James Holzhauer returns to Jeopardy! tonight, following a well-deserved two-week break for the Teacher’s Tournament. We’ve written before about what makes him so dominant—and had Ken Jennings weigh in, as well—but for a quick refresher, it helps to see it in chart form.
No scatter plot can fully capture Holzhauer’s strategic chops; how he starts at the bottom of the board to amass a war chest and hunts down Daily Doubles like a bloodhound. But they can give you a better sense of what rarified space he occupies in the Jeopardy! firmament. All figures are current up to the game that aired May 20.
You can’t win 22 games of Jeopardy! in a row, and rack up $1,691,008 in winnings along the way, without knowing your stuff. Holzhauer takes that to the extreme. Prior to his Monday return, he has given 803 correct responses out of 830 attempts, according to statistics compiled by Jeopardy! enthusiast site The Jeopardy Fan. That puts him second only to Jennings for total correct responses—and Jennings played 87 games.
It’s not just that Holzhauer gets so many questions right. He’s also very rarely wrong, an important distinction to make, since ringing in with an incorrect response in Jeopardy! docks you points. In addition to hitting 97 percent of buzz-ins overall, Holzhauer has correctly answered 49 out of 53 Daily Doubles and whiffed on only one of his 22 Final Jeopardy clues. At this same point in his streak, Jennings was at 94 percent overall but had missed six Daily Doubles and seven Final Jeopardy rounds.
Finding the Daily Doubles is one leg of Holzhauer’s strategy. Knowing the answers is another. The third, and the most important for his eye-popping totals, is his willingness to wager huge sums on them. This next chart shows Holzhauer’s net Daily Double gain from each of his appearances. The numbers vary widely, depending on a few factors: how much money he has at the time, how big a lead he has, and how many of each episode’s three Daily Doubles he finds. But other than an April 26 game, when his opponents beat him to the punch, Holzhauer has bet huge.
Another Jennings comparison is helpful here. Throughout his Jeopardy! career, Jennings has averaged a Daily Double net gain of $5,353. Through 22 games, Holzhauer averages nearly four times that amount.
Raw numbers tell only part of the story. It also helps to look at Holzhauer’s so-called Coryat score. In 1996, two-day champion Karl Coryat proposed a new method for home players to keep track of their Jeopardy! progress. Under the Coryat method, you exclude the amounts wagered in Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy from final tallies. That way, you avoid wildly inflating or deflating how well you’ve done based on a single clue.
Given that Holzhauer’s extravagant wagers produce outsize final scores, you might think his average Coryat would be relatively tame. And yet! When placed against other Jeopardy! legends—including all-time money winner Brad Rutter, who has never lost to a human opponent—Holzhauer decisively leads the pack, according to the stats kept at J! Archive, a Jeopardy! data compendium.
This comes with a couple of qualifiers. Unlike Holzhauer, most of the people on this list have played in at least one Jeopardy! tournament, which means stiffer competition and lower scores. This also isn’t meant to reflect the top average Coryat scores of all time but rather a survey of some of top players of the past several decades.
Among the top 10 Jeopardy! money-winners of all time, seven of them form a cluster. They’ve all played 13 to 27 games and won from $450,000 to $800,000, collected from both regular-season and tournament play.
Then there are the Big Three: Jennings, Rutter, and Holzhauer. Jennings is Jennings. Rutter first appeared when regular-season champs were limited to five appearances, but has won over $4 million over several tournaments. (Had he arrived after Jeopardy! lifted that restriction, who knows how far he could have gone.) And then there’s Holzhauer, who in just 22 games has already separated himself from the pack. Again, keep in mind that “the pack” here represents the most successful Jeopardy! players of all time.
You can’t argue with results, so we’ll leave you with the list of the 15 highest-scoring single games of Jeopardy! of all time. We were originally going to stop at 10, but that didn’t quite cover it.
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