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Titans of "Jeopardy!" Julia Collins and Arthur Chu, and a third contestant, will face off Thursday and Friday in the final round of the Tournament of Champions.
(Jeopardy Productions, Inc.)
Arthur Chu dispatched two more "Jeopardy!" champions on Tuesday's broadcast, propelling himself into the final round of the popular game show's Tournament of Champions and picking up $50,000 more in winnings with a chance for $250,000.
"The money is important," said host Alex Trebek at the start of Tuesday night's contest. Chu, tweeting during the show, exclaimed, "Oh come on, Alex. You think I'd be here for a participation plaque?" Chu amassed $297,200 during his 11-game run.
In the finals, the Broadview Heights resident will face Julia Collins, who blew past his 11-game streak last year to notch 20 in a row. She won $429,100. Collins won her semifinal match Monday. The third finalist – who'd better bring his or her A-game – will be determined Wednesday night.
"Jeopardy!" fans have been pining for Chu v. Collins. So has Chu.
"I kind of feel like we'd be cheating America if we didn't make that matchup happen," he said last night.
Chu became known – and, by some, reviled – for his unorthodox play. He jumps all over the board looking for lucrative daily doubles and employs game theory when making his wagers, confounding "Jeopardy!" purists.
Tuesday night, he won in the purest of ways; he was the only contestant to correctly supply the question for the Final Jeopardy! clue. His opponents tightened the score after he opened an early lead, but Chu still had a $5,000 lead going into the final question. In the end, what mattered was that he got the answer in the category "French Literature" and his opponents, Mark Japinga of Madison, Wisconsin, and Rebecca Rider of Queens, New York, didn't.
Clue: "Its first chapter recalls 'The little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds.'"
Answer: "What is 'In Search of Lost Time.'"
That was correct, though it was noted by Trebek as the secondary title to a work most know as "Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust.
The final will be a two-round match Thursday and Friday with two separate games being added together to determine a champion.
Chu said before the tournament began that he'd watched every episode Collins was in and studied her play. She wins because she knows every answer and she's quick with the buzzer. It will shape up as not only a battle of intellect, but a battle of styles.
Before this semifinal round, Chu posted a piece on the "Mental Floss" Web site with his behind-the-scenes take on the Tournament of Champions. He talked about how strange it was to have a documentary filmmaker recording his studying in the hotel room prior to taping and how obsessed people seem to be with his 30-pound weight loss.
But his anecdote about choosing a movie to watch in the "Jeopardy!" green room reveals his always-competitive mindset.
Contestants, he said, can choose from a library of films to watch while other contestants play (multiple games are taped in the same day). It's meant to drown out the noise so they can't hear the final scores.
"The movies are all vetted by 'Jeopardy's' writing staff to ensure they contain no spoilers for the tournament itself. This means that it's to your advantage to pick a movie that contains a lot of pop culture references that you can tick off in your mind as things that won't come up," Chu wrote.
So he's getting clues by finding out what won't be clues. So Chu.
Given the choice of pop culture-heavy "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" and the more staid "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" -- ("Pretty much all you can deduce from that movie is that 'Jeopardy!' isn't going to ask how far it is from Wichita to Chicago.") -- he voted for Pilgrim. Unfortunately, he was the only one.
Starting Thursday, Arthur Chu vs. The World.