Then at the beginning of 2014, Arthur Chu took what we already knew about the strategy, combined all mechanics, and threw it in the face of every regular viewer while absorbing and poking the bear of whoever gave him the most negative attention. In the year of 2015, Alex Jacob made a poker-like approach to the method by combining the liberal wagering of Roger Craig and the conservative wagering of David Madden on Daily Doubles to help him win the 2015 Tournament of Champions. While other big shot players like Austin Rogers, Buzzy Cohen, and Matt Jackson did flirt with the procedure at times to help them win crucial games, no one had really unlocked its full potential until where we are now, April of 2019.
James won his first game with $43,680, before winning approximately $90,000 more in his next two games. Fans were impressed by his gameplay but quite rude about his smile. On April 9th, however, he pulled off the unthinkable. Beginning the Double Jeopardy! round with a TDD worth $14,600, he accumulated another $17,600 before finding the last Daily Double of the game, where he set a then-record Daily Double wager of $25,000. With a correct response, he had over $70,000 to work with before Final Jeopardy! To surpass Roger Craig’s one-day record of $77,000, he needed to be correct and wager at least $4,401. Not only was he correct, he made an incredible bet of $38,314 to win with $110,914, a reference to his daughter’s birthday. With a 4-day total of $244,365, he had already surpassed the 5-day total of $195,801 set by Roger Craig. And it was only going to go up from there. In his tenth game, he smashed his own record by earning $131,127, giving him a 10-day total just under $700,000.
James Holzhauer breaking his own one-day record in his tenth game, his highest-scoring game in regular play (4/17/2019).
Throughout the course of these games, he continued to start at the very bottom of the board, bouncing from category to category to clear out the rows of $1000 clues, which he also applied to $2000 clues in the Double Jeopardy! round. He was a man on a mission to not only optimize the Forrest Bounce, but to smash through every previous record conceived in the 35 years since the syndicated show began to air. James was very popular with a large sector of the fanbase, but like with every player who's been on for a long time, a lot of people also had great disdain for him.
James was everywhere. CNN, Vulture, The Washington Post, Five Thirty Eight, and whatever news source you could name were all reporting on his run one way or another. CNN actually has several dozen articles citing how he used the Forrest Bounce as the technique that earned him a lot of wins and a lot of money. His name generated more viewership than ever because he wasn’t just going on a streak. He was bulldozing his opponents and taking up the entire high score leaderboard. On May 4th, 2019, Tom Nichols took to CNN to make the assertion with Michael Smerconish that James Holzhauer was actually ruining Jeopardy! with the amount of winning he kept piling up during his run. We’ll get to Tom later, because I actually want to go over the opponents that actually had the misfortune of facing him. A couple of weeks later, on May 20th, three players who lost their game to James Holzhauer took to the television screen.
The first one to talk was Adam Levin – not to be confused with the Maroon 5 singer – who lost to James by $18, saying that he played with a level of speed and used the Forrest Bounce in a way that he had never seen prior to when he played against him. Alix Basden added that while she didn’t believe that James had “broken the game” yet, he was absolutely changing the game in ways that even those who expanded upon the Forrest Bounce before him couldn’t replicate. However, Robin Falco, who lost to James in his 17th game, had way stronger and less favorable comments to make about him. In her Reddit game thread, she was already kind of dropping hints about how she felt regarding how James Holzhauer allegedly treated her in response to people’s critiques about how she played the game. In the interview with CNN, she was a lot less reserved.
Falco took to the Reddit thread centered around the appearance afterwards to talk a bit more in depth about how her experience with James Holzhauer affected her, to a crowd that was mostly standoffish and indifferent to her claims. A few people did come in to express their sympathies towards her for the far-right harassment and doxing she and her family were receiving for her appearance on the network, which is obviously never okay. As stated earlier, James had a slight backlog of controversies that were a bit behind-the-curtains as far back as the early 2010s at least, and I think it’s important to mention here for the fact that the Forrest Bounce technique in general has served as a bit of a boogeyman against contentiously controversial players. As a great beneficiary of the gaming approach, which was already tendentious to the viewing audience, the reputation of the players fulfilling the procedure of the Bounce was beginning to overshadow the actual set of tactics.
A couple of days after Robin’s interview was posted on Mediaite, a scathing article about Arthur Chu by Annelise Ogaard came out going over the rather scattered details of Arthur’s life post-Jeopardy! fame. A lot of people unfamiliar with Jeopardy! and the success that he achieved from the show primarily know him for making some rather questionable and unflattering tweets online. He also made a documentary, which was released in 2017, talking about how he tried going from a successful Jeopardy! player to an online influencer. The film itself doesn’t really portray him as a hero or a villain effectively, according to Ogaard, although it does reveal a bit of a cruel irony around the fact that Arthur had spent a good deal of his online career trying to get into feminism and fight against the toxicity and reactionary elements of GamerGate, including going on a panel, but apparently not being a great husband. The year before the film came out, Arthur and Eliza Blair ended up divorcing. A set of posts from her indicate that she was extremely unhappy in the relationship and it only worsened over time. If you want to learn more, I’d suggest reading the full article and watching the documentary.
Trailer for Who is Arthur Chu? (2017) documentary.
At this point in Jeopardy! history, the origins of the Forrest Bounce seemed to be pretty buried by the way the strategy has developed over time, as well as the players who carried its torch. By the time James was on, the full potential that was available seemed to be completely unlocked. He was on pace to break Ken Jennings’ all-time money record of $2,520,700 by the time he began his 33rd game. With his total winnings at $2,462,216, he was averaging approximately ~$77,000 per episode. But then, of course, this happened.
Deja vu is quite prominent whenever big events like this occur in the game show community. People start creating their own quacked out theories of how this could have possibly happened. In more extreme and volatile cases, people with massive platforms but little involvement in the actual community start making very irresponsible and ill-informed statements on public platforms that are easily verifiable and also easy to dispel with more careful research. I am, obviously, referring to MatPat’s two-part Film Theory video about why “Jeopardy Is Rigged” and how the show totally screwed over James Holzhauer.
The Forrest Bounce Courthouse
Now, I’ll preface this by saying that I do enjoy MatPat’s material that doesn’t pertain to Jeopardy! so much. I think his game theory videos are very entertaining and surprisingly well thought out for the kind of niche that they fill. Above it all, however, he is just that; an entertainer, not necessarily someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. With games that involve actual real life people like Jeopardy!, I'm afraid that he’s absolutely clueless. There are a few general claims to dispute in the video, one being that it is very, extremely, quite illegal to rig any game shows in the United States. The birth of Jeopardy! also derives from the quiz show scandals of the 1950s that allowed for laws like this to pass in the first place, which honestly makes MatPat’s ignorance that much more poignant, especially as someone who claims he’s obsessed with information. He also wrongfully claims that James Holzhauer is the first to move around the board and wager massive sums of money, which you can literally just reread this article up to this point to see how false that is. But the biggest offense of these two videos, in terms of what this article is about, is that he never even mentions the Forrest Bounce.
This is actually the driving video series that made me want to write this in the first place, because people seem to have a gross misunderstanding of how the game strategy actually started and formed over time, as well as which players actually influenced the way it’s used in modern times. For someone whose channel relies on incisive and careful research, I’m kind of stunned by how easily disputable most of the claims are. It speaks volumes to me how unwilling he was to dive into the very well-documented 40 years of the syndicated show but was very quick to entertain the several conspiracy theories that spawned from people who never started watching until James Holzhauer appeared on their television screens.
One thing I’ll give MatPat is that he did do pretty well in talking about the math behind James’s games and how much of an outlier his gameplay was compared to everyone before him. He even brought up the Coryat score, which the official website doesn’t even use, even though it’s been perhaps the highest quality standard around raw game theory of Jeopardy! since the J! Archive went online back in 2005. There’s not really a whole lot of substance to go over in the video other than that, but it did get rightfully condemned by some of the biggest players, including Alex Jacob on X formerly known as Twitter™, as well as Austin Rogers in a YouTube video response.
One particular point that MatPat really entertained was that Emma was basically too good of a player and that the producers set him up to be defeated by her. While Mr. Rogers dispels this theory pretty well in his own video response, I actually wanted to entertain this thought a different way by going over the games where James had the most trouble. While I do accredit MatPat with being able to provide pretty good accounts of numerical data, there are some other data points that he missed out on – those of which are quite literally my own. Seriously, the man could have just asked me.
Let’s actually take it back to the first game, because I want to go over a dynamic that is quite important in a game against James Holzhauer: finding the Daily Double and using it at its maximum capacity. As I mentioned earlier, James did this in the first round by doubling up to $10,000 before the first break. Alex Koral, the returning champion who played a very strong game against him, did not end up doing this when he found the Daily Double. At $9,000, he was down $6,400 from James’s score. To beat someone like James, who was quick, knowledgeable, high-rolling, and bouncy, it was quintessential for him to go all-in. But he only bet $3,000, and with a correct response he was still behind. For the rest of the round, James dominated and catapulted himself into a runaway, meaning that Alex was not within range of surpassing him with an all-in Final Jeopardy! bet. By only betting a third of his money, Alex left James in a position to steamroll him by hopping around the board and finding the other Daily Double. While it wouldn’t have mattered in the end, due to James knowing Final Jeopardy! and also being likely to take a bigger gamble had Alex bet it all, he certainly would have been in a better position.
If you take a look at the table I made for James and his stats, you’ll notice a section there featuring a term that I coined for players with 10+ wins called the runaway rate. When a game is labeled as a “LOCK,” it means that James has put the game out of reach with his opponents having no hope of catching him beyond a double-up, which is another word for runaway. As Alex would have only gone up to $36,000, James’ pre-FJ score of $40,412 already had Alex defeated. You’ll notice that there are three games labeled in gold as him being “1st,” which means that he held the lead before Final Jeopardy! but did not have a runaway game. The other game that doesn’t have “LOCK” under it is his last game, which we’ll get to.
In his second game, he was playing even with challenger Satish Chandrasekhar. With Satish leading at the beginning of the second round, he found the first Daily Double and wagered a conservative $4,000 to extend his lead. However, as soon as James found the other Daily Double, the game was his. He was also correct in Final Jeopardy!, unlike Satish, which rendered the outcome in James’s favor regardless. His other strongest opponents included Adam Levin, who lost to James by $18 in James’ 18th game with the highest second-place score of all time with $53,999. Nate Scheffey was the next big obstacle in his 26th game, with Nate sealing his fate with a Daily Double wager that left $7,400 in the pot and him with a $5,400 deficit to James before the final round. With both players answering correctly in Final Jeopardy!, Nate came up short as well.
The key here is that James had the highest accuracy rate of any 10+ game winner on getting Final Jeopardy! in regular play, an unbelievable 97%. The one time he ever missed was in his sixth game against Lewis Black and Stephanie Stein, who wrote an article for The New York Times about her experience. Despite being a runaway, this was also one of James’ closest games, as both players drew five-figure numbers before Final Jeopardy!. With Lewis having 43% of James’s score before Final Jeopardy!, it’s wild to think that a couple of clues worth around $2,400 could have completely changed the outcome of the game. I shall note, to stay on topic, that James did achieve these wins by abiding with the Forrest Bounce.
So now that we know that James had more than just one tough opponent, let’s address the last tough opponent he faced in his final game. I’m not talking about Emma Boettcher, but rather the other opponent – Jay Sexton, a man who memorized the entire Trivial Pursuit set back in middle school. One thing I do want to give credit to MatPat on is that he did mention this game being the highest scoring game in Jeopardy! history, with $53,200 in Combined Coryat. However, he forgot to mention the fact that Jay Sexton shaved $11,000 off of the board as well, contributing to ~20.7% of the Combined Coryat, with Emma possessing an even more impressive $18,800. Of course it’s going to seem unusual, as it’s the best played game in the show’s history. Look towards the 2024 Tournament of Champions finals, with three of the show’s top players – Yogesh Raut, Troy Meyer, and Ben Chan – a Combined Coryat average of $47,500, with the highest Coryat breaking $50,000. High-scoring games like this are far from uncommon just because James ended up losing.
I could go on here, but the main critique I want to pull towards MatPat is that he needs to learn more about the actual strategies that come with winning the game, the history, and the mechanics that make the game so great, rather than posting sloppy conspiracy theorist bait videos about the topic. If you honestly want to spend more time pondering the merit of these videos, I’d recommend just skimming through the videos a bit and watching Austin Rogers’s takedown video of it, as he mentions the Forrest Bounce, as well as extra bits about the history of rigging game shows and how the show’s abides by the standards of legality surrounding it. I also want to recommend a video about James Holzhauer’s streak done by a YouTuber named Cheddar, who is a lot smarter than his YouTube channel name makes him sound. He goes over not just the Forrest Bounce, but makes really good citations to actual statisticians and archivists such as J! Archive and The Jeopardy! Fan, and even interviews actual former contestants like 1995 TOC winner Fritz Holznagel, who wrote the book “Secrets of the Buzzer.”
Excerpt from Cheddar’s YouTube video talking about the buzzer in an interview with 1995 Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel.
With the run of James Holzhauer, the discourse around the show, the player, and the Forrest Bounce strategy had people debating if the show was enhanced or ruined. It was kind of deja vu in a way, as Arthur Chu’s controversial run took place just about five years prior. A lot of people were claiming that Arthur was changing the game when he was on. If Arthur changed the game, then what did James just do? Can it even be called the Forrest Bounce anymore? What happened in a post-Holzhauer Jeopardy! world? Let’s take a look at the next biggest players to play the show.
Post-Holzhauer: The Champions Who Benefited
The player whose run was immediately paralleled to James is the player who went on a streak from the end of Season 35 to the third week of Season 36, Jason Zuffranieri. As many viewers are aware, Jeopardy! tapes their episodes often several weeks in advance and in the case of Jason, whose first six games aired on the last episodes of Season 35, his games were taped following James Holzhauer’s second win being aired on TV. He was unaware of Holzhauer’s game. Jason began as a very strong player, earning 6 wins and $137,300 and catapulting him into the top 100 all-time highest money earners. Once he viewed Holzhauer’s games on television and took extra time to prepare for his first game of Season 36, which was taped three and a half months following his 6th win, he became a monster of an opponent to face.
The beginning of both Jason’s 6th and 7th games, taped three months apart.
Starting with his 7th game, he began each game at the very bottom of the board, selecting a $1000 clue, and often either bouncing to another $1000 clue or going to the $800 clue in the same category. While he wasn’t as commanding and dominant as James Holzhauer was, it’s clear that James’s patch update for the Forrest Bounce was instrumental in creating a new class of players mastering the game far beyond their other contemporaries. The difference between Jason’s games at the end of Season 35 and his games at the beginning of Season 36 was pretty easy to notice. With visibly more confidence, he ended up winning 19 games and $532,496 overall. Even right before Jason, there were the runs of his Tournament of Champions contemporaries, Ryan Bilger and Sam Kavanaugh. In their runs, they both played traditionally but often bet aggressively whenever they were pummeled with wagering clues.
Sam Kavanaugh and returning champion Ryan Bilger playing the game mostly traditionally, starting at the first or second clue of the board and going down. Sam was an aggressive bettor from the beginning.
In the post-Holzhauer age, this didn’t last for long. Both players employed the Forrest Bounce technique which got them into the semifinals, with Ryan defeating Jason Zuffranieri at his own game in the quarterfinals and Sam playing up the aggressive Daily Double bets harder than ever before. With Sam’s win of the 2021 TOC, it was well established at that point that the Forrest Bounce was permanently here to stay.
Season 37 ended with a new streaker on the rise, Matt Amodio. After defeating Josh Saak in his 4th game, Matt went through a series of four guest hosts to end the season with 18 wins. He also went the route of all his predecessors, picking from the bottom two clues of the board to start and building on his money total along the way. He wasn’t as monetarily successful as James Holzhauer due to missing some Final Jeopardy! clues worth a lot of money, for one. You can compare their FJ correct rates on my stats sheet for players who won over 10 times. Despite this run happening concurrently with the hosting fiasco that nearly killed the TV show as we know it, Matt’s run drew ire for not just the Forrest Bounce but his unorthodox way of answering clues:
This touches on a broader point that I’ll get to later, but I also wanted to bring back another character in this story, Tom Nichols. Here are two tweets he made during Matt Amodio’s run:
“Matt Amodio is a great player, but I really don’t understand some of the bad strategy among the players he’s faced, like picking away at small value clues when there’s big money left on the board.” - August 5th, 2021
“Look, Matt Amodio is a great Jeopardy player - one of the best - but this is proving my point that champions on a long streak have an advantage over newer players that turns into almost inevitable drubbings. @Jeopardy should reinstate the five-game champion rule.” - August 9th, 2021
Eventually, Matt’s run was ended by a top-down player named Jonathan Fisher and future Second Chance winner Jessica Stephens, the former of whom went on to win 11 games despite not employing the same strategy. Another one of the most stark examples of a top-down player beating a Forrest Bounce player is the long-standing and never-ending rivalry between Andrew He and Amy Schneider, which began on November 17th, 2021 when Andrew lost his 6th game to Amy. Andrew He holds the record for the highest-scoring debut game in regular play at $52,001, which he achieved through the means of starting at the bottom of the board and going all-in on Daily Doubles.
At this point, it was a common strategy and it fit like a glove for Andrew. Despite this, Amy won the game from second place in a lone FJ solve, for a total of $31,600. The top-down strategy employed her just fine, as she continued to win up until the end of January. With a 40-day total of $1,382,800, she had the second-longest streak in Jeopardy! history, as well as the fourth-highest earning total in regular play behind only Ken Jennings ($2,520,700), James Holzhauer ($2,462,216), and Matt Amodio ($1,518,601).
At this time, a lot of fans such as myself were beginning to take notice of how often we were seeing these streaks come into fruition. During Amy’s run at the beginning of 2022, four to five months before the rise of Mattea Roach and Ryan Long, an article was published on The Ringer by Claire McNear about the streaks unfolding throughout Season 38.
She mentioned Forrest Bounce professionals Arthur Chu and James Holzhauer having what some may declare as a “mythical status” given the uniqueness and innovation that their runs provided. 2017 TOC winner Buzzy Cohen added onto this by stating as follows: “It's sort of like if tennis went from being an amateur game to being a professional game but it didn't happen overnight. We're at a point where it's not all pro, but there are a couple people that are preparing in a different way than everyone else."
She also went on to invoke Holzhauer’s streak further by suggesting alongside Buzzy Cohen that we could be in “an era of aggressive preparation,” especially in a post-pandemic world where we’re all kind of recovering from being cooped up in our homes with nothing to do but read and watch television all day. With this painful privilege, more players likely became familiarized with not just trivia at large, but perfecting the strategy that allowed the aforementioned players in this article to become as successful as they were. As Claire points out in the same article, however, the show has been longing for streaks like this since 2003 when the 5-day limit was lifted.
Ratings surged during Season 38 and new people were becoming infatuated with the quiz show and its persistence in displaying academic excellence and innovating gameplay to influence future generations of players. Of course, with new fans and new passions unfolding, there were contrarians who used Amy Schneider’s current streak as another opportunity to complain. One week later, another article was published for The Atlantic called “It Might Be Time to Retire ‘Jeopardy!,’' a hit piece written by none other than…take a wild guess.
The Antagonism of a Former Champion
Alright, let’s eat. So who exactly is Tom Nichols, and why does he play such a crucial role in this uprising of uptight attitudes towards such a monumental adaptation of this historic game show’s mechanics? Well, it goes deeper than you think. You see, Tom isn’t just a former professor at Harvard University pretending to speak for the amateur every-man, or a writer at one of the oldest and most widely-circulated newspapers in the United States. He’s also a former Jeopardy! contestant and a pretty successful one at that. As mentioned in his CNN interview lamenting about James Holzhauer being too good at games, he was a 5-time winner back in 1994 and even got to compete in that year’s Tournament of Champions… where he got eliminated in the very first game. His last appearance was in 2005, when he played against Eugene Finerman and Chacko George in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions.
Tom Nichols’s last appearance, his only game in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions. He did not do too great.
At some point, you gotta hope that Tom Nichols breaks his television so that we can never hear him whine and moan again about the show that paid him over $50,000. The man earned an amount of money that I’ll probably never see in my lifetime but he constantly rails against it as if it put him $50,000 in debt. And yes, I know, he probably has enough money to afford a replacement television set. But enough ad homs, let’s finally give some thoughtful critique on the many complaints he has about the TV show, the streaks, and of course, the Forrest Bounce at large. Let’s rewind back to the appearance he made on CNN that’s topical to this video.
“Hey, Tom. Thanks for being here. I see from a tweet of yours that you agree with the analysis that I've just referenced. You said this, "Just watched tonight's "Jeopardy". No hope for people who are new to stop a guy who's been handling the buzzer for so many games. Just like Ken Jennings, he won't be beaten. He'll play until he makes a mistake. Incredibly dull."
Okay so before we listen to this guy talk, let me address this initial comment. We’ll be going by the transcript because I don’t want to subject readers to hearing his haughty, snobby voice. Like I’m doing you a favor by laying out the transcript of the video here like this.
Anyway, here’s the deal with the buzzer. New players get several hours of prep and rehearsal time before they actually go on the show. Players get tons of instructions to learn the buzzer mechanics and play as many practice games as possible, according to the accounts of many former players. Is there a disadvantage? Of course, but there are plenty of procedures that go into place before the actual game starts and there isn’t much that can be done beyond that. As a former contestant who competed as recently as 2005, he should arguably know this but I have a feeling that he’s just being malicious here to spite the multi-day champions that he doesn’t enjoy watching.
“I hope we're not in the minority because I'd hate to think that Charles -- that Chuck Lane is right that what people really want to see is not competition, but just somebody who has figured out how to break the system and rack up $1 million. And let me just say, I mean, I don't begrudge James the money. He figured it out. He's figured out the algorithm. He's got a strategy that works, but there's an inherently unfair nature to this competition.”
Well, unfortunately for him, he is in the minority here. Personally, I actually love seeing competition. And so does most of the general viewing audience. The tournaments of Season 40, especially the Tournament of Champions and inaugural Invitational Tournament, have been a blast with all of the all-time biggest winners slugging it out for the top prize, often while bouncing around the board. I also think it’s extremely cool that we all had the privilege of watching someone like Holzhauer stand out as a massive outlier and rack up 3 times the amount of money earned per game as even the show’s best players, during regular play. Here’s the thing though. You can’t say you don’t begrudge James for figuring out the game while you’re also out here saying that the show should be retired because players like Amy Schneider started winning too much, and that the 5-game limit that forced your run to an end should be reinstated.
Also, the inherently unfair argument here? When has Jeopardy! ever been fair? Players who finished in second and third place didn’t even get monetary compensation until the year 2002. Before that, there were a variety of prizes that ranged from old electronic games to boxes of Rice-a-Roni. Is it fair that you got to cash in over $50,000 in 5 games and come back for two tournaments while the ten opponents who lost to you didn’t have the knowledge or buzzer advantage to beat you? Was it fair that you originally lost your 5th game due to a clue discrepancy that affected the outcome? Obviously not, otherwise you wouldn’t have been invited back for another chance at winning your 5th game and that TOC spot.
Being better at the game because you worked and upgraded a game action that was already set in stone back in the 1980s is not unfair. This is just the Michael Larson argument. There was no cheating involved. He knew the answers, had the quickest finger, figured out the game, and most importantly, he had the entire country watching. The only other time the show pulled more ratings than James Holzhauer’s run is when Ken Jennings went on his run for much longer without even using the Forrest Bounce. He expands further on his “point” or whatever about the buzzer later in the interview:
“But the other is how much of "Jeopardy" is a purely mechanic operation with the buzzer and getting the rhythm right of knowing when to buzz in because you can't see it at home, but there's a light that goes on when your buzzer is -- when you can buzz in.”
Okay, so hear me out: This is just a skill issue. You know who else wasn’t great at the buzzer in his original run? 2024 Tournament of Champions winner Yogesh Raut. One of the top-ranked quizzers in the world, but at a disadvantage in his initial run due to not getting the buzzer timing quite right and only circulating 3 wins without runaways. So you know what he did? The same thing that James Holzhauer did to prepare for the show; he read through the book “Secrets of the Buzzer” by 1995 TOC winner Fritz Holznagel. Contrary to Emily Sands’s ranking here, she used gaming the buzz-in stats as a strategy to insinuate she was the slowest by deliberately buzzing in late on clues really late.
There’s also Melissa Klapper, a 3-time champion and the only player whose buzz-in rate was lower than Yogesh’s out of anyone else competing, according to the pre-TOC stats. She actually led 13-time winner Ray Lalonde, who often starts in the middle of the board, and Celebrity Jeopardy winner Ike Barinholtz before Final Jeopardy!, despite the buzzer statistics not favoring her much. Also, Ike won the game in an upset that only rivaled when 3-time winner Jared Watson defeated 21-time winner Cris Pannullo in a runaway during the same tournament. All players had to use the Forrest Bounce method in order to compete with the top players. If that’s not entertaining to you, or even competition, then I don’t know what to say.
The people most passionate about knowledge and success tend to prepare for the show in more focused and intense ways. Why is that something that they as players and us as viewers should be punished and scolded for? If you don’t have the time to learn the mechanics of the buzzer, then honest to God, why are you going on Jeopardy! expecting anything to go your way? If you don’t have the attention span to get through Fritz Holznagel’s book, which I really do recommend if you’re trying to get on the show and be very successful, I do at least recommend checking out the rest of Cheddar’s video about James Holzhauer, where Holznagel is cited and also interviewed.
But here’s the main point I’m wanting to get through to here: the audience is infatuated with this unique style of gameplay and it’s pretty insulting to insinuate that the only reason James keeps winning is because of the buzzer, especially now that box scores are now available, to show the wide range of potential knowledge gaps, buzz-in rates, and buzzer attempts… which you’ve also bitched about. It’s also a blatant deflection from what you’ve been stating as the main problem for the past four years, which is the board bouncing. There is no consistency with Tom’s arguments. The whole interview is basically him whining about James Holzhauer being too good at the game while not being direct and honest about the main thing that actually bothers him.
NICHOLS: Watching "Jeopardy" now is about as interesting as putting a camera in the sports book room at Caesar's Palace. This is like watching a guy who, you know, does algorithms. I mean, even his Daily Double bets are, you know, right to the penny ...
SMERCONISH: Right.
NICHOLS: ... because he's done the math in his head. And you know, that's impressive, but it's also -- it's like ...
SMERCONISH: Yes.
NICHOLS: I mean, it's like going to the horse races with a bookie. Nobody enjoys that.
Uhhh, again. Citation needed. So wasn’t that just the biggest waste of energy? Well, he wasn’t very graceful when James Holzhauer lost either towards the amazing woman who defeated him, Emma Boettcher. Here’s the dismissive critique he gave in disagreement with current host Ken Jennings: “I think @KenJennings reaches the wrong conclusion in this @TheAtlantic piece, but if you want evidence that the game is no longer for amateurs - which imo breaks the most appealing aspect of the game - then I agree with him here.”
So because Emma, a humble librarian from Chicago, had been training for a long time to be on the show, going as far as to make her master’s thesis around the show, the show “no longer appeals to amateurs.” As opposed to Tom, who is literally a Harvard professor and has tens of thousands of followers propping up his terrible takes as a result of his game show success. He was shut down pretty quickly by two-time champion Jennifer Morrow in a reply on X formerly known as Twitter™:
What is up with the constant disrespect, honest to God? It’s not even like he actually respects amateur players if this tweet about Matt Amodio’s opponents is an indication of anything. Like seriously, what do you want man? Well, let’s look at our answer as we’re now about to get into the real trenches here with this article he wrote at The Atlantic, which came out in the midst of Amy Schneider’s run titled “It Might Be Time to Retire Jeopardy.” Before we start this off, I do want to point out one thing that I find kind of humorous about this article, by the way, which is this tweet thanking Nichols for making the article free. I had to get a free trial just to read this. I guess he didn’t want this to be accessible anymore for some reason. I kind of have an idea, but let’s just go in and see what he had to say.
So after reminding us that he’s over the age of 60, Tom made the claim that the show has “lost the spirit of what made it an American institution,” and pursuing the previous argument that he made saying that the show is “too professional” now and that amateurs are now apparently “closed” from the show. Time is a circle, and Jennifer Morrow quote tweeted her own previous post, saying: “You’ve been on this nonsense for years now, stop rehashing it. J! is one of the few competition venues left in American culture where anyone can give themselves a good chance to earn big bucks. Every tool you need is available via Google. If people don’t use it, that’s on them.” Alex Jacob also took a sarcastic shot at him: "It used to be a show that celebrates the smarts of the average citizen, like me, a Harvard professor."
These two went at it quite a bit after the publication of this article, which I will get to. Further down the article, Tom Nichols cites Chuck Lane’s op-ed with The Washington Post, another former Jeopardy! player who was badly defeated, which he very publicly admits in the same article. I mean he really did not make it a secret how bad he did and how bad it made him feel. Are y’all starting to see a pattern here? I mean most of this article is calling James Holzhauer a “menace” and just using all kinds of dehumanizing language against him, and for what? Because he’s really good at the game and revitalizing the strategy that has existed for years and years at this point?
Lane also invokes the name of Charles Van Doren, the former academic who was infamously involved in the quiz show scandal surrounding 21 and the show’s producers feeding him the answers. The reason for calling Van Doren’s name into effect was that he died around the same time Holzhauer’s run started. I literally see no point in making this connection unless he was trying to imply that the show is rigging the game in favor of Holzhauer, which he goes on to clarify was not the case. So that was certainly one of the articles of all time. James may not be the most perfect person outside of TV, if previous accounts have any merit, but he absolutely isn’t a cheater and I like to think that he’s softened over the years with the people he’s played against and the beneficial charity work he’s done for people who are struggling.
Even way before his victory on Jeopardy! Masters, which allowed him to pick a charity to donate $100,000 to, he donated $10,000 to the same nonprofit called Project 150 which allowed specifically homeless or otherwise disadvantaged kids to continue their education. He also chipped in $10,000 to help the family of deceased and beloved Jeopardy! champion Brayden Smith, who was a local resident of Las Vegas at the time of his passing. With his humanitarian work for Las Vegas, James became the first recipient for the “Person of the Year” award at the first Jeopardy! Honors event as a result. It really rubs me the wrong way that some guy who has the privilege to write for The Washington Post can write a huffy article about the way they perceive James based purely off of how he comes off on television. What he’s done here is certainly more worthy of praise than whatever the hell these articles are.
Speaking of injecting Jeopardy! players with praise, Tom Nichols goes on to remind us, once again, how much he liked Matt Amodio. That’s nice. So why did he write all of this, as well as a bunch of whiny cope tweets about Amy Schneider’s run while she was on? It’s incredible dissonance too when you remember that Matt Amodio objectively used the Forrest Bounce much more than Amy ever did, which he has also whined about relentlessly as recently as literally this month. He goes off on a spiel about the buzzer, yet again, later on. We already went over all of this and there’s no point rehashing it again because we all know the buzzer’s a pain in the ass. Though I will say, tournaments like Invitational and Masters show the sudden split from dominance that big players like Schneider and Holzhauer usually have, which you can see in the box scores.
“...veteran players who master this ability have a greater chance of finding the Daily Doubles (where contestants can make big wagers beyond the value of the clue) because they can control the board for longer stretches. The Daily Double used to be a shot at changing the game’s momentum, sometimes with a dramatic bet. (I won some and lost some.) Now it's mostly a way for the returning champs to invest in padding out a lead.”
I mean, this is just false. Watch Juveria Zaheer’s first game in Second Chance, played in December 2023, and you’ll see how this isn’t true. She found the first Daily Double in the second round, wagered it all and made a huge momentum shift in her favor. Later on however, her opponent Jake Garrett found the other Daily Double and made a big enough wager to put him in the game. It wound up being such a tidal wave of a game that it ended with the highest third place score of all time. Players like Amy Schneider and James Holzhauer did not put an end to games like this, they temporarily halted the show’s spotlight with their streaks. No more, no less. Players utilize Daily Doubles very differently depending on their circumstances, and this statement from Nichols is just a logical fallacy.
Now I will give Mr. Nichols one thing, he gives solid advice to new and upcoming players about playing a champion and that’s looking at the board instead of the host. You don’t want to break your focus, especially with how comfortable the champion might be getting inside the studio. If you’re not coming to win, then really, what are you doing? Perhaps a lot of players would just rather have fun and I think that’s fine, personally, but it would appease people like Tom Nichols who insist on being cranky for many different reasons.
Take a look at this strawman argument from him as well: “Worse yet, this has actually improved ratings, which says something bad about us, the viewers. Americans no longer care about the triumph of the everyman or everywoman.”
Sam Kavanaugh, 2021 TOC winner, was a teacher in his first appearance. Deb Bilodeau, the 2024 CWC Group 2 winner, was a restaurant server by the time they appeared in the Champions Wildcard tournament. Ryan Long, a 16-time winner from Philly, was a rideshare driver. Julia Collins, who started as a supply chain professional and became the top winner of Season 30, revealed herself to be unemployed during the 2014 TOC, before using her winnings to create an organization that allows for women to be successful in the workplace. Mattea Roach, a former law student from Canada who very nearly defeated James Holzhauer in the Jeopardy! Masters finals, is now the host of a podcast. What the actual fuck is Tom yapping about here? You see a few “professional” trivia players using a strategy that you hate and all of a sudden viewers “don’t care about everyday people?”
He also took a minute to hype up a trashy gossip tabloid that picked up James’s tongue-in-cheek shot at Matt Amodio, which Matt shot back at in good jest. The Masters tournament showed that there’s a pretty great sense of camaraderie between the players, but leave it to Tom to engage in the same kind of exaggeratory exploitation of game show winners. So basically, Tom used the success of players who are much kinder and smarter than him to promote his trashy, tabloid-tier temper tantrum. I honestly believe what Tom did here is more harmful than what MatPat did. Because unlike MatPat, a now-retired YouTube entertainer and outsider to anything related to the Jeopardy! community, Tom actually has game show credentials, with being a writer for a newspaper has actual influence and impact on the show and the narrative around certain players.
Now let’s check some reviews from former contestants on X formerly known as Twitter™ and some of our greatest hits, because I can’t really expunge more energy on the incoherent ramblings of this man:
From Jason Block, a 4-time winner from 2001 who lost to Mark Eckard (R.I.P.): “As someone who was on the show and would have liked to be on the show as long as possible...you have actually zero knowledge about the show. Very very uneducated take.”
And of course, Alex Jacob who won the 2015 TOC, got in on this. Screenshot provided for this, because it’s a fairly lengthy back-and-forth.
As you could probably expect, he has not stopped saying that and he has continued to persistently and rambunctiously criticize the show to the ground at every opportunity, whether it’s because of the tournaments, the players, or the strategies. Robin Falco mentioned how disrespectful James Holzhauer was towards the game, the staff, and his opponents, with Tom Nichols more or less echoing the sentiment she expressed. I don’t think Tom respects the game or the players. I think he’s a grifter who is using his outdated appearances on the show as a crutch to be as malicious and vitriolic as possible. I’m willing to bet that if the show were to ever invite him back to compete again, there’s no way he would say no.
He’s not the first player from the show to criticize it and I highly doubt he’ll be the last, but even Yogesh Raut (who also wasn’t the first, obviously) was able to step above his predispositions about the show to compete in the 2024 Tournament of Champions and win it all in a graceful manner, without really compromising on the statements he had made previously. It’s fine to not connect with a show the way you used to, but to suggest that it should be “retired” to appease your own lack of enjoyment and to take away the aspired dreams of thousands of hopefuls, is an extremely gross and shallow sense of entitlement that is honestly beyond measure. Unfortunately, I doubt he’ll ever stop as this is his job and he needs money by broadcasting his bad opinions over and over again. I don’t think we need to say much more here, but take him as another example of the negative sentiment being expressed towards the show and how it derives from the Forrest Bounce strategy.
The Current State of the Forrest Bounce
With all the complaints about the same contestants, clues, and tournaments eventually being exhausted, the usual obsessions people have with whining about Jeopardy! quickly culminated and looped back around to being about the gameplay that the best players have grown attached to. On October 18th, 2023, William Hughes of AV Club wrote an article titled “One of Jeopardy!’s favorite player techniques makes for terrible TV.” Mmm, spicy headline. You can of course guess that this is about the Forrest Bounce. I know we’ve suffered through a lot of brain rot, but we’re going to make it through this together.
The article spends the first few paragraphs introducing the fanatical analysis of the game that’s done on the J! Archive, which is good. There are many archivists out there doing great work and displaying the fabled research necessary for a game centered around knowledge, trivia, and strategy. It then discusses the Forrest Bounce in a rather neutered and ill-researched fashion, which is unfortunate. This will serve as kind of an overview of everything we’ve already learned so far, as well as a dismantling of pretty bad journalism.
“There’s Forrest’s initial rationale, which was entirely based on psychology and disruption: If you know what the next category is going to be, and your opponents don’t, that’s an advantage in the lightning-reflex world of Jeopardy!; forcing people to load up geography, then vocabulary, then movie trivia in their brains at a rapid pace is inherently disruptive, and disruption is a powerful weapon in a mental game like Jeopardy!”
Okay, so nothing wrong with this. Hughes seems to have a good grasp on what the origins of the technique are.
“The other reason, meanwhile, is monetary and has come in vogue after being central to the strategy of dominant Jeopardy! player James Holzhauer in 2019.
… Even more than Jennings, the super-champs who have come after Holzhauer (notably Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider, who both won more games but less money) have followed the path he laid out. Really, though, it’s everybody: Jeopardy! players are people who like optimal solutions, as a rule and, having seen a better way, they’ve adopted it fervently.
And it makes, we hate to say it, for terrible TV.”
Yeah okay, so there are a few issues with this. First of all, it wasn’t James Holzhauer who put this strategy back “in vogue.” There were quite a few players before him who laid out the groundwork necessary for him to expand upon the use of the strategy. Arthur Chu in particular went quite viral for the exact same reason just five years before Holzhauer did. While I can understand these players not having the same cultural impact as Holzhauer, it’s a bit ahistorical to erase the accomplishments of those who were doing it before Holzhauer and after Forrest, such as Alex Jacob, Roger Craig, and David Madden. Also, Amy Schneider did not follow Holzhauer’s footsteps. She was very much a top-down player in her initial run and was even quite the contrast against the defending champion she defeated at the time, Andrew He. Winning dozens of games doesn’t mean you used the same method to accomplish it. You can say that for Matt Amodio, who very much likened himself to the Forrest Bounce, but Amy is absolutely a more conservative and traditional player. As a matter of fact, here is Amy herself confirming this after winning her 33rd game:
She even received praise from Brad Rutter, the top-earning Jeopardy! player of all time, for playing the game and earning 40 wins the old-fashioned way. You could have even picked someone from recent seasons, such as Cris Pannullo with 21 wins and $750,000 in winnings, as an example of someone who actually uses the Forrest Bounce. Basically, this is pretty lazy research from Hughes. If anything, this just goes to show you the diversity that comes with these big winners and how they earn their wins. You don’t actually need to do the Forrest Bounce to be successful in regular play. Sure, you may need to eventually adapt for tougher competition, but that comes later.
How is this terrible TV, exactly? Viewers were getting kicks out of the long streaks and it allowed them to look forward to some of the best trivia competitions they’ll ever witness during the 2022 Tournament of Champions, as well as the following year’s inaugural Masters tournament. I understand people view the show for different reasons, whether for the trivia, statistics, or competitive gameplay, and that it’s all subjective, but the complaints here really just kind of gives me the same vibe as this:
“When the strategy works, it works decisively. The “lock game”—i.e., one where all other players have less than half the points of the leader, rendering Final Jeopardy! meaningless in the absence of anything but complete wagering madness on the winner’s part—is the least exciting outcome for a game of Jeopardy!”
I don’t know if Hughes is aware, but there have been much more lock games done traditionally than by using the Forrest Bounce. Ken Jennings himself had 28 runaways in a row from his 21st to 48th games, and he played about as traditionally as you could expect from any player in 2004. Personally though, I’m not a fan of runaway games in tournament settings. People are supposed to be more equally matched and when you see two legitimately great players getting stomped, then yeah it’s not very fun. In regular games, however? I love to see decisive runaways because it makes room for the possibility of new rising stars in the Jeopardy! world. The fact that some players can do so by bouncing around the board is even more impressive to me because it shows off quick recall and a mastery of many differing subjects. I guess I don’t really like how this article is trying to make it out like this is an issue that’s unique only to the Forrest Bounce and a select few players. A lot of the show’s best players, say for example Larissa Kelly, didn’t accumulate many runaways in their run, while some players who did have a lot of runaways in their initial run fizzled out a bit in future tournaments. This is also just subjective, but I’m not a fan of the way this is framed.
Let’s also talk about a new dynamic that’s featured in the all-new primetime Masters tournament: the second and third place scores. The winner of one game gets three points, whereas second place gets one point. However, the third place finisher always gets zero points. So even when there’s one player clearly stealing the game from the other two, the battle between second and third place becomes a lot more interesting, especially when it all racks up cumulatively. This alleviates one particular gripe I have about tournament games that wind up in runaways. But the thing about runaways is that it gives you the privilege of witnessing potential once-in-a-lifetime greatness, especially at the hands of James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings. Not only that, but it makes competitive games that these players have a lot more special, given how rarely they come by. It’s those moments where you realize that the game where the player on a winning streak finally loses is going to be relatively imminent.
Hughes also spends a couple of paragraphs saying that the current clue writers are “out of step” with the current way that the game is being played, since the contestants are no longer playing in sequence with the full category. To which I say, even if that were true, why is it an issue? If anything, people who are truly invested in learning and wanting to do well on the show with this kind of gameplay have the ability to practice it more. Many players are still going to play traditionally. The only reason we haven’t seen it as much in Season 40 is because there’s a lot of top-level competition playing one another in tournaments who are more favored to use alternative methods like the Forrest Bounce, which the article does also acknowledge.
However, I honestly think this attitude is pretty insulting to the writers, who pretty recently returned to work in the aftermath of a strike for fairer wages, better labor conditions, and action against the exponential rise of artificial intelligence. They aren’t “out of step” or in any way out of touch for the way the clues are written. A lot of the people just don’t exclusively abide by traditional gameplay anymore, which is more on them and the viewers than the writers. But let’s get to the main point of the article that really grinds my gears, as an unwise cartoon character once said.
“All we can really do is turn back to Trebek himself, who opened up about the Bounce in a wide-ranging interview with Vulture in 2018, two years before his death.
What bothers me is when contestants jump all over the board even after the Daily Doubles have been dealt with. Why are they doing that? They’re doing themselves a disservice. When the show’s writers construct categories they do it so that there’s a flow in terms of difficulty, and if you jump to the bottom of the category you may get a clue that would be easier to understand if you’d begun at the top of the category and saw how the clues worked. I like there to be order on the show.
“But,” he ultimately acknowledged. “As the impartial host I accept disorder.” So, perhaps, must we all.”
There it is. Invoking the words of the man who was the star of the show for nearly four decades, when he is no longer here to clarify or acknowledge it. Let’s talk about this for a minute, because it actually represents a sector of the fanbase that really gets on my nerves, and those specific people are the ones who for some reason feel like it’s necessary to martyrize and immortalize every single opinion that Alex Trebek held at some moment in time. I’ve also seen people use his name to invoke their own bad opinions about the show while framing it as an opinion that Alex Trebek would have had when they didn’t personally know him or even seem to be aware of his actual positions.
And the thing is, yes he wasn’t a fan of the Forrest Bounce. Chuck even acknowledges his position on this and expresses agreement to a certain extent, as this strategy doesn’t exactly work for everyone. However, this quote also skips around a lot of what Alex says in this interview. We also talked about this exact part of the interview earlier in this article, which you would be able to recognize by the fact that it left out the portion where he says that the players who practiced this technique were all outgoing players with great personalities. But let’s talk about other portions of it too, real quickly.
“The famous Forrest Bounce.
That’s right. He jumped all over the board in an obvious attempt to throw off his opponents. It worked. They never adjusted. But, you may remember, Chuck didn’t win the championship that year. So go figure.”
Chuck Forrest first appeared in late 1985, one month before the first annual TOC aired. However, Alex failed to remember that he didn’t participate in that TOC, but in the one the following year, which is also literally mentioned in the same article. Alex’s implication is that Chuck’s strategy didn’t work for him because he didn’t win the championship, even though he did. Just not in the year that Alex was thinking of, which in this case was 1985, won by Jerry Frankel. In the same interview, Alex also mentions hating when people wager conservatively, particularly on Daily Doubles that are in the second box from the top. Hughes also fails to mention that this interview was conducted before James Holzhauer went on his run. Alex did not make it a secret that he was very fond of him. As a matter of fact, I always think of the interview segment from James’s final game where he lost to Emma Boettcher.
James Holzhauer’s daughter Natasha made a “get well” card for Alex Trebek, since the episode was taped one week after Trebek’s cancer announcement.
I think it’s important to note this since Hughes invokes Holzhauer’s name very often and attributes a lot of the Forrest Bounce’s popularity to his streak. I obviously can’t speak for him, as he’s no longer here, but given how fond he was of the show’s best players while he was alive, I have to imagine that he’d love the streaks of Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, and a success story of his home country, Mattea Roach, in spite of his dislike for the Forrest Bounce and the Daily Double hunting. Which brings me to my last point. You know who else didn’t like the Forrest Bounce or use it very much in gameplay, who also hosts Jeopardy!? And is currently alive to clarify his positions?
Ken Jennings. 74-time champion, traditional player, we’ve mentioned him several times in the article already. He has his own history with the Forrest Bounce that is absolutely worth looking over, and we’re going to go over that right now.
The GOAT Defeats the Creator & the MVP
Ken Jennings running the “Initials to Roman Numerals to Numbers” category in his 2014 Battle of the Decades quarterfinal match.
Ken Jennings first appeared on the show on June 2nd, 2004. His run lasted until November 30th, with some gaps in between for tournament play and off-season reruns. After a couple of plays in the Ultimate TOC and a literal computer, he played in the 2014 Battle of the Decades, which incidentally took place in the midst of the runs of Julia Collins and Arthur Chu himself. Not only was he a traditional player, he often aimed for even totals in multiples of $5k, winning games with scores such as $25,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, and even $75,000 when it came to betting. Perhaps his most impressive moment in the Battle of the Decades was when it was down to one category, of which he went from the top clue to the bottom clue: Initials to Roman Numerals to Numbers. With a score of $24,200, he was well ahead of his opponents in the quarterfinals, TOC winners Tom Cubbage and Rachael Schwartz. He ran the entire category for $6,000 more to his score, putting the game completely out of reach. With a $40,000 win, he moved onto the semifinals where he faced 2004 TOC winner Russ Schumacher, as well as the winner of the 1986 TOC.
Yes, I’m talking about Chuck Forrest. Chuck came into the semifinals slightly vulnerable off of a come-from-behind win in the preliminaries, as well as a hotly contested quarter-final between him and TOC winners Mark Dawson and Colby Burnett, where he won by $900 with Colby earning a wildcard spot and Dawson just barely missing out on it due to missing the final clue. Chuck often either stuck with the category traditionally, or bounced to the top of another category like he did back in the 1980s for these games.
Now onto the semifinal match between Chuck and Ken. After the first few clues in one category were selected by Ken, Chuck answered the third one affirmatively and then immediately bounced to another category for a clue worth $800. I think at this point, Chuck knew it was necessary to get with the times a bit and prevent Ken from finding the Daily Double. Since it was a Triple Stumper, however, he went back to the category they started with. Once Ken had control of the board, he stuck with the categories he was comfortable with. When he ran into another Triple Stumper in Gardening however, he skipped to the middle of the board in a different category, Broadway & Politics. After Chuck answered the $800 clue in the category correctly, he did what he always does. He went to a different category, but for $200 instead of anywhere from $400 to $1000.
His old tricks were just messing with the psychology of his opponents and I think he wanted to take this initiative against Ken Jennings as well. The problem is, he’s Ken Jennings and not only does he know pretty much everything you need to know to be good at Jeopardy!, he’s ungodly quick on the buzzer and the $200 clues are typically always the easiest. After responding correctly, he was back in the Broadway category where he answered the $400 clue correctly… and then went to the $1000 clue.
It was the Daily Double. He put everything that he could at risk early in the game and doubled up to $8,800. After the first round, Ken was up to $15,000 while Chuck was only at $2,800. Russ was even further behind at $800. In this moment of 2014, Ken was aware that he couldn’t be as conservative as he used to be against top-level players like these. He also recognized how people were using the board bouncing in order to find Daily Doubles, and that he would be very likely facing not just Brad Rutter but Roger Craig as well in that year’s finals. So let’s recap how the Double Jeopardy! round went for these three.
Russ selected an $800 clue first, which is probably smart given that the Daily Double does often show up in the second row and it’s a relatively easy way to get on the board. However, Ken answered it correctly, and then went for the $1200 clue in the same category which Chuck got right. He then bounced to the $400 clue in 4-Syllable Words, again reverting back to his old tricks. Ken answered it and went back to the Art category for $1600. This easily could have been one of the Daily Doubles, especially since they most often appear in the fourth row in both rounds. Luckily for Chuck and Russ, it wasn’t there. Unluckily for them, Ken still answered it correctly and widened his lead. He went for a $2000 clue next, which ended up stumping all three, including a wrong response from Russ putting him in the red.
Ken went back to 4-Syllable Words for $800. Chuck got it right and actually stuck with the category, but went for the $1600 clue instead of the $1200 clue. The fourth row is the most likely area on the board where you’ll be able to find Daily Doubles and this time was no exception. For the first time ever in his career, Chuck had to do the inevitable as he had never been this behind in a game before. He made it a True Daily Double, which got everyone to applaud. With a correct response, he doubled up to $9,600, putting him above 50% of Ken’s score.
Forrest then went for a $1600 clue in a different category, testing his upgraded strategy to benefit himself. Unfortunately for him, the other Daily Double wasn’t to be found and Ken reaped it in instead, putting his score above 2x Chuck’s score yet again. Russ and Chuck found the next two clues, with Chuck skipping to the middle of the “Create Your Own Spy Novel Title” category. After no one got it, Chuck made this very appropriate quip: “It might have been better to start at the top of that one.” With a humorous lack of confidence, he bounced to “We Get Letters” for $400. While the circumstance made it easier to understand, this moment could have sealed his fate.
Eventually, Ken found the other Daily Double and put $6,000 at risk, a bit uncharacteristic for him as he did not have an even score. In a game changing outcome, he answered it wrong and ended up dropping down to a $2,600 lead over Chuck. After answering a few more low-valued clues correctly in order to keep Chuck from passing him, Chuck rebounded on a $1600 clue Ken missed in the spy novel category and took the lead away for a moment. Knowing that he now had the advantage over him for the first time, he went to a $400 clue in a different category. Ken answered that correctly, putting him $600 away from the lead. And then he bounced back to the spy novel category that had been giving Chuck visible nervousness, capitalizing on the $2000 clue plus $2,000 more to hold a $3,400 lead over Chuck before Final Jeopardy!
In this game, Chuck showed that he could keep up with the times by competing with the big and newer players while also getting himself to submit to the new adjustments towards the game plan that he pioneered. However, he also showed in some ways how the way he played was a bit dated, such as going to the top of the board when there were still Daily Doubles left to be found. He mentioned in his Vulture interview how the Daily Doubles are more of a risk than an opportunity, but I’d argue that what he did there was a bigger risk. While going for the top of the board does successfully throw off his opponents in terms of going where no one expects him to, it’s a clue value that everyone can generally answer correctly and at worst gives you a ⅓ chance of buzzing in before everyone. And since he’s playing against Ken in this case, it’s hardly a benefit.
In the end, Chuck and Ken both answered correctly, with Chuck bumping his score up to $26,200 and Ken winning the game with $30,401. While he still abided by a lot of traditional game values, Ken basically beat Chuck at his own game here. But on the other hand, Chuck showed that he’s still pretty sharp and that his influence has only grown stronger over time, through the importation of other game moves and ideas along the way.
Ken ended up playing Brad and Roger in the finals. Ken and Brad still come from a time where top-down gameplay was very much the normal way of gameplay, and Roger for the most part conforms to that as well. Being in third place before Double Jeopardy! in both final games, Brad often selected near the bottom of the board in order to rack up more money and prevent the others from finding Daily Doubles. Roger obviously obliged, as he often relied on big bets to put his games out of reach. Unlike the 2011 TOC finals, however, this kind of backfired on him as both of his True Daily Double wagers in the finals bankrupted his totals and left the game down to Ken and Brad. In the end, Brad defeated Ken in the finals once again and they wouldn’t face each other in another full game with one another until 2020, the last mega tournament that Alex Trebek ever hosted: Greatest of All Time. It only makes you wonder how Ken would have done if he had the foresight of Holzhauer’s game mechanics back then and had put it to use.
Only several months after James Holzhauer got his revenge on Emma Boettcher to win the 2019 Tournament of Champions, James faced off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a first-to-three-wins tournament meant to determine who the greatest Jeopardy! player of all time was. Throughout the entire tournament, no one ever started at the top of the category. Ken and Brad both knew that James had vitalized new life into the gameplay around Jeopardy! and in order to uphold their reputations, they had to play his game. For Ken, it worked very well, as he went all-in or big on every single wagering clue that he found or otherwise had to play. Brad also found a lot of Daily Doubles in which he had to go all-in. The difference is, Brad’s gameplay was typically out of desperation, for James and Ken kept running with the games. As the veteran, Brad was the most accustomed to playing the game traditionally, and with James in the mix with Ken’s growing mastery of the game plan, Brad really didn’t have much of a chance. He missed most of his Daily Doubles, whereas Ken and James answered most of theirs correctly.
How Ken Jennings won the GOAT tournament, from board bouncing and Daily Doubles to big bets.
In reality, it was mostly a board-bouncing race between James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings, as Brad Rutter, the top earning player of all time, suddenly turned into a non-factor. Perhaps even more notably, Ken was visibly uncomfortable with James’s style of playing, as it was not a skill that he grew to habitually utilize in his 15 years playing on the show. Despite the hesitance, with four out of seven possible games played, Ken was the first player to reach three wins, taking the million dollar prize and being declared the greatest player of all time. He mastered the Forrest Bounce and pushed it to the maximum capacity necessary to defeat not just Brad Rutter, his longtime rival, but also the bounce-maxxer himself, James Holzhauer. With over $4.3 million in earnings, Ken Jennings is ranked #2 behind Brad Rutter and currently hosts the show to millions of viewers a week. He was announced as permanent host back in December of 2023 after over two years of guest hosting following Alex Trebek’s death.
The Return of Chuck Forrest
In 2024, the Forrest Bounce became the standard of gameplay as Season 40 has been the year of the tournaments. With two weeks-long Second Chance competitions and six different Champions Wildcard tournaments, everyone was playing at a quicker pace and going straight for the highest stakes. It was all pushed to its limits during the 2024 Tournament of Champions, specifically during the finals between winner Yogesh Raut and runners-up Ben Chan and Troy Meyer. Board bouncing became more common than traditional gameplay, especially as regular games were not anywhere to be seen until much later in the year. It was only a matter of time before it all came full circle when the inaugural Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament began airing.
The JIT invited back 27 of the show’s biggest winners and best quizzers over the past four decades the show’s been airing. This included all-time legends such as Amy Schneider, Matt Jackson, Larissa Kelly, Andrew He, Sam Buttrey, Victoria Groce, and the longtime living legend himself, Chuck Forrest. After facing off against Ken Jennings in the Battle of the Decades ten years prior, Chuck now had to face Ken Jennings as the host against two other big league players: Sam Kavanaugh, the winner of the 2021 Tournament of Champions, was the first one. In Sam’s TOC appearances, he took the Holzhauer approach that Zuffranieri took in his regular run at the beginning of Season 36: selecting clues from the fifth row. As the tournament progressed, he made the conscious effort to keep picking near the bottom of the board and wagering big on every Daily Double he found. This ended up benefiting him well, as he was able to persevere into a lock tournament in the finals over Veronica Vichit-Vadakan, who he beat in the quarterfinals, as well as Jennifer Quail, a more conservative and traditional player.
Chuck’s other opponent was Monica Thieu, the winner of the 2012 College Championship and quarterfinalist for the 2013 Tournament of Champions. The key about Monica is that she actually had a pretty long history with Ken Jennings, who initially was a big rival of hers when both of them appeared on the short-lived game show 500 Questions in late May of 2016. In a surprising result, Monica eliminated Ken from the competition after only 4 questions and their short rivalry took an interesting detour in 2019 when Ken picked her as his second choice for his All-Stars team, alongside Matt Jackson. The team finished in second place to Brad Rutter’s team and split a $300,000 prize.
Beginning at an $800 clue, Sam and Chuck both missed it, which allowed Sam to bounce to a different $800 clue. This one was answered affirmatively by Monica, as she stuck with the category for the other two clues below the second row before bouncing to a $600 clue which was answered by Chuck. Predictably, he went to another category but for a $400 clue. At this point, Chuck’s strategy is so established to the point where it’s just expected for players to go around the board, especially if they’re already elite. Eventually, Sam found the Daily Double and bet the window maximum of $1,000. Unfortunately, he wound up being wrong and he finished the round with just $200, compared to $2,600 for Chuck and a whopping $8,200 for Monica.
In the Double Jeopardy! round, Sam started at a $1600 clue which was a Triple Stumper before switching to another $1600 clue. Notably, once again, the fourth row is where the Daily Doubles are most commonly found. And that’s where Sam’s selection was. With nothing to lose, he put $2,000 at risk and answered correctly to put him closer to Chuck. For his next selection, he bounced to a $1200 clue in the category he first selected from, which is where the other Daily Double was. Putting all he had on the line in a manner that emulated what players like Eric Ahasic, James Holzhauer, and Roger Craig did before him, he doubled up to $4,400 and left no more Daily Double crumbs on the board.
All the three players could do for the rest of the round was earn as much money as was available, by selecting wherever their opponents least expected. This game with Chuck Forrest was the ultimate culmination of everything we have learned about the strategy and how players have beefed it up over the years. By the end of the round, each player was in five-digit territory with Monica earning $15,800, Sam at $12,000, and Chuck at $11,000. One flaw in Chuck’s gameplay over the many years he’s been on is that he typically overbets when he’s trailing behind other players before Final Jeopardy!.
Sam was in a position referred to as Stratton’s Dilemma, coined by Andy Saunders of The Jeopardy! Fan, described as when a player in second place “must decide whether to play for a win on a Triple Stumper (provided that the leader makes the shut-out bet) and risk being overtaken by the third-place player if he/she gets Final right (between $0 and $4,399), or wager to cover the third-place player at the expense of falling behind the leader's minimum shut-out wager on a Triple Stumper ($10,001 or more).” In Sam’s case, he bet on Monica and Chuck getting it wrong, with Monica betting to cover a double-up from Sam and Chuck likely betting too much.
Sam Kavanaugh’s watch party reaction when he defeated Chuck Forrest and Monica Thieu in the JIT quarterfinals.
With Sam doing everything necessary related to the original Forrest Bounce and the revitalizations it’s undergone through the past 40 years, he defeated Chuck Forrest at his game with Monica Thieu also outplaying and outscoring him in the end. Regardless of how often it may be used, or which players end up benefiting from it the most, I think it’s safe to say that whether we like it or not, the Forrest Bounce is here to stay.
Despite the counter-cultural backlash being expressed by several people like Tom Nichols and William Hughes, who are desperate to preserve the status quo and rile up negativity, as well as some less-than-satisfactory theories around the show’s integrity and legitimacy, Chuck Forrest’s influence on the game has become eternal. Other players like David Madden, Roger Craig, Arthur Chu, Alex Jacob, Sam Kavanaugh, and especially James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings, have provided the biggest building blocks of the game changer that Chuck Forrest plugged into his player podium for the first time back in 1985. There are many reasons to watch and enjoy Jeopardy!: The exquisitely gifted team of clue writers, the competitive and nail biting games of uncertainty, the long streaks that unleash from new people who have cracked the code, the action-packed tournaments, and the analysis/stats that come with the gameplay.
There may never be a game plan as effective as the Forrest Bounce ever again, and it could potentially be the new normal for many years to come. What I wonder from here is how the game will adapt overtime. As much as I’ve criticized the aforementioned people in this article, they may have a point about it becoming the standard. What if the Bounce becomes the status quo? I know a lot of people will still want to adopt the top-down style and may even succeed with it, but when it comes to playing people with advanced knowledge and game theory, will it even be feasible? Are there any other ways in which new strategies can be accounted for and inducted into the strategy that we’ve grown to love and loathe?
At this point, I think the only way this could be possible is if the people behind the clues themselves make changes to the game, whether it’s making low-valued clues more difficult or putting the Daily Doubles in those clues to mess with the player’s psychology. It could become a tricky dilemma down the road beyond fixing, even if the players we see win from it the most are likable enough to where we just accept it. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.
In Match 3 Game 2, James' wrong DD response on Gemstones category paved Ken to win his match thru super-lock which mean if Ken bet all in and got the wrong FJ response, he would still won because both Brad and James were unable to catch him up with a very huge lead.
Ken is on a different level at GOAT as he needed to play like James in order to win the tournament.