I suppose it had to happen sometime:
NEW YORK - All those years of answers and questions, and it’s never happened before on “Jeopardy!” What is a three-way tie, Alex?
The three contestants on the venerable game show all finished with $16,000 after each answering the final question correctly in the category, “Women of the 1930s,” on Friday’s show. They identified Bonnie Parker, of the famed Bonnie and Clyde crime duo, as a woman who, as a waitress, once served one of the men who shot her.
“We’ve had a lot of crazy things happen on `Jeopardy!’ but in 23 years I’ve never seen anything like this before,” host Alex Trebek said.
The show contacted a mathematician who calculated the odds of such a three-way tie happening - one in 25 million.
And here’s the video of the Final Jeopardy round. Watch it and answer this question for me……why didn’t the person in the lead simply bet $ 1 more and guarantee a win ? My answer is below the fold.
It’s clear that the reigning champion deliberately bet $ 2,600 on the hope that the other two contestants would put in all their money and get the question right, or that at least one of them would. Why ? The only reasonable answer I can come up with is that he felt confident he could beat them again on Monday, and he wanted some free publicity. This is just too convenient to be a pure coincidence.
March 17th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I figured something similar on that. It is not very common that there is a tie for second place setting up a situation where a three-way tie is really likely.
March 17th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
He’s done well enough on the show that he had to know the math of it.