How I'm studying for Jeopardy

When I was solidly a third-trimester pregnant person, I imagined that I was going to be spending my down time during maternity leave getting around to some much needed Jeopardy brushing up. Once my son was born, I realized two things:

  1. I barely had time to eat, nevermind sprinkle in some flashcards to my daily routine
  2. I actually had a lot more knowledge gaps than I initially realized

Today, my son is over 6 months old, I'm back to work almost full time, and I've come to the conclusion that the process of studying is going to be a slower, more deliberate pursuit of knowledge than the "pull an all-nighter cramming for the final" type of studying.

Process

I started out by mapping out what I call the Jeopardy Knowledge Base. This is my list of knowledge domains, grouped somewaht categorically and hiegraphically. If I know I have a solid set of time, I'll pull a section from here (for example Sports > Olympics > Olympic Cities). Before I was back to work full time, I would schedule sections to study on each day of the week, but I no longer have that flexibility!

When I study by a specific category, I use a combination of some good ol' internet research, sleuthing through the J! Archive and building out decks of flashcards using Quizlet. One of my favorite decks I've curated over time is the authors set -- given the title of a novel/poem/play, you have to name the writer.

Any Jeopardy hopefuly will tell you that the best way to study is to watch the show. While watching the show, I always track my Coryat score using this app. I use new episodes as my litmus test for how I'm trending on average. I watch nightly and typically review the game board after I finish watching. This means I'll go through all of the clues from that day on J! archive and make sure I have cards for anything I missed (or was slow to recall, etc.).

As part of my more "passive" learning, I listen to podcasts and do practice clues. I've found that history podcasts seem to usually be at the right level of knowledge for my purposes -- interesting enough that I end up retaining the information pretty easily, but not too in depth that I waste time on something that is too esoteric for Jeopardy. I often use Blinkist to listen to classic novels in ~15 minutes.

Plus, a few other things that I haven't yet looped into my process, but I plan on doing before I ever get into the show:

  • Wagering strategy: While I haven't focused on this yet, my plan is to use standard wagering strategy. While waiting for Final Jeopardy, I wowilluld practice wagering as each contestant and use the Wagering Calculator to compare my wagers.

  • Buzzer practice: I'll probably just practice with a pen while watching the show, focusing on rewatching shows with Ken + Mayim hosting. You can obviously get pretty deep on buzzer practice (a la Fritz Holznagel), but I think my approach will be simple and straightforward.

Tools & Resources

You may have already gotten a sense of what types of tooling I'm using, but here's it laid out and enumerated:

Notion For tracking domain knowledge and anything categorically, I use Notion. I also use Notion for keeping track of other things in my life, so this was a natural extension for me to use.

Hulu We pay for Hulu specifically for access to watching Jeopardy (we don't watch much other live TV!). I love this approach because even though it's pretty expensive, I can record shows and then have entire seasons ready for rewatch.

J! Archive My main resource for studying. I use the archive in two main ways: First, I often do a quick search through the archive to make sure I'm getting the important highlights on a topic. Second, sometimes I will use this as a quick pop quiz after I studied a topic. For example, after studying Merry Wives of Windsor, I'll do a search and make sure I'm able to answer all of the related questions.

Quizlet This is my favorite Flashcard app. I can enter clues from desktop and practice on mobile (my usual MO). I especially like some of the learning flows where they serve sets of clues in a more Anki style for the correct level of review and repetition.

Coryat I use the Coryat app linked above to track my score nightly.

Study! I built this app out for my own personal use. I needed a way to study a bit more passively and for it to be easy to use while I was feeding my son. Here's how it works: each time you play, you get a set of 10 clues you've never seen before, ordered by dollar value. You can tap each card to see the answer on the back, and swipe left/right tinder-style for correct and incorrect. I track the $ value of clues correct out of the total. Any clues that were answered incorrectly get placed into a queue for me to process for review.

Sporcle It's not always a perfect mapping to Jeopardy knowledge, but I use Sporcle for a couple areas. First, the quizzes that are "Countries of the World" or "Shakespeare's Plays" are good to get down solid. I find those types of quizzes help immensely with recall, especially with areas like Final Jeopardy. Second, word play is often helpful to practice anagrams. It's not possible to study word play, but it is possible to practice.

Goals

My main metric I'm tracking is my Coryat score. I've used this Reddit post as a bit of a target range for myself. mixedberrycoughdrop writes:

20,000-25,000 to get on the show

25,000-30,000 to have a snowball's chance of winning

35,000 to be TOC material

40,000+ to be Matt/Ken level

As of writing, I'm usually in the 20,000-25,0000 range. While this might be enough to get on the show, I'm waiting until I'm more consistently closer to the 30,000 range to take the anytime test. My goal is to get consistently into the 30,000+ range by the time I (hopefully!) make it onto the show.