'Jeopardy!' champion Brad Rutter applauds Amy Schneider's 'old school' way of playing the game
Looking at the phenomenal winning streak of recent Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider, another legendary Jeopardy! winner, Brad Rutter who is now on The Chase, said she brought the game show back to the “old school” way of play.
“She's obviously fantastic but the thing that grabbed me about her was she sort of played the old school way, going straight down from the top of the categories, no Daily Double hunting, no crazy betting or anything like that,” Rutter told Yahoo Canada. “It was kind of refreshing to sort of have a throwback there and obviously, she was still able to be fantastically successful.”
“It just goes to show you that, people say the game has changed, but in some ways it's always the same.”
For people who may be interested in participating in Jeopardy! in the future, Rutter believes playing like Schneider, rather than playing the game like professional sports better and Jeopardy! champ James Holzhauer, is the way to go.
“James, with his gambling background, was obviously trying to maximize his take-home pay every day,” Rutter said. “If you're not as good as James, you're probably not going to succeed in that, too.”
“I'd probably recommend to people getting on the show that they'd probably be more successful playing [like] Amy than James.”
Schneider has the second-longest winning streak in Jeopardy! history, second to Ken Jennings.
'Law of large numbers'
Jeopardy! viewers have seen that in more recent years, more contestants seem to be managing to have longer winning streaks. While some may be tempted to point to some sort of possible conspiracy theory for why players have been racking up the wins, expert Brad Rutter says it really comes down to “the law of large numbers.”
“If you flip a coin a million times and you ask someone, ‘well, how often would heads come up 30 times in a row?’ They'd say, ‘I don't know two or three,’ but it's more like 30 or 40,” Rutter explained.
“Eventually we're going to have something like this and it just happened to happen now.”
