Jeopardy! Is Increasing Second and Third Place Prizes in Season 40

At long last, Jeopardy! is increasing runner-up prizes by an extra thousand dollars for 2nd place (from $2K to $3K) an 3rd place (from $1K to $2K). Michael Davies, the show’s Executive Producer, announced the long-awaited change on this week’s Inside Jeopardy! podcast, along with other plans for Season 40.

Original plans for the start of Season 40 called for 3 back-to-back tournaments but those plans were scuttled. This was at least partially due to the top qualifiers for the 2023 Tournament of Champions’ refusals to participate until after the current Writers Guild of America strike is resolved. (If there’s any encouraging news on when that will happen, I haven’t seen it.)

All the same, we’re still going to be starting out with tournaments. Michael Davies says he doesn’t think it’s fair to new contestants to get “non-original material or … a combination of non-original material and material that was written pre-strike.” Instead, we’ll be seeing a Second Chance Tournament for Season 37 contestants. They’ll follow that up with a Season 37 & 38 Champion’s Wildcard tournament.

Davies continued to talk about tournaments (Celebrity Jeopardy! will be returning, Triple Jeopardy! included). I’m sure he doesn’t think that’s all Jeopardy! fans care about. He just doesn’t know exactly when regular games are going to resume. From the looks of it though, by the time they do, we’ll probably all have forgotten who the champ was at the end of Season 39.

CLICK HERE TO REMEMBER!

As for “recycled clues”, don’t forget we put up a category from J-Archive on the weekday Spoiler Talk posts. That was started almost 10 years ago as a way to show that there’s always pretty much been a mix of easy, medium and hard clues, and there have been at least several instances of similar clues coming up during the week.

I can also recycle some of the triple stumper posts from several years ago. I would really like to take a look at some old pop culture clues to see if I can sort them by “they’ll definitely know it” or “they definitely won’t”.

IF YOU HAVE SUGGESTIONS FOR CHANGES TO THE SHOW OR COMPLAINTS, (that includes complaints about the hosts), PLEASE SEND YOUR FEEDBACK DIRECTLY TO JEOPARDY!