colonialrampage wrote: ↑Wed Jul 26, 2017 7:36 pm
All of the responses seemed to center on whether people have lost when they had runaways. The real question here is how often people risk runaways, because when they pull it off we may tend not to notice. My guess is that it does happen from time to time, and in a certain set of circumstances it can be logical.
Here's a partial list of regular-play games where the leader risked a lock. A version of this list might have been posted on the old Sony boards, I can't remember.
Dec. 28, 1984 (Jerry Frankel game 5; see
this thread)
Sept. 12, 1989 (Bob Blake game 5; see
this thread)
Dec. 17, 1999 (lock-tie situation, leader bizarrely wagers $100 instead of standing pat but second-place bizarrely wagers everything-but-$100 instead of going all-in)
June 2, 2000
Dec. 29, 2004 (The player in second would have won an "unwinnable" game, if she had been correct on the FJ clue)
Nov. 4, 2005 (Maria Wenglinsky game 5)
March 29, 2006 (lock-tie situation; absurd wagers on a clue about an absurdist play)
Jan. 28, 2009 (Jack Feerick, ranked 50th on
list of the largest one-day totals in Jeopardy! history; at the time would have been in top 40)
April 30, 2014 (
Julia Collins game 8)
March 8, 2016 (
JBoard discussion thread)
In most of these it looks like the leader made a math/logic error. (In the lock-tie games, perhaps they didn't realize that in FJ, unlike daily doubles, players are allowed to wager zero.) Only in Jack Feerick's game (Jan. 28, 2009) does it appear that it might have been an intentional gamble to risk the lock for a huge payday. But who knows; that one could have been just a math error like the others. It's especially weird that three champions violated Clavin's Rule in their fifth game, thus risking an opportunity to compete in the ToC.
Edited to add: Bob Blake is quoted
here saying that he can't remember why he bet so much but possibly it was because he was in search of a record. I still think it was probably an arithmetic mistake (even though he is an actuary by trade). He was going to set the 5-day record even if he wagered zero; in fact he did set the 5-day record, even though he wagered $4000 and did not get the clue. If he had been correct, with his $4000 wager, his final score that day would have been $19,100, not even close to a one-day record.
Edited to add: the
March 8, 2016 game (Annie Moriando) was speculated to be a deliberate Clavin ("The Western Hemisphere" was a wheelhouse category?) but
according to a commenter on Reddit who was at the taping, it was a miscalculation. Also see in that thread
brief discussion of Dan Feitel who did not violate Clavin's Rule but did something analogous.