Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

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econgator
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by econgator »

bpmod wrote: I clicked on that link, and, as you can guess, clicked on a link within to find outdated information.

Brian
*nod* For example, they still show an F1 race in Istanbul that doesn't exist and don't show the one in Austin that does.
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Volante
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by Volante »

opusthepenguin wrote: For the second trick, bring back the map with the threefold division--three equal parts from north to south. (I know I said to "get rid of" it, but I really meant for you to just lay it aside. I'll wait while you make a new one. Sorry.) Label the southern third "Southern California". Label the middle third "Northern California". Label the northern third "South Oregon".
Lost it right there. Genius.

While I'd like to think I would have gotten macaw without this: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=10682 I just can't say that for a fact. Being the rarest companion pet in the entire game (until a few months ago at least) makes it a pretty notable critter if you collect those.
The best thing that Neil Armstrong ever did, was to let us all imagine we were him.
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by TenPoundHammer »

dhkendall wrote:(Sorry for the Quayle comparison there, I know, you're a Penguin, not a Quayle.)
And I'm a Peacock. Nice to meet you.

Speaking of birds, I think I got macaw almost entirely because of Rio. Which remains the only time that I've heard George Lopez' voice and not wanted to swing at my TV screen with a ten-pound hammer.

(The nerdy redhead girl in Rio was kinda cute, too. Especially near the end, in that skimpy bird-like suit… okay, I'll stop.)
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by StrangerCoug »

dhkendall wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:For the record, my playing style won't be like Ryan's. The Forrest Bounce is not my strong suit. Kudos to players who can pull it off because I'm exactly the sort of player that makes it a good strategy. You'll have to cheer for me out of loyalty or something.
Opus, I've watched Chuck Forrest's games. I've seen the Forrest Bounce being used in subsequent games. I'm very familiar with the Forrest Bounce. And that, Opus, was not the Forrest Bounce. (Sorry for the Quayle comparison there, I know, you're a Penguin, not a Quayle.) What Ryan did was almost always start the category, at every opportunity he could, at the middle row ($600 or $1200), and go down from there, whether it's for DD hunting or for other reasons. The Forrest Bounce isn't nearly that predictable. You didn't know where Chuck would pick next, it could be the bottom row, the second row, the fourth row, you just didn't know! And, if I remember right, he wouldn't pick the next clue down after he'd get that clue, but move to another completely random place on the board. I believe that is done mainly to confuse opponents.
My mom at least employs a similar strategy to Ryan; in home game versions, she'll start in the middle row (depending on the version and the round, $300/$600/$1,200) to get a gauge of the difficulty of the questions in that category and she'll go down if she's right and up if she's wrong. (I prefer the traditional "top down" strategy and don't bother with DD hunting.) I tried a Forrest Bounce against my parents in the PS3 version (I was a bit behind, if I remember correctly) and it ended up backfiring.
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Spaceman Spiff
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by Spaceman Spiff »

TenPoundHammer wrote:
dhkendall wrote:(Sorry for the Quayle comparison there, I know, you're a Penguin, not a Quayle.)
And I'm a Peacock. Nice to meet you.

Speaking of birds, I think I got macaw almost entirely because of Rio. Which remains the only time that I've heard George Lopez' voice and not wanted to swing at my TV screen with a ten-pound hammer.

(The nerdy redhead girl in Rio was kinda cute, too. Especially near the end, in that skimpy bird-like suit… okay, I'll stop.)
Same here on the bird. But I found the redhead annoying as hell when she was calling for her bird. (It also helped me remember the Christ The Redeemer statue a few weeks back.)
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by bpmod »

Spaceman Spiff wrote:(It also helped me remember the Christ The Redeemer statue a few weeks back.)
You mean this one?
Image

Brian
...but the senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity.

If I had 50 cents for every math question I got right, I'd have $6.30 by now.
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Spaceman Spiff
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by Spaceman Spiff »

bpmod wrote:
Spaceman Spiff wrote:(It also helped me remember the Christ The Redeemer statue a few weeks back.)
You mean this one?
Image

Brian
Funny, I never envisioned the Canadian and American flags in Rio (OK, maybe during the Olympics in 2016...)
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earendel
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by earendel »

This Is Kirk! wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:
marpocky wrote:Touching to see how emotional the new champ got about his win. I hope he gets a few more.
Same here. That's quite a wave of emotion that hits him. Worth watching again
I got the feeling it was a combination of waiting so long to finally get there plus that niggling doubt that by specifying a gold medal he might be wrong that really got to him. Maybe Tom will post here and let us all know!
In the meantime, here's a link to Tom's posts on the Millionaire board, where he talks about the emotion he experienced.

http://wwtbambored.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43698
"Elen sila lumenn omentielvo...A star shines on the hour of our meeting."
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by dhkendall »

opusthepenguin wrote:
Volante wrote:
Bamaman wrote:I don't think of O.akland as being in northern California, I think of it as central California. Would like Mark's take on this.
What, another CA native's interp isn't good enough for you?!

Citywise, Fresno and above is Northern CA. Bakersfield and below is Southern. (Nothing of note is between where cities are concerned)
'Central California' tends to refer more to the San Joaquin Valley / farmland region rather than any center of population.

San Francisco / Bay Area is most definitely Northern CA.
As another California native (hence, expert), I concur. You really have to be a native (or at least a transplant of many years) to get this. Most people look at a map and mentally divide it into thirds along the north-south axis. They assume the sections correspond more or less to Northern, Central, and Southern California. The Bay Area seems obviously to fall in the middle section. But "Central" is a red herring. That's more of an east-west division. It's the valley between the eastern mountains and the western coastal ranges. It's got nothing to do with whether a city is designated "Northern California" or "Southern California".

There are a couple of ways for an outsider to get a handle on this. The first is to get rid of that threefold division and mentally divide the map in two. Then it's easy to see that San Francisco is (just barely) part of the northern half. That works tolerably well, but it still doesn't impart the flavor. The distinction between Northern California and Southern California is primarily cultural and only accidentally geographical. To get a closer approximation of this, you need the second trick.

For the second trick, bring back the map with the threefold division--three equal parts from north to south. (I know I said to "get rid of" it, but I really meant for you to just lay it aside. I'll wait while you make a new one. Sorry.) Label the southern third "Southern California". Label the middle third "Northern California". Label the northern third "South Oregon". Shade in South Oregon. It's not part of this discussion. Now draw a line on the map representing the course of Interstate 5. To the east of that line, write "Beyond This Place, There Be Hayseeds". Shade in everything more than 7 miles east of that line. That part of the map doesn't count as "Northern" or "Southern" either.
After the discussion today, I did a little research on what is considered "northern" and "southern" California, and it looks like there's an easy way to tell: Looking at a map with counties, there is a straight line where county borders all line up about 2/3 of the way down the state at approximately 35º47'24" that seems to be used in several sources as the dividing line, so that makes it really clear for me!
TenPoundHammer wrote:(The nerdy redhead girl in Rio was kinda cute, too.
*All* nerdy redhead girls everywhere are cute. This is a scientific fact.
"Jeopardy! is two parts luck and one part luck" - Me

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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by bpmod »

dhkendall wrote:
TenPoundHammer wrote:(The nerdy redhead girl in Rio was kinda cute, too.
*All* nerdy redhead girls everywhere are cute. This is a scientific fact.
QFT

Brian
...but the senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity.

If I had 50 cents for every math question I got right, I'd have $6.30 by now.
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by interrobang »

Hi JBoard,

It's Ryan from yesterday's game. You might also remember me as the guy who did the DD %s calculation that was brought up earlier in the thread, which I originally did for a HS friend on the show a few years ago and updated for my games. It also explains why I was jumping around the board so much.

First, I want to congratulate Tom on a great game. He's an extremely strong player who is absolutely lightning quick on the draw and has an excellent breadth of knowledge. From sitting with him while the previous two shows were taped, I can also say he’s a super nice guy! I don't blame people on the board for rooting for Tom-- I would have been rooting for him too, had our life goals not been diametrically opposed at the time. The best player won our game, and I am definitely pulling for him in upcoming episodes.

Despite Tom being a nice guy… I did not relish playing him on Jeopardy. In fact, the reason I had been sitting with him earlier was that I had him pegged as the #1 threat of the day and I wanted to get a sense of his strengths and weaknesses. (Note to future contestants: Watch out for players who know the answer to Maggie’s blimp/dirigible question. They are the sharks.) As several people here have correctly guessed, I got in trouble early and struggled to claw my way back into the game. The metaphor I’ve been using to describe how playing against Tom felt was that it was like hanging on the edge of a cliff by your fingernails while someone is stomping on your hands. Tom’s lickety speed on the signaling device caught me by surprise, because I had done very well in the warm-up rounds (one of the advantages of sitting through the first day of taping, I suppose). I had also done quite a bit of reaction time training in the run up to the show, mainly in the form of watching several old episodes per day on Dailymotion and playing along with a mock signaling device. Fun fact: the metal cylinder that holds toilet paper rolls is pretty much a dead ringer in terms of size, shape, and heft for the Jeopardy buzzer. Anyway, point being, I knew buzzer technique was important going in, tried to prepare for it as best I could, and still got blown out of the water on the signaling device, though I think I closed the gap a bit in DJ.

I also didn’t think that the categories in my game were particularly good for me. They elicited a lot of “huh?”s at my viewing party last night when they came up. I owe a lot to JBoard in terms of the material I used to prepare, as I hit the Pavlovians for opera, composers, artists, mythology, royalty, and explorers heavily to try to shore up those high value areas and complement my core strengths in science, geography, and US history. Unfortunately, it seemed like any of the categories that I might (and I emphasize might, Tom being Tom) have had an edge on were underrepresented on the board, which was heavy on literature, wordplay, and weird, unclassifiable categories. If you had asked me three categories that I didn’t want to come up, I would have told you 1) baseball 2) cooking/food and 3) 60/70s movies, so of course baseball was the first clue given. I’m sure that this will earn me the enmity of the baseball fans (though I seem to already have it for switching away from the category), but I still don’t think it was a mistake to not study the baseball Pavlovian. There’s just too much information, and I didn’t have any natural base in it like I do in basketball, football, or track (which I did for 14 years and was a category on Friday!), so I didn’t think it was the best use of my limited prep time. I don’t think I’m wrong in that, so it was just unlucky that I got called out on my lack of baseball knowledge immediately in the game.

Looking back, I don’t think there was anything I could have done either in the game or to prepare that would have given me a path to victory under the circumstances. Aggressively looking for daily doubles every time I had control of the board was absolutely necessary to stay competitive given Tom’s sizeable edge on the buzzers, and the bet I made was the right call since I was able to lock out Pat while not adding any more downside. (I LOLed watching yesterday when I hit the DD. I definitely did not realize I whipped my hair like Willow Smith when that happened, but what I was doing was looking back and forth between Alex and the scoreboard to my left since I had no idea how much money I had. Incidentally, the reason I left $500 was I wanted to be able to miss one more $400 clue and not be bounced should I have gotten the DD wrong.) The only real mistake I made was ringing in on unicorns when I had no idea what the answer was, but getting that $1600 back wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the game. I had studied and should have gotten Francis Perkins but just couldn’t remember her in time. I rolled my eyes hard on the Sex and the City question, which I think you can see in the episode if you look carefully.

As far as my Final Jeopardy bet, the reason I went Venusian is because at the end of DJ it felt like someone had erased my mind and I could not for the life of me recall any of the betting strategies I had studied. I spent the next 5 minutes frantically trying to re-derive what the Martian would be, including getting it wrong at one point and needing Glenn to erase my bet. Eventually, I decided to go $4101 because the math was easier just to reduce the risk of a catastrophic wagering error, even though I know that left a few bucks on the table. Of course, in the end it didn’t matter at all because of the sub-Celebrity Kidz level of the FJ, but I was well positioned for the win if Tom had gotten the question wrong. The only downside is that now my Facebook is clogged with people being wrong on the Internet saying that I could have won if I had bet more. $32000 is more than $15900 doubled, dummies! At least you guys know what I’m talking about.

Overall, I had a great experience on the set of Jeopardy in everything other than the actual gameplay, for the reasons I mentioned above. The cast and crew of the show is absolutely top notch and extremely friendly, I had a great time meeting and getting to know the other contestants, and I even ran into Seth Rogen in the Sony cafeteria on Monday. While I'm disappointed to have lost, I now have a new life goal: get on a future version of Jeopardy in 40 years, and crush the dreams of some twentysomething. I'll even cry. I promise.

#UnicornPower,
Ryan
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by dhkendall »

interrobang wrote:The only downside is that now my Facebook is clogged with people being wrong on the Internet
People are wrong on the Internet?!?!?!?!?
interrobang wrote:saying that I could have won if I had bet more.
Any of them named mbclev?

(And thanks for the reminder for me to try my best to drop off the face of the Internet (at least in terms of social media) before my eventual game airs. (Although, I do plan on plugging my national anthems website, and I'm easily searchable on the 'net that way, so I'll probably still get tons of "fan" mail anyways.))
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by closetbuddhism »

"Watch out for players who know the answer to Maggie’s blimp/dirigible question. They are the sharks."


What is Maggie's blimp/dirigible question? And what's the answer?
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by harrumph »

interrobang wrote:Hi JBoard,

It's Ryan from yesterday's game. You might also remember me as the guy who did the DD %s calculation that was brought up earlier in the thread, which I originally did for a HS friend on the show a few years ago and updated for my games. It also explains why I was jumping around the board so much.
Thanks for posting, and welcome to the board.
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by Jasoni22 »

dhkendall wrote:
interrobang wrote:The only downside is that now my Facebook is clogged with people being wrong on the Internet
People are wrong on the Internet?!?!?!?!?
Image
(courtesy of XKCD)
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by SavoyGirl »

SavoyGirl wrote:Thrilled to have a New York State Court Officer appearing and triumphing! (I'm a Senior Court Clerk in the NYS court system and am happy to see one of our own doing us so proud.
I exchanged emails with Tom through the NYS court system mail and it turns out we were both trying out for the original JEOPARDY around the same time (mid 70s). I thought I had a long wait (22 years) after my first attempt but Tom's was WAY longer! In 1996 I took tests around the same time for JEOPARDY and for a Court Assistant position in the NYS court system. I wound up not being hired there until 2004, but got on JEOPARDY that summer.
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by ElendilPickle »

Well done, interrobang! If only you'd bet more on FJ...

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
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Magna
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by Magna »

SavoyGirl, is your avatar Elsie Maynard? (Just wondering.)
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by Bamaman »

Thank you for responding, Ryan. you came across well on the show, sorry I had to root for Tom.

Your bet was fine, it assured you second place and gave you a win if Tom missed FJ. How people do not know the losers don't keep their money is beyond me.
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SavoyGirl
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Re: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Post by SavoyGirl »

Magna wrote:SavoyGirl, is your avatar Elsie Maynard? (Just wondering.)
Heavens, no! Maybe the spinning wheel is hard to make out... Phoebe Meryll!

(if you're totally befuddled, this is G&S talk)
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