Sam Morris / Las Vegas News Bureau
“Jeopardy!” champion James Holzhauer is interviewed after receiving a key to the Las Vegas Strip during a ceremony at the Welcome to Las Vegas sign Thursday, May 2, 2019.
Friday, May 31, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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Even when James Holzhauer was 13 years old, it was obvious he was going to be a gambler. He always seemed to know who was going to win sporting events, and lamented to his dad that he couldn’t trade stocks of sports teams to at least make a few bucks off his predictions.
He bets on sports professionally now, and it’s that sports gambling background and knack for risk-taking that has helped the Las Vegas resident go on one of the most dominant runs in ‘Jeopardy!’ history. He has won 31 games in a row for a total of $2,382,583, with a single-game total of $131,127 on April 17.
“I think a typical player is watching at home and says hey, everyone is playing this way, let’s do it that way,” he said. “The gambler in me says let’s dissect every part of the game and see where I can I play better than everyone else.”
Holzhauer was on a panel at the International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking at Caesars Palace on Thursday where he talked about handicapping sports and extrapolating that into other fields.
He started young, finding himself apt at knowing where sports teams are over or underperforming where they should be. He finally made that skill profitable with sports wagering once he turned 21, and also dabbled in online poker in college.
“A good poker book doesn’t tell you to raise pocket Jacks, it tells you how to think about the factors going into everything,” Holzhauer said. “It’s one thing to say I skipped class to play poker, but if I’m learning how to think in the real world playing poker, maybe that’s a more valuable than an education ever should have been.”
In ‘Jeopardy!’, he realized the value in controlling the board was not just selecting an advantageous category, but also hunting the Daily Doubles to multiply his own score. He’s developed other strategies, like spending hours teaching his muscles the proper timing of the buzzer to gain an edge on his opponents.
At one point the other panelist — Andy Bloch, a professional poker player and former member of the famed MIT blackjack team — explained the value, or lack of value, in chips, and how they are a brilliant casino invention to make people think they are betting plastic instead of betting money.
It’s the same concept in ‘Jeopardy!’, where the dollar value of points does not correspond to real money, unless you win. A player could have $50,000 in Jeopardy money, but only collect $2,000 in real money if they come in second place. Holzhauer has made it part of his game to place larger-than-expected wagers on the Daily Double and Final Jeopardy rounds in order to maximize his earnings.
“Talking to some people, they said they couldn’t do what you do because they’re not willing to make those big bets,” Bloch said to Holzhauer.
Holzhauer said he never expected to gain this level of ‘Jeopardy!’ fame — he was in it to win exactly $110,914 because his daughter was born on Nov. 9, 2014. He likes to make his bets based off important dates in his life, including paying homage to the Golden Knights on the May 22 episode by betting $10,617. The Golden Knights’ inaugural game was Oct. 6, 2017.
Oftentimes, his ‘Jeopardy!’ games aren’t close to make for less exciting television, but that’s just fine with him.
“I feel like I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways,” Holzhauer said. “You can complain about how boring the games are, but there have been at least seven or eight out of 30 that one clue goes the wrong way and I lose, and none of those have gone the wrong way yet.
“I feel really, really good about how this has gone.”
