James Holzhauer's run on Jeopardy!

Tomorrow I'm rooting for someone to take down the giant killer, but at least she didn't use James' strategies tonight. In the Jeopardy! round she did start at the bottom, but unlike James, she didn't jump from category to category to the extent that he did; instead she would stick with whatever category she picked but work from the bottom up.

Regarding the leak, I think TPTB were upset about it because only they should get to spoil stuff in advance.


The cynical guy in me thinks James wasn't shown the next day due to him causing so much damage to both Jeopardy! and Wheel's prize budgets that once his run was done they wanted to give him as little on-air exposure as possible, whereas Ken took over twice as long (not to mention being spread across two seasons, so the prize budget got a refill) to get to the same amount of winnings.

Let's compare tape dates...


Jeopardy! generally has a longer tape-to-air gap than Wheel does since Wheel tapes more episodes in a week and does it in whatever order they want.

We know James' last episode taped March 12, which was after the upcoming Teen Tournament but before the Teachers Tournament which taped April 1-2. It is also known that show #8000 taped March 5 since the slate surfaced online.

Jeopardy! usually tapes two weeks of shows in two days a week (Tue-Wed) every other week, much like Wheel (Thu-Fri), so the April 4 episode likely taped in January (perhaps January 9 if there was a consistent two-week pattern). Or if the Teen Tournament taped somewhere in between, James' shows may have started taping before the holiday break in December.


Next door at Wheel, the first week to tape after the taping of James' defeat was the second Aulani Hawaii Vacation week, which taped March 14 and aired April 22-26 and May 28. The next day's tapings, Island Hopping, was the first taped and aired week that began the four-week losing streak. Rail Tour, which is airing now, taped in between Saving Big Money (show 7000) and America the Beautiful, but the four skunked weeks all aired in the same order taped aside from that. This also means that Wheel's losing streak likely goes on even longer by taping order than airing order, since the win on May 27 taped back on February 28. March 14 may have very well been the taping of the last Bonus Round win of Season 36 by taping order (and considering they had five more taping days after that... yeah...).

Coincidentally, James' first episode aired during Delicious Destinations week, which went 0/5 and had two consecutive $100K losses. That week taped February 28, at which point at least half of James' run should have been taped.


So if James really did kill Wheel's budget, they didn't start pulling the extreme damage control until just after he was finally out of the studio.

I don't know because they shuffled both Wheel and Jeopardy!'s schedules around likely to better accommodate Alex after his diagnosis. Both shows wrapped their current seasons earlier than originally planned.

Definitely wouldn't have been later than March 18-19 or 19-20. Two weeks after that would have been the Teachers Tournament tapings on April 1-2.

^ I doubt that because Wheel taped on March 28, too. It takes them the whole afternoon and the shows share several staff members so I really don't think they would have taped both shows on the same day.

Didn't Jeopardy tape on the 27th or 29th of March? And if it weren't for Alex's cancer diagnosis, when do Jeopardy tapings usually wrap up?

The 27th, maybe, but the 29th was when Wheel taped Rail Tour week, which is airing now.