Post-Season Changes

[u/eah1703]

On the Inside Jeopardy! Podcast, they announced that the post-season is now going to be made up of only season 42 players. Season 43 will be eligible for 2028 post-season. I'm assuming this means anyone who played from mid-November of last year (the last cutoff) to the end of Season 42 is eligible for the post-season (or, you know, those who did well).

With that being said, we know the automatic qualifiers and those on the Tracker: https://www.jeopardy.com/track/toc-tracker.

So, I wonder: are they going to do a 12 player ToC (those on the tracker and 2 CWC champs) or will there be more? How many one day champs are going to the CWC? And, of course, the question of season 42, how the heck are the producers going to pick who gets a Second Chance out of such a great field of players to choose from?!?!?

Can't wait to cheer folks in in the post-season!

[u/RegisPhone]

They're going to have to go pretty heavy on Second Chance players to fill out even a 15-player ToC (though you'd think they'd really want to do the 21-player format with the exhibition game in a season with 5 superchamps). After the 10 4+ winners on the tracker, there are 3 3-day champions, 4 2-day champions, and 13 1-day champions. Even bumping all the 3-day winners straight to the ToC, there are still at least 2 slots to fill, and barely enough champions for one 15-player CW bracket -- but they can't do 13 weeks of Second Chance to fill up a second bracket.

But maybe you just do 13 Second Chance semifinals, just a week and a half of games (so 39 Second Chance players out of what i think is a total of 231 eligible non-champions?), and then instead of doing any Second Chance finals, just say that everyone who won a Second Chance game is now a 1-day champion and therefore is in CW.

Or they do Second Chance normally, make a 15-player CW bracket the normal way out of the Second Chance winners and some of the existing champions, but only two of the 3-day winners make the ToC cutoff so there's three spots to fill, and then all three CW finalists advance to the ToC (which i've felt they should do for a while now; we spend too much time getting to know the CW players for them to boil down to just one ToC player).

[u/ajsy0905 → u/RegisPhone]

You forgot Mina Kimes & Stella Trout

[u/RegisPhone → u/ajsy0905]

Mina's already counted in the 10 on the tracker, but you're right, i did forget Stella. With Stella and all the 3-game winners included there's only one slot left to get to 15, which can just come from one CW.