The History of Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions
And Why The Upcoming Changes Aren’t the Oddest — But They Are The Most Troubling
Leading up to the 2022 Tournament of Champions and especially due to recent announcement, long time fans of Jeopardy have been increasingly up in arms in the changes that are being proposed for the upcoming 2023 Tournament of Champions.
Among the controversial decisions have included the choice to have all pre-Tournament events (referred by producers as the ‘post season’) to be run consecutively at the start of the fortieth season rather than have them spread out throughout the course of it as has been the case for decades. It is estimated that this may last as long as ten weeks before regular play begins. The producers have also announced the return of the controversial Second Chance Tournament, which this season let eighteen players who had never previous won a game, for various reasons, compete for two spots in the Tournament of Champions. Finally there has been the announcement of the Wild Card Tournament which will apparently do the same thing for several other players who have won a couple of games but who would not qualify for the Tournament under normal circumstances.
Obviously there is a lot to unpack from these decisions that would no doubt upset the longtime fans of Jeopardy. But I think it is worth taking these decisions in context both in terms of Jeopardy and how the Tournament of Champions has evolved over time before I come to my conclusion about these particular changes.
The phrase ‘Tournament of Champions,’ like ‘Daily Double’ and ‘Potpourri’ are terms that Jeopardy has introduced into the lexicon. It now exists in various formats for other competitions and even popular culture. The sequel to Escape Room had the surtitle Tournament of Champions which just shows how far it has advanced in popular culture. Despite all that, it’s worth noting that like almost everything about Jeopardy over its nearly four decades on the air, it has itself been in near constant flux since the show had its very first in 1985. This has ranged from the amount of money won to when it would air to the qualifications of the participants. So as an expert on the show and indeed this very subject, I think we need to explore thoroughly the history of the show to see just how the Tournament has changed.
From the debut of the tournament in 1985, the basic structure was the same for next thirty six years. Fifteen quarterfinalists would play five games. The five winners and the four high scorers (known as wild cards) would then play three semi-finals and the three winners would play in a two game total point affair for $100,000 until 2001, and $250,000 from 2003 until the present today. While the structure would essentially remain the same for thirty six tournaments, everything else would be in flux, starting with the participants.
The first tournament featured for perhaps the only time in the shows history fifteen five game winners. From that point on the tournament always let in four game winners, perhaps because the show’s producers had already realized how difficult it was to win five games.
Then the show began allow winners of other Tournaments to participate in the upcoming of Tournament of Champions. The first such Tournament is one whose memory have been lost to those but the oldest viewer of the show: the Seniors Tournament. Alex Trebek had noticed that players over 50 were having difficulty winning games against younger participants, so to remedy this the Seniors Tournament was created where players who were over fifty would have the option to compete in either regular play or the Seniors Tournament. The rules followed the foundation of every Jeopardy tournament that followed, with the winner getting at least $25,000 and being able to participate in the next Tournament of Champions.
This Tournament ran from 1987 to 1995, when it was discontinued. No reason has ever been given by the showrunners. My theories have ranged from the idea that the show did not think it was commercial to have a tournament where only ‘old people’ played t0 the equally likely possibility that older people eventually began playing in regular competition because there was a chance of winning more money. There is more evidence that the latter strategy is the correct one because players in their fifties and older have been playing in regulation games and have often done quite well. It is worth noting that many of the winners of the Seniors Tournament were more than capable of playing the show against younger players in Tournament of Champions in their own right: Lou Pryor, winner of the 1991 Seniors Tournament and Marilyn Kneeland who won the 1993 Seniors Tournament, both made it into the finals of their respective Tournament of Champions and competed very well against some of the greatest of that era.
In any case the Teen Tournament was also created in 1987 to basically allow high school students to also compete for the same level, with a $25,000 cash prize and a spot in the Tournament of Champions. The Teen Tournament has continued until 2019 (since the pandemic, it has yet to resume) but it stopped being a factor in the Tournament of Champions in 2000 when for reasons that have never been clear, Teen Tournament Winners have never appeared. This is a bizarre rule because in Tournaments such as the Ultimate Tournament of Champions several Teen Tournament winners after 2000 were allowed to participate and in the Jeopardy All-Star Games in 2019, Leonard Cooper the winner of 2013 Teen Tournament was one of the competitors.
The last major tournament introduced in the early years of the show as the College Championship in 1989. As I may have written in a previous article, Tom Cubbage, the first ever winner of that Tournament went on to win the Tournament of Champions. No one has duplicated his feat since several College Champions have done well in both Tournaments of Champions and future Tournaments. However, there has never been any rule prohibiting college students to compete as regular contestants and several have done so.
From 1985 to 1996, the Tournament of Champions was held every November. Even then, there were fluctuations in the rule. From 1985 to 1993, you could only participate in a Tournament of Champions if you won your games in the season involved. If you won five games in the 1985–1986 season, for example, you would play in the 1986 Tournament of Champions, but if you won five games, in October of 1986, you couldn’t compete until the 1987 Tournament. This could be a nuisance in some cases as in every season, there were always players who were winning four or five games before the November cut off and had to wait a year. Eventually the shows recognized this problem, and at the start of the 1994–1995 season, that restriction was lifted. Steve Chernicoff became the first beneficiary of this: he won his fifth game on September 7th 1994 and was allowed to complete in the 1994 Tournament of Champions two months later.
Then in the 1997–1998 season, the Tournament of Champions was moved from November to February of 1998. There has been no hard and fast place for it in the Jeopardy season ever since. It has been Novembers some years, February in others, May in still more (in 2004 it aired in September). Usually it gets played when there have been more than a sufficient number of winners to fill all fifteen slots, which has sometimes taken more time than others — and leads us, naturally, to a problem that has slowly but surely become an issue.
In the 1993 Tournament of Champions David Tiemann became the first three time champion to qualify for a slot in the Tournament of Champions. He lost in his quarterfinal match. This fact pointed out just how difficult it can be for a Jeopardy player to win four games, let alone five. That became clear in 1994 when Rachael Schwartz became not only the first woman to win a Tournament of Champions but the first Tournament of Champions winner who’d only won four games in their original run, a feat Ryan Holznagel duplicated the following year. Jeopardy has always been the sort of the show where the best player in a season does not always go on to win a Tournament of Champions, and it may come as a surprise to those who have grown up in an era of super-champions to know such was not the case while the show capped the winnings at five games — and indeed hasn’t significantly made much of a difference now that they can win until they are beaten.
Indeed the first post Ken Jennings Tournament of Champions in 2006 demonstrated this to an extreme. Of the fifteen competitors, only four won five or more games at all and five won three games. That year Michael Falk became the first — and to date, only winner of a Tournament of Champions to win three games. And in the 2007 Tournament of Champions, Doug Hicton, who also only won three games, finished second in that year’s Tournament to Celeste DiNucci. Indeed the 2007 Tournament is the only one in the era of after the rules changes where all of the participants won five games or less. And as we know in recent history, Emma Boettcher, the three game winner who dethroned James Holzhauer in the 2019 Tournament of Champions came within an eyelash of defeating him in the Finals of that one.
Now I will acknowledge that such occasions have been more or less aberrations among the statistical norm; in the post Ken Jennings era, it has been extremely rare for three game winners to qualify for the Tournament of Champions at all. But the prevalence of four game winners remains fairly constant even within the era of super streaks. The 2009 Tournament of Champions featured four and in 2021 (to date the last Tournament of Champions to follow the old format) featured five, as well as another three game winner, Steve Moulds. One of the four game winners, Veronica Vichit-Vakadan went on to compete in the finals that year before losing to Sam Kavanaugh. Four game winners have been prevalent throughout all the tournaments in the intervening years and its hard to imagine a Tournament that would have at least one. ( commented last year about how four four-game winning female champions deserved to compete in that year’s tournament over a six game winner who’d won less money that three of them. At the time, I was unaware of the rules changes that were in effect but even with them, I still believe that had the earned the right to compete.
So when you consider the constant flux within the participants (I haven’t even included the Teachers Tournament) as well as the fact that it is rare for the greatest champions of a given year to win regardless, it is tempting to dismiss these complaints as little more than a variation of the aggressive trolling of the show that has been, if anything, more toxic since the passing of Alex Trebek nearly three years earlier. In addition to the haranguing of the contestants, there has been aggressions towards the relative difficulty of certain clues and Final Jeopardys and barbs against people like Ken Jennings. So one could just consider this frustration against the recent new Tournaments as more barbs from the ridiculously conservative group of Jeopardy watchers and internet trolls.
The thing is in this case, I’m inclined to agree with their complaints and not just as someone who generally has problems with change in a general. All of them have points that are more than valid and in some cases troubling. I will go through with my issues with them in descending order of difficulty.
When it comes to the Second Chance Tournament, I am in complete agreement with those who think it is bad for the show. Those of you who follow my column know that I did a deep dive into the eighteen players who ended up coming back for the Tournament this past November, and that even by the most generous of standards I could only find a justification for two-thirds of the players involved. And even those qualifications had a very big asterisk. A fair amount of the players involved happened to have been in very close matches with many of the super-champions over the course of Season 38, being among the very few to come close to defeating Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, Mattea Roach and Ryan Long. The argument was valid because there were so many super-champions. We’re now nearly two-thirds of the way through Season 39 and there have not been nearly that many and honestly there have been fewer players who came close to doing so to the ones that won.
While I’ll admit the play in the Second Chance Tournament this year was exciting, it does not change the fact that it operated under a cloud that I was only willing to overlook on the idea of the extended gap due to both the pandemic and the number of champions. I don’t think I can justify it as a yearly event, considering how loose the standards were the first time.
The Wild Card Tournament I will have to withhold judgment on until we are made aware of who those participants will be, which we won’t know for certain one way or another until at least the end of the season. I am, however, inclined to more or less agree with those fans who are opposed to it on principle. At best, it is only a slight improvement over the standards of the Second Chance Tournament, and if one of those standards involves players who won three games — well, you might as well let them just qualify for this next tournament without having to play their way in. It’s not like you’d be breaking any rules by those standards. You could see in the vaguest of justifications for a second chance tournament; the Wild Card Tournament just seems superfluous.
As to the idea of starting every season with what amounts to ‘the postseason’, I have the least problems with this as an idea. The hopping around from one month to the next over the last thirty years has become one of the least enjoyable things about waiting for The Tournament of Champions and there’s a lot to be said for streamlining the process. The set up of the Second Chance Tournament immediately being followed by the Tournament of Champions was a highlight of the entire season. That being said, I do understand those would be frustrated by it: fans might very easily become exasperated for having to wait weeks, if not months to see regular play again.
Looking overall at the ideas for these new Tournaments, you can’t help but be reminded of the decision to add wild cards races to baseball at the end of the 1993 season. Purists hated the idea from the beginning, saying that it permanently destroyed the last remnants of the pennant race in a great sport. There is a certain truth to that: while this had led to some great moments in the postseason over the past thirty years, there is something fundamentally diminished about seeing some teams that would finish third in their division end up winning the World Series and the excitement that the owners thought it would add to the game overall has never truly panned out. At the end, one can only view it as a change to give the illusion of competitiveness without fixing the larger problems.
The changes that the producers of Jeopardy are going forward are not quite as drastic but they have the potential to do great harm. It is defeating the perfectly logical dictum of qualifications for tournaments and giving losers not just a participation trophy but a chance to prove they can win by, more or less, defeating other losers. What makes this fundamentally more superfluous is that you truly wonder what is gained by this: some of the best Jeopardy champions are forgotten until they return for a Tournament of Champions months later. Are people really going to tune it to watch people whose sole qualification was that they lost one game to a great player? And I have to remind that was the best case scenario of many of the players in the Second Chance Tournament. Considering that Jeopardy ratings have increased by more than thirty percent over the past two years without any tinkering at all, the logic to much of this escapes me: it is a solution to something that no one ever thought was a problem.
I’ve made suggestions over the years as to ways that could help resolve an unwieldy process with the Tournament of Champions. I don’t think anyone in the history of watching Jeopardy ever said: “This show is great, but you know what would make it better? Having contestants who lost invited back.” To be on the side of the internet trolls, many of whom seem to have some fundamental opposition to any change at all is something that fundamentally repulsing my very nature. But these fundamental changes are ones that I don’t see any benefit for and do a lot to tarnish a brand of a show that has lasted for decades and that was doing just fine with people rooting for the winners.