One of Jeopardy!'s favorite player techniques makes for terrible TV

It’s not surprising, given the pool of people from which it pulls both its fans and its players—i.e., hyper-pedantic nerds with a taste for showing off—that Jeopardy! is one of the most aggressively analyzed TV shows in game-show history. You don’t really need to look any further than the fabled online J! Archive to see what we’re talking about: a meticulously researched index of not just (nearly) every single question from the show’s current 39-year run, but also every wager, contestant bio, and bit of host banter. It’s the sort of monumental labor of love you don’t see people apply to, say, Wheel Of Fortune.

Even beyond this digital temple to trivia, though, the show’s move into online spaces over the last 20 years has been a major boon for players both past and (optimistically) future. Where once prospective players would have to scour books like 1992’s Secrets Of The Jeopardy! Champions to learn about the ins-and-outs of getting on the show—or having a chance in hell of actually winning once the buzzer was in their hands—now they can congregate on Reddit or other online communities to swap strategies, often interacting directly with actual champions who can back their advice up with the wins to prove it works. Interestingly, though, the legacy of Secrets (or, at least, one of its authors) still hangs over the series in a strange way—which is a bummer, because it actively makes Jeopardy! a worse show for fans of the program to watch.

We’re speaking (obviously!) of Chuck Forrest and the infamous “Forrest Bounce.” Forrest appeared on Jeopardy! in its second season as a syndicated nighttime show, back in 1985, becoming one of its first-ever super-champions. (A rather breathless L.A. Times piece from 1989 called him the “Alexander The Great of Jeopardy! players.”) Like every contestant before 2003, Forrest was only allowed to win five games (and a massive $72,800) before “retiring” and ceding the champions’ podium to someone else. But that didn’t stop him from coming back for the annual Tournament Of Champions and adding another $100,000 to his prizes (or, yeah, literally writing the book on winning Jeopardy!, along with fellow champ Mark Lowenthal). It goes without saying that Forrest had the encyclopedic command of trivia required of any top Jeopardy! player and a dauntingly fast finger on the game’s buzzer. But he also came equipped with a new technique, one he credited to and named after his friend Donn Rubin, but which has come to be known among Jeopardy! nerds simply as the Forrest Bounce.

The Bounce brings disruption

If you’ve watched Jeopardy! recently (or at multiple points across its four-decade run—but it’s endemic at present), you’ve almost certainly seen the Bounce: It involves aggressively working the bottom of the clue board, moving between categories frequently, rather than taking a more traditional tack and running down an entire category from the top. It’s an undeniably useful technique for two big reasons. There’s Forrest’s initial rationale, which was entirely based on psychology and disruption: If you know what the next category is going to be, and your opponents don’t, that’s an advantage in the lightning-reflex world of Jeopardy!; forcing people to load up geography, then vocabulary, then movie trivia in their brains at a rapid pace is inherently disruptive, and disruption is a powerful weapon in a mental game like Jeopardy!

The other reason, meanwhile, is monetary and has come in vogue after being central to the strategy of dominant Jeopardy! player James Holzhauer in 2019. Holzhauer’s Jeopardy! run has been a turning point for the modern incarnation of the game, not necessarily because of how often he won—his 32-game streak was impressive, undoubtedly, but has since been surpassed more than once—but for how much he won. Holzhauer demolished the show’s single-day earnings record within his first week on the series, ultimately winning nearly as much money as current host Ken Jennings brought in during more than twice as many games over his legendary streak in 2004—and he used the Bounce to help him do it.

That’s because Holzhauer (a professional gambler) grasped, as few players have, the raw power of the Daily Doubles, those three spaces in each day’s game that allow Jeopardy! players to as much as double their current scores, without having to fight anybody else for control of the question. A single smart Daily Double wager can pull a player back from the brink, but the sheer power of multiplicative math means that a player who can get their hands on multiple DDs can build a lead that no amount of regular question-answering (which operates additively, maxing out at $2,000 per pop) can touch. By bouncing around the bottom of the board, Holzhauer not only stumbled onto the Doubles (which are, more often than not, located in the more expensive questions and always just one to a category) more quickly, but also ensured he had a hefty bankroll to wager with when he found them.

The results speak for themselves: Holzhauer averaged $75,362 per game, numbers that demolished, as a matter of regularity, the previous all-time top games with shocking regularity. (The show’s official list of highest single-game winners is literally just Holzhauer 10 times—including one instance where he tied himself, just for fun.) Like Forrest three decades earlier, that success speaks to the man’s mastery of the material—Holzhauer’s hit rate was phenomenal, giving incorrect responses only three percent of the time during his initial run—but it also speaks to his understanding of Jeopardy! the game. Even more than Jennings, the super-champs who have come after Holzhauer (notably Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider, who both won more games but less money) have followed the path he laid out. Really, though, it’s everybody: Jeopardy! players are people who like optimal solutions, as a rule and, having seen a better way, they’ve adopted it fervently.

And it makes, we hate to say it, for terrible TV.

Dominant performances detract from the game

Like the rationale for using it, the viewer-side arguments against the Forrest Bounce are two-fold. The first is dramatic: When the strategy works, it works decisively. The “lock game”—i.e., one where all other players have less than half the points of the leader, rendering Final Jeopardy! meaningless in the absence of anything but complete wagering madness on the winner’s part—is the least exciting outcome for a game of Jeopardy! Sure, we like watching the occasional dominant performance, as a player like Amodio, Schneider or Mattea Roach smashes through opponents and records alike. But nobody really enjoys a fait accompli, the whole dramatic spectacle of Final Jeopardy! rendered inert by the preceding two rounds.

The bigger issue with the Bounce, though, is a narrative one—and one that Alex Trebek himself, usually that most neutral of observers, occasionally expressed some frustration with. Despite the high-profile host hunts of the last few years—and the show’s producers deciding to move forward with a compromised version of the series during the WGA strike—Jeopardy! has always been a writer-forward show, with the clues themselves as the most compelling aspect of the series. A good Jeopardy! board isn’t just a series of topics culled together from old trivia books; it’s a net of categories that covers an engagingly wide span of human knowledge.

And each category within that system follows its own flow, from the easy introductory questions at the top of the board, down to the stumpers floating around the bottom, with questions even subtly building on each other more often than not. Among other things, many of the more puzzle-like categories (variants on series staple Before & After, for instance) use their early questions as tutorials, easing players and viewers into the logic of whatever the writers are asking contestants for in an environment where even a bad guess will only cost $200 or $400. Similarly, writers will sometimes use an earlier entry to weed out an obvious wrong answer down the line; if Romeo And Juliet has already been used in the $800 slot of a Shakespeare category, you know it’s out of consideration for the $1600 clue. Now, that flow rarely gets a chance to show itself.

Are the writers out of step with the times?

Or, to put all this another way: Jeopardy! is currently being written in a way that is out of step with the way it’s being played, because the way it’s played has drastically changed over the last few years. The clue boards are still being written for the old show, where categories would be read out in sequence from the top down, following the natural rhythm the show has employed over almost 40 years on TV. But the regular adoption of the Bounce—it’s even taken over side programs like the Teen Tournament, where the bottom rows of the board are now regularly cleared out by contestants born 20 years after Chuck Forrest’s first appearance behind the podium—means that running a category in traditional sequence is now exceedingly rare. (If you need convincing, watch the regular videos of whole categories that the show’s social media team posts on YouTube and see how scattershot the editing can be as moments several minutes apart get cut together to make a cohesive whole.)

What’s interesting about all this, then, is that everything we’re describing here is a natural outgrowth of the rules of the game—which just happen to be running counter, for once, to the rules of “what makes good TV.” If you can hang with the Bounce, it’s a genuinely useful strategy—even as it makes the process of watching a category unspool go from a gentle pleasure into a mild pain in the ass for viewers. (Among other things, it’s probably why we’ve had so many more multi-week champion runs over the last few years; this is just supposition, but we suspect the all-or-nothing, high-pressure Bounce favors high-performance players in ways that lets them stomp dozens of opponents apiece.)

It’s certainly not anything Jeopardy! can really fix, at least not without making changes that would fundamentally alter the game in ways no one is prepared to do. (You could try to take out the subtle sequencing of question order, but that’s a straight-up bummer; situating the Daily Doubles more regularly in the top half of the board might slightly alleviate the problem, but it’d also screw with balance.) The thing is, game shows are weird, because they have to function both as games and shows, and Jeopardy! has hit a stumbling block in that regard that it might not be capable of reconciling. All we can really do is turn back to Trebek himself, who opened up about the Bounce in a wide-ranging interview with Vulture in 2018, two years before his death:

What bothers me is when contestants jump all over the board even after the Daily Doubles have been dealt with. Why are they doing that? They’re doing themselves a disservice. When the show’s writers construct categories they do it so that there’s a flow in terms of difficulty, and if you jump to the bottom of the category you may get a clue that would be easier to understand if you’d begun at the top of the category and saw how the clues worked. I like there to be order on the show.

“But,” he ultimately acknowledged. “As the impartial host I accept disorder.” So, perhaps, must we all.