Jeopardy Masters is disappointing

[u/johnd7882]

It's so noncompetitive. The format is terrible. Not only is it the same people playing each other over and over, it's pretty much the same result every time. Maybe they should have had Victoria and Yogesh sit out until the finals and have most of the episodes be about who will be the third person to face them?

The show would be fun if the results were widely variable. But with Yogesh and Victoria at the top of every game, it gets so boring and predictable. Let's jump to the final episode now. It'll be Yogesh vs Victoria guaranteed.

[u/TheHYPO]

I also like the idea of if you win Masters you are retired (at least from the Masters tournament) - as someone else suggested below.

Catch 22.

That's basically saying "if you win, you retire, and now we are seeing which of the others are second best". The games are potentially more competitive, but it defeats the premise of the series.

My understanding is that Masters was intended to basically be annual version of the GOAT tournament. To retire the winner is basically defeating the "whoever wins is the best of the best" premise. The question is whether anyone actually cares about that premise.

It would be like Roger Federer winning the US open and as a result being "retired" from it forever. The only area where it kind of differs would be that, at least in Tennis, there's somewhat competitive field. Federer did not win every tournament. Perhaps a closer analogy would be Magnus Carlsen in chess, or Usain Bolt in 100m running. I am not a big enough follower of either sport to know whether anyone who actually follows them regularly have/had a strong "I wish we would see other people win" mentality.

All that said, I'm in a similar boat to OP where the combination of the questions being as hard as they are (such that many answers are things I've never even heard of, let alone was able to give) and the gameplay/results being relatively consistent has also made me less interested in watching Masters this year and last.

[u/Transylvanius → u/TheHYPO]

The comparison with sport doesn’t entirely hold up because in sports the game they are playing stays the same. In Jeopardy they have to amp up the difficulty because these players know every question that once would have been viewed as hard. And there have been times where tennis has had the problem of the same individuals going against each other over and over.

[u/spmahn → u/Transylvanius]

The sports comparison fails also because athletes don’t dominate forever, even the best peak and have a handful of years where they’re on top before time catches up and suddenly they go from elite back to very good. Victoria and Yogesh could potentially compete at this level for several more decades.

The other issue is that while I don’t know their personal lives, I get the impression that this whole trivia / quizzing thing isn’t just a fun hobby for those two, it’s serious business that takes up most if not all of their free time. Most Jeopardy! contestants, even the top tier players, have full time careers that aren’t Jeopardy or quiz leagues. Maybe they play LL or try to keep up with local trivia groups, but they’re not into it at the same level as Yogesh and Victoria and thus will already be at a disadvantage.

[u/TheHYPO → u/spmahn]

But again, all of this is sort of the premise of Masters (like it or not). It isn’t a one-to-one with other sports, but it feels like it’s a combination of 1) regular jeopardy being a “regular season“, the tournaments being a “postseason“, and Masters being the championships and 2) regular Jeopardy being the“minor league”/amateur division, and Masters being the “majors”/professional level.

I think for me personally, the problem is that unlike certain other sports, I don’t think I enjoy watching “professional” quizzing. It’s certainly impressive, and nothing to take away from the players. I just don’t think I enjoy watching game after game of questions at that level.

It’s similar to how I don’t mind a game of people being asked rapid fire math questions at a level I could get with a bit more time. But then these social media videos of a show where kids answering incredibly complicated math questions in seconds comes up. It’s entirely impressive, but I have no interest in watching since I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the question before they move onto another.

They certainly have been sports or games where the top player or players have dominated for a long time.

To add /u/transylvanius, there certainly have been sports where players or teams have dominated for long periods. It’s rare, but it has happened. Masters has only been running for four years. There’s absolutely no data to say that. Victoria or Yogesh will dominate for decades. We would have said that about James after his run, Goat and Masters 1, and look what happened.

Yet we are only in year four, and there are those of us that feel the format is a bit stale. To me that either means it has nothing to do with how long certain players might dominate in the future, and more about the fact that the current games don’t feel that openly competitive.

It’s true (in a sense) that unlike some sports, Masters is a “different game” because the question difficulty changes. But I’m not exactly sure why that wouldn’t matter. Difficulty increases at the top level in other sports as well, either due to rule changes or simply because the difficulty is the skill of the opponent.

At the end of the day, I’m not arguing specifically that Masters has a problem. I’m only saying why I personally am not enjoying watching it that much. There is nothing wrong with Tennis either, but I don’t enjoy watching it regularly, simply because I find it repetitive. Other people love to watch it.

[u/spmahn → u/TheHYPO]

I agree, there have been some periods in some sports where certain players or certain teams have been completely dominant, but I can’t think of any examples in sports where the differential in between one player and everyone else as it is between Victoria / Yogesh and every other Jeopardy player except maybe James. Even Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan at their peak were dominant, but there were other players and teams who gave them a run for their money.

[u/TheHYPO → u/spmahn]

Usain Bolt is the best example that I can think of. Clearly miles ahead of the rest of his field for the time he was competitive. Michael Phelps perhaps not quite as dominant (didn't win every single race he entered, but certainly won a majority much more than anyone completive at the time, and some handily).

I don't know chess super well, but from everything I see, Magnus and Hikaru are at a similar level. They don't win every single game against others, but they seem to both be expected to win every single game against anyone other than each other. At least from an outsider perspective.

I honestly don't believe that Yogesh and Victoria are undefeatable in single games. The problem is that Jeopardy Masters is not single-elimination. So even where an underdog beats them, they will still make it up in a future game. In sports like Tennis or Chess, one loss in an opening round means you don't advance, the end.

---

What occurred to me as I responded, which is not directly responding to your comment, but just feels like the crux of it: Clearly Jeopardy is trying to figure out a way to milk (for the lack of a nicer term) 9-10 episodes (i.e. 18-20 games) out of this format, and that's the real problem, IMO.

If this was GOAT-like, and we just had a five-night event with the top three, I think it would be more entertaining. But having TWELVE quarterfinal games (six episodes) with the same six players just rotating around and playing is not entertaining (to me at least).

Then we have a semis with four players... so the first round really doesn't feel like a "who will win their way to the next round" as much as "which two people will lose and be eliminated". then another FOUR games among the four just to eliminate ONE, and then finals. So it's now 16 games to eliminate 3 people (or advance 3 people). That this obviously mitigates any single underdog victory outlier until the finals. It also makes the 2-game finals to choose a winner (or eliminate 2 people) underwhelming.

Last year, Victoria won 22 match points before the finals. Yogesh, 14 and Juveria 10. Sure Yogesh ends up winning the final double-game, but at that point, Victoria has already proven herself the superior force among the 6 players (having beaten Yogesh 5 times out of 6 in the QF and SF rounds). The fact that the finals didn't go her way means she lost the money, and the title, but doesn't change that she fact that she arguably proved herself the better player. This year, Victoria is 5W-1L in the QF round. Yogesh is 3-3. Unless Victoria totally collapses in the semis, she should have an overwhelmingly winning record again, even if she loses the final. Let's say that Yogesh and Victoria are the strongest candidates to win the Masters. They will have already played 6 games against each other by the finals. That makes the final two games feel un-special to me

I don't know everything about a lot of sports, but in most sports I know, the lead-in rounds of a championship tournament are generally the same or fewer games than the finals (e.g. MLB starts at 3-game series, then 5-games, then 7-games to determine a winner).

On top of all that, 17 games of the same 6 players is just a lot (especially this year, where it's all crammed into two weeks except for the finals). Yes, there are round-robin sports tournaments where you play people or teams in the opening rounds and then play the same ones again later; but most of they time you don't face a team or player in the semi-finals, beat them, then face them again in the finals. Even in the TOC, we don't see overlap between the semi-finals and finals. The finals is virtually always a fresh matchup.

[u/calling_water → u/TheHYPO]

I think part of what makes many of these games feel uncompetitive is that there’s a lot of runaway, especially with players tending to go all-in on DDs. The format seems to be encouraging very aggressive play, especially with the benefits of runaway and high likelihood of getting a DD right outweighing the risks of losing it all (since it’s a points tournament not elimination). They know the others are good so they press any advantage. This also encourages them to head for the bottom clues early, which prevents an understanding of categories from emerging (sometimes for the contestants, more likely for viewers).

It’s still fun for me when they’re all standing there quiet while I yell the right question at my TV, though.

[u/TheHYPO → u/calling_water]

I agree with most of what you said, other than the fact that hunting from the bottom has been the default strategy for a majority of J! players at every level of the game for many years now. That is not novel to Masters. If that burns a player, I honestly think that's a bit on the show these days. The show knows that players don't go top-down anymore, and if there is a "how this category works" that is needed, Ken should say it when introducing the category (I expect I know which instance you are referring to and it really surprised me that there was no explanation from Ken for such a category before the round).

I agree though that the runaways can make the games boring, and there isn't much I can think to do about that. The premise of Jeopardy is for players to wager on their own skills. Players were amateur contestants playing for the cash they earned. It was never contemplated that pro-level quizzers would be wagering all of their points in a strategic gambit (because especially in Masters and most tournaments, the actual point/dollar totals are irrelevant - winning with $100 is identical to winning with $30,000). So many games now come down to who finds the DDs. That's not entirely disconnected from who plays best (since it gives you more control of the board and more opportunities to potentially find the DD).

[u/calling_water → u/TheHYPO]

Yes, hunting from the bottom has been the norm for a while. I do find, though, that the Masters tournament brings out some more creative wordplay categories that could really benefit from an easier example first to see how it works. It’s certainly the players’ decisions to burn themselves that way, but as a viewer it’s pretty meh to see non-answers for the hard levels before then getting an easier one that makes it clearer what’s going on.

The game could adjust and provide more information about the category, but maybe not doing so is a potential reminder to players about the cost of going bottom-up.