With 74 straight wins and millions of dollars in winnings, Ken
Jennings has dominated Jeopardy! like nobody else. And he says that the current
champ Arthur Chu—who’s
been the subject of a lot of scorn lately—has been using a time-tested
strategy that’s worked for people in the past.
Jennings’s record-breaking run made him probably the most
famous contestant on the long-running show. He’s an expert on how Jeopardy! is played and, in a new piece
written for Slate,
think that the anger being directed at Chu isn’t necessarily warranted:
There’s an obvious racial angle as well. Chu, a bespectacled
man with rumpled shirts and a bowl cut, plays into every terrible Asian-nerd
stereotype you’ve ever seen in an ’80s teen movie. Charmingly, he seems to
enjoy the role of the scheming outsider. In a
recent Wall Street Journal interview,
he pitted his own eccentric genius against me, “the angelic blond boy next
door, the central casting ‘nice boy.’ “
But in fact, plenty of nice white boys on Jeopardy! have been pilloried by
viewers for using Arthur Chu’s signature technique: bopping around the game
board seemingly at whim, rather than choosing the clues from top to bottom, as
most contestants do.
Jennings posits that it’s this break from tradition that made
the quiz show’s audience so mad at Chu. Jeopardy!‘s in the middle of a College
Championship series right now and Chu
won’t be back on air until Feb. 24. So, we’ll have to wait and see if the
animosity for the show’s current top dog keeps going.
[via Slate]
