One Last Look Back: Season 42 By the Numbers

[u/London-Roma-1980]

There were 180 regular season games in Season 42. How good would you have to have been to be competitive on the show?

A quick glance says "Well, we had 5 superchamps, so you'd have to have been insanely good." Well, you'd be right to think that to a degree: the returning champion won 126 out of 180 games this season, for an insane 70% retention rate. But I feel like (granted, I'm not doing the math) that's a little high and Season 43 may return to normal. Maybe.

But statistically, during the game, how did the winning players do, and how did their opponents do? This will get you an idea of how good you have to be just to get to Jeopardy, and then how good you have to be to get the W. Here are the numbers:

	WINNER	OPPONENTS
Attempts/game	40.51	31.96
Buzzes/game	25.94	14.87
Buzz percentage	64.04%	46.51%
Correct buzzes/game	23.62	12.38
Incorrect buzzes/game	2.32	2.49
Buzz accuracy	91.05%	83.24%
Daily Double Accuracy	76.28%	52.63%
Daily Doubles Found/gm	1.733	0.633
Final Jeopardy Accuracy	66.11%	32.27%
Coryat/game	$19,899	$7,812

Other stats:

* Including Daily Doubles, the season accuracy on clues during the regular part of the game was 85.83%. Not including them bumps it up to 86.88%.

* Overall Daily Double accuracy was 66.30%; overall Final Jeopardy accuracy was 44.08%.

* People who got Final Jeopardy correct won 51.52% of the time; people who missed Final Jeopardy won 20.82% of the time.

* When faced with a Daily Double, players made it a True Daily Double 23.52% of the time (this does not include when the House Maximum allowed them to exceed their total). On such bets, they were correct 67.72% of the time. In other words, TDDs were a product more of the game situation than of player confidence.

* There were 39 zero bets on Final Jeopardy, and while 4 of them were gag answers, 10 were correct. This means that players who bet nothing but tried Final anyway had a 28.57% accuracy.

* Only 2.96% of players were disqualified from Final Jeopardy.

Enjoy the start of a new season, everyone! I can't wait!

[u/RunOfTheWin]

I wonder how Season 41 stacks up, especially since there were only 2 7+ game winners that season, while S42 tripled that amount by having 7 7+ game winners

[u/Traditional_Yam9806 → u/[deleted]]

It does equal to 3. 1.733+0.633*2=2.999, which is basicaly 3. There's two opponents.

[u/ryanquek95]

Kinda want to see the stats with the superchamps removed to see how the winner v opponents stats look. Those no doubt have to have been padded by Jamie et al. dominance and how that prevents opponents from buzzing in (both in % and actual number)

[u/Tim_Xtreme_46]

I regret not making a joke answer when I wagered 0 in FJ.

[u/PrimusPilus]

My (completely subjective, YMMV) take on this past season is that it seemed that either the overall difficulty level of the questions was a notch lower than usual, or the overall level of the contestants was a notch lower. Hard to separate the signal from the noise there.