If recent Jeopardy! champion Drew Basile wants a chance to beat super-champ Adriana Harmeyer in the next Tournament of Champions, there is one area he needs to improve on, according to 2017 TOC winner Buzzy Cohen.
Basile’s seven-game winning streak came to an end last Friday (June 28) as he blundered on the Final Jeopardy question. Despite this loss, the Survivor alum had already cemented his spot in the next TOC, where he could very well come against recent 15-game winner Harmeyer.
Speaking on the latest edition of Inside Jeopardy! podcast, Cohen and Jeopardy! producer Sarah Whitcomb Foss compared Basile and Harmeyer’s stats, with Foss pointing out how, “One stat that isn’t quite as great for Drew is Final Jeopardy.”
“Obviously, with so many runaways, he didn’t need it very much, but he was only three for eight [on FJ], so about 38 percent,” she added. “When you compare that to Adriana, who was 13 for 16, probably something Drew is gonna work on before TOC I’m guessing.”
Adriana Harmeyer; Jeopardy!, Inc.
Cohen agreed and shared his perspective as a former player, explaining how easy it is to get tripped up on the Final Jeopardy. Cohen was a nine-game champion in Season 32 before going on to win the 2017 TOC.
“I think that Final Jeopardy plays really differently; it’s written differently, as we discussed with our head writers. I think a big part of it that’s hard for people, I don’t know if this was a challenge for Drew but it was a challenge for me, is that you stare at that category for a long time,” Cohen stated.
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“You start to think about what [the question] could be, and then the clue comes up, and you’re like, ‘Woah, this isn’t what I’d thought it was gonna be,’” he continued. “So, you know, working on just kind of, not totally clearing your mind, but staying in the moment definitely is something I think Drew, given how great the rest of his play is, I think he’ll be able to punch it out.”
Basile is aware that Final Jeopardy is his “weak point,” telling Entertainment Weekly, “I didn’t really pay enough attention to the structure of Jeopardy clues, the grammar of Jeopardy. Going back, I’m really going to spend a lot of time watching the show, paying attention to the way that those Final Jeopardy clues are structured.”
He also admitted, “Pop culture is a weakness for me, so I’m going to tune into the new pop culture Jeopardy on Amazon, for sure. It’s going to boil down to a lot of flashcards, a lot of rewatching older material, and I’m going to pick a few all star names, like, of course, James Holzhauer, Victoria [Groce], Yogesh [Raut], and study how they play and what they do, to take cues from that.
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