Kid Charlemagne wrote:(Sadly, none of Kristin's episodes are up on J-Archive yet, so I'll have to go from imperfect memory.)
That, was, um, interesting.
I suppose it was pretty obvious that the champ had some poise and played her game, following the landmark comeback win from her debut. (That sounds like faint praise...but it's one of those things that tough to quantify or even articulate, so we spend more time here discussing FJ wagering strategies and specific answers, but some people crack under the lights and some people are the polar opposite of that.) In this particular game, that's what you had to have more than anything else. Brutal DJ round. There are probably some people out there with the knowledge base to have crushed it, but they were few and far between.
Stephanie has been subjected to a lot of ridicule. I did wince (Rachael Ray?) at a couple of her guesses..I'll echo whoever it was who figured a Geography Bee contestant would have fared better on East Asian Cities... but once she was far behind enough, absolutely the right thing to do is gamble and keep gambling. And go for the high-dollar questions, just like she did. Do your best Roger Craig imitation. Unfortunately, she's not Roger Craig, there was the "Giant" trap, and, really, this was not a good board to have for someone trying to mount a comeback anyway. People will say she's one of the worst contestants on Jeopardy, but that's not necessarily fair.
As for Brad, well, TPTB must have had their reasons, and they saw much more of him than I did, but nothing I saw suggested he had any business being up there.
Huh? Defend both of them or neither. Makes no sense to be so much harsher on Brad. Some of Stephanie's guesses were really ugly. It's not like she got to -6800 on a bunch of Oxford-Cambridge-type misses...