Final Jeopardy: Board Games (5-19-14)
The Final Jeopardy question (5/19/2014), in the category “Board Games” was:
In the classic version of Monopoly, the only two improvable properties without Avenue or Place in their names.
10x champ Julia Collins, who has won $220,610 so far, returns today for her 11th game. If she wins, she ties Arthur Chu’s recent 11-game record-setting run. Her opponents today are: James Herman, from Washington, DC; and Leah Blumenthal, from Miami, FL.
Round 1: James found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Marine Biology” under the $800 clue. He was in third place with $1,200, $3,000 less than Julia’s lead. He made it a true Daily Double and he was RIGHT.
This small fish of the genus Hippocampus has no stomach & must eat almost constantly to stay alive. show
Julia finished in the lead with $5,000. Leah and James were tied in second place at $3,400.
Round 2: Julia found the first Daily Double in “Come at the King” under the $1,600 clue. She was in the lead with $12,600, $6,400 ahead of James in second place. She bet $2,600 and thought it was Alexander the Great. That was WRONG.
In 336 B.C., a young Macedonian noble named Pausanias killed this king but was killed on the spot himself. show
Julia found the last Daily Double in “You Like Kabuki, Noh?” under the $1,200 clue. In second place with $12,400, she had $200 less than James’ lead. She bet $2,000 and she was RIGHT.
Kuroko are kabuki stage hands whose traditional black dress is believed to give them this quality. show
Julia finished in the lead with $16,400. James was next with $11,000 and Leah was in third place with $4,200.
Only ONE of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.
Just about everybody knows that Boardwalk is the most desirable property in Monopoly, and it’s usually the first property that comes to mind when you think of the game. As for Marvin Gardens –“You may know that the streets on the Monopoly Board are all in Atlantic City, but did you know that one of them, Marvin Gardens, is both not actually in Atlantic City and is misspelled? The actual location, Marven Gardens, is a housing area in Margate City New Jersey and is said to be a combination of Margate City and Ventnor City due to its location between them. Charles Darrow made the original mistake of misspelling it on his circular boards and it has never been corrected.” (Dave’s Cool Toys Blog)
Leah got it right. Her $1,402 bet brought her up to $5,602.
James only had Boardwalk. He lost $600, finishing with $10,400.
Julia wrote down Boardwalk and its neighbor, Park Place. Don’t ask us why. She lost $5,700 and finished with $10,700, enough to win the match by $300! Her 11-day total is $231,310.
Whoa! Close call there, Julia. James did a nice job of catching up, even getting in the lead at one point. In FJ!, Julia would have gone home if he stood pat!
That Crazy Moment: In the first round, the players left “The Most Populous Country” until last. The very last clue ($1,000) was “Bosnia, Belgium, Belize.” James picked Belize (its population is smaller than Miami). Neither Julia or Leah wanted to narrow that down any further!
2 years ago:: Only ONE of the players got this FJ in “Drama”
This play that came to Broadway in 2005 is set in the autumn of 1964 at St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx. show
We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made from Amazon.com links at no cost to our visitors. Learn more: Affiliate Disclosure.
I don’t why Julia made a mistake as Alex Trebek said because Park Place was not an option. This was for Final Jeopardy!
I have to say, as rock solid as Julia has played she has to counted as very fortunate to be experiencing the run she’s on.
Case in point, in her very first game she was in a neck-and-neck battle with Frederique Delapree and managed to snag “The Frogs” by Aristophanes for 1200, just as the end of game buzzer sounded, to sidle into a 200 pt lead for Final. Both Julia and Frederique correctly got, “The Hanseatic League”, and Julia eked out the victory.
By my count Julia has had 6 of her 11 wins come in games that could very easily have turned against her. Which is not to take anything away from her, especially since her poise has been noticeable in addition to her low percentage of incorrect responses.
The odds would suggest that her run will end this week, likely before Friday arrives. But we shall see.
I agree with you, William, she has been very lucky several times. I will publish a table of her statistics after today’s game, win or lose.
One thing I should have mentioned after she won this game — this win made Julia the highest female winner in regular Jeopardy! games, topping Larissa Kelly’s winnings of $222,597.
vj,
The amazing thing about Larissa’s $222,597 was that she accumulated it in just six games! Yeah, there were some fairly reckless “all-in” wagers in Final Jeopardy that helped pad the total, but I would say that Larissa was the best female player I’ve witnessed on Jeopardy, and if a rough ranking of the all-time best players were tallied up I would probably put Larissa in the top 5-ish range.
These things are always subject to wide open debate of course, but Larissa was a consumate trivia lover, and I loved her Jeopardy playing skills. In any case, her average Coryat score –a normalized, regulation Jeopardy game-play rating giving face value to Daily Doubles– was 20,000 range. That’s top drawer stuff.
P.S. For comparison sake, Ken Jennings’ average Coryat was 27,000. But then, Jennings did win 74 consectutive games and is widely acknowledged to be the best of all time (I second that notion). Any Coryat average in the 20,000 or more range is fantastic.
I was crushed that she didn’t win her qualifying round. Oddly, she would have won that round if she would not have bet on FJ.. But that just wasn’t her style.
Does anyone else think with games like this one, and especially in light of Brad’s win, there may be a lot more zero bets by the leader? That would certainly make the second contestant need to bet enough to take the lead. Interesting game-theory applications.
As a side, I believe that Brad knew that was a weaker category for Ken. I recently watched Ken on “Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?”, and he chose not to answer a Social Studies question. Oddly, I believe, it turned out to be a question that he had missed on Jeopardy!. Of course, in most games, the contestants won’t have any knowledge of the other players weaknesses.
maybe, Eric, the leader might be inclined to bet zero if they thought the FJ category was a toughie.
I wonder how nervous Julia was after Leah’s correct answer was revealed.
Well, Julia had to realize that her own answer was wrong, but that fortunately, Leah was monetarily irrelevant: James was all that mattered, but I’m sure that she felt vulnerable.
Of course, now that I think of it, the change would not come for a long time, as taping may be over for a while.
luckily for julia she was far enough ahead to win even with a miss (though she bet 99 bucks more than necessary). it was “inopportune” wagering by james as one of our fans here would say. he should have bet nothing or 5.401. well, as always, hindsight….but the 600??? strange, but it won julia the game.
btw, bosnia (it should have said bosnia and herzegovina= one country) has about a little less than 20K square miles but only 4 million residents, while belgium has less than 12K square miles but a population of over 11 million people.
but julia seems like the energizer bunny and again, she is not only (very) good, but also lucky. good for her!!! i hope she will keep on going and break a few more records!!!
and as a p.s.: kind of a tough fj. who really knows the “classic”=original version of monopoly?? i didn’t.
I didn’t know the population stats on that, but the way I went about that one was immediately crossing out Belize (since I at least knew it is a little country in Central America (formerly British Honduras). Bosnia-H (I can’t even say that H part!) was a part of a larger country before it became a country, so yeah, I just would have went with Belgium for it being around the longest.
As for Monopoly, well, I lived in New Jersey far longer than Texas, and have been to Atlantic City plenty, and I’ve been to Margate and Ventnor, too, so FJ was a no-brainer for me.
well, we had different names on the monopoly games. france, england, germany,austria all had THEIR main roads and places. and it’s (almost) pronounced as you write it: HERTSEGOWEENA. the stress correctly on the “O”, although most europeans put it on the last syllable, the “I” or “EE” when you say it. in bosnian it’s hertsegOweena.
as for julia, we shall see. she is the typical “lucky AND good” lady… maybe she can hang in there till the summer break? but i am afraid not. if james had bet zero, her reign would be over already.
PS – the “classic” version of Monopoly just means the one based on Atlantic City. There were a slew of other Monopoly type games. We had a few of them, like Big Apple-opoly based on New York City. And Elvisopoly and another one based on the internet with eBay and Amazon and such.
$16400 to $11000 is a two-thirds game, meaning James could have won on the triple (or double stumper with him and Julia) by wagering less than $300, but he wagered $600 and gave Julia her 11th game.