On Tuesday, the inaugural Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament came to a thrilling close. Victoria Groce, best known as one of the in-house trivia gurus on The Chase, battled back 40-time champion Amy Schneider and buzzer shark Andrew He to seal her victory at the end of an up-and-down three-part final, capping off an exhilarating competition that saw the show bring back fan favorites such as Sam Buttrey and Leonard Cooper and all-time greats such as Chuck Forrest and Larissa Kelly. But for many who watched Groce warmly embrace Schneider and He and celebrate her $100,000 prize, there lurked a less gracious sentiment: Thank heavens that’s finally over.
With the conclusion of the JIT, Wednesday will offer up the first episode of Jeopardy! with new contestants competing in a nontournament format in more than eight months. Since July 28, when librarian Monika Chavez and teacher Sharon Bishop strode onto the Alex Trebek Stage to face two-time champ Lucas Partridge, there has not been a single episode of regular Jeopardy! Instead, audiences watched a parade of tournaments: seven weeks of Second Chance competitions for non-winners of recent seasons; 17 weeks of Champions Wildcard contests largely featuring recent one-, two-, and three-time champs; more than three weeks of a Tournament of Champions for the winningest players from the previous season; and then—deep breath—the three-week-long JIT. In all, it made for 152 straight tournament episodes without a new contestant. It was exciting and also confusing and exhausting—the kind of thing that inspired one fan to make a calendar and explainer that I have found myself returning to over and over. Even with a finale as riveting as the Invitational Tournament, this long stretch proved to be a rare divergence from what makes Jeopardy! special.
What to make of this season of tournaments? For all the viewers happy to see old friends return for another shot at Jeopardy! glory, there seemed to be just as many begging for the tournaments to end. Further muddling the viewing experience was the fact that the tournaments were structured to feed into one another using a labyrinthine system of qualifying rounds and pools from recent seasons. Even for those of us with a professional interest in following the latest goings-on at Jeopardy!, the structure proved frequently confounding. In theory, players bounced in the first round of the 2019 Teen Tournament could have qualified for one of the 2023 Second Chance Tournaments and faced non-winners from 2022 and 2023. If that onetime teen contestant were to have won Second Chance, they would have moved on to the Champions Wildcard and faced still other 2022 and 2023 players. If they won that, they could have punched a ticket to the Tournament of Champions, where victory would have sent them on to the Masters (more on that later). For better or worse, no one pulled off anything quite that complicated: Only one of the six Champions Wildcard victors, Juveria Zaheer, came to the ToC by way of the Second Chance contest.
What should be music to the ears of the tournament weary and outright tournament haters is that it’s clear that Jeopardy! never wanted to do a season of endless tournaments and is unlikely to do anything of the sort again. The Second Chance and Wildcard tournaments—of which there were two and six, respectively—were explicit responses to the five-month Writers Guild of America strike that began in May. Jeopardy!’s clue writers are WGA members and thus were on strike; the show relied on recycled clues used in previous episodes for the duration. Jeopardy! leadership decided that it would be unfair to first-time contestants to bring them in with already used material, and voilà: a holding pattern of tournaments until the strike came to a close. (Notably, the show continued taping with new players as usual during the 2007-08 writers strike.)
Until now, the series’ longest stretch of tournament games was all the way back in 2005, when the back-to-back Teen Tournament and one-off Ultimate Tournament of Champions stretched over 86 episodes. That’s just over half the duration of this season’s tournament run and is itself an anomaly, with the UToC structured as a stunt to capitalize on the hype around now-host Ken Jennings, whose record 74-game winning streak had ended just two months earlier, by bringing back the best players from throughout the show’s history.
While we’re not likely to get a monthslong run of tournaments—either in the mold of the UToC or, especially, this season—again anytime soon, more flashy contests are here to stay. Executive producer Michael Davies has talked about building a league and relegation system analogous to Premier League soccer. The format would be anchored around a de facto annual postseason, with a Second Chance tournament leading into the Tournament of Champions and finally into Masters, an elite contest for the reigning six best-of-the-best players. While the strike’s disruptions seem to have knocked the timing off course, we look to finally be back on track. Masters will, yes, be one more big tournament this year. But before you contemplate pledging allegiance to the Church of Sajak, there is some comfort: Masters—which will feature last year’s top three Masters finishers (Matt Amodio, James Holzhauer, and Mattea Roach), this year’s Tournament of Champions winner (Yogesh Raut), Groce, and an as-yet-unnamed producer’s pick—will air in prime time on ABC, leaving the usual Jeopardy! time block for regular episodes.
Some side effects will linger from all the tournaments: The biggest is that it has been that much harder for first-timers to earn a place on the show. About 125,000 people (including Emma Stone) take the Jeopardy! contestant test every year. There are 230 episodes in a typical season, meaning 460 spots for new players—though usually that number is closer to 400, since tournaments featuring returning champs are a programming standby, even if not to this year’s degree. There are just 78 episodes remaining this season, offering a comparatively piddly 156 spots for would-be future champs. Meanwhile, the backlog of competition for those openings has only grown. Jeopardy! pushed aspiring trivia buffs to apply last month on what the show has dubbed “Jeoparday” and launched an ad campaign along the same lines. It was already extremely hard to get on Jeopardy! Now it’s even harder.
What has become clear during this curious quiz show season is that while big streaks are electric and rooting for Team Colby or Team MacKenzie is a thrill, so much of what makes Jeopardy! what it is is the joy of watching new players shoot their shots. Give me your principals, your programmers, your huddled mechanics—let’s see some regular ol’ folks win big. It’s been nearly nine months! Babies who were conceived since the last normal episode of Jeopardy! aired have been born! Partridge is back at long last, now a three-time champion and ready to face two newcomers who have nary a buzz under their belts. Kiddos, get ready for the real fun.
