The most efficient “Jeopardy!” player of all time is ready to share his secrets for breaking the bank at the brainy game show.
Roger Craig, this year’s “Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions” winner and game-show record holder, is about to release an iPhone app that teaches players how to dominate the game.
The key to Craig’s success is a computer program he created to help him study before going on the game show.
In recent weeks, he’s turned the game-tested plan — something akin to the test-prep courses students take before the college boards or high-school entrance exams — into an iPhone app called QED: Quiz Everyday.
“I don’t want people to think that I’m going to hoard this to myself and never let it see the light of day,” Craig said.
No one could question Craig’s qualifications.
In September, Craig shattered legendary “Jeopardy!” player Ken Jennings’ previous single-game winnings record — $75,000 — and then went on to win four more games in a row.
In a single day — “Jeopardy” tapes a week’s worth of shows in one day — he set two records: most money accumulated in a player’s first five games, $195,801, and the single-game record, $77,000. (Craig lost in his seventh game after winning $230,200 in all.)
The app is a daily 10-12 flashcard quiz that incorporates the techniques and hidden patterns Craig learned while preparing.
A Ph.D. in computer science, Craig analyzed every question ever asked on “Jeopardy!” — they’re on the show’s Web site — and found that the questions were not as random as they appeared on TV.
Instead, the game show favors certain subjects and answers over others.
“Take the award shows as a small example,” he said. “The Oscars come up the most. Then the Grammys and Emmys might be tied. And the Tonys are the ugly stepchild,” Craig said.
Craig combined his study of the game’s questions with a radical new approach to classic, flashcard-style, rote memorization he learned from a psychology study.
“You’ll see people with a flash card in front of them, and they’ll be racking their brain for maybe 10 seconds until they flip it over and see the answer,” Craig explained.
“But in the ‘tip-of-the-tongue syndrome’ paper, these psychologists showed that if you take longer to think of the right answer, you’re actually training yourself to be slower when you remember it the next time,” he said.
So, Craig designed his app to give the player only 5 seconds to answer the question before the program automatically shows the answer.
“The main thing is that, when they’re done with the quiz, they’ll have their results — plus links to read up more on the ones that they missed,” he said.
Roger Craig’s insider tips
* Highvalue questions come from academia, low value questions come from popular topics
* You don’t need to learn every capital of every country, just the 80 percent people have heard of
* Fill in the blind spots in your knowledge
* Aggressively huntout Daily Doubles, and then bet heavily