Where to Find Jeopardy! Daily Doubles

Placement of Daily Double clues, from Season 1 to 31. Watch them play out.

In 2014, Jeopardy! fans criticized contestant Arthur Chu for skipping around the board instead of opting for the traditional top to bottom selection of clues. He was on the hunt for Daily Doubles, and as the 74-time winner Ken Jennings pointed out, Chu’s strategy was a good one. It’s in a good player’s best interest to remove the major elements of chance.

The key word in that last sentence is “good.” Armed with horrible recall and near-zero trivia knowledge, I wouldn’t benefit a whole lot. My wife on the other hand would fair much better.

So where can one find Daily Doubles? Most regular watchers can tell you it’s towards the bottom. But we can be more accurate than that.

The fan-maintained J! Archive keeps record of clues, dating back to the first season of the show’s current version. Unfortunately the J! Archive doesn’t have records for every episode. That doesn’t start until the 14th season. However, percentages for Season 14 and on versus the total of all clues on record don’t seem to change that much.

I collected data on Daily Doubles — 13,663 of them at the time, and ta-da, the board above. The darker the blue, the higher the percentage of Daily Doubles from that spot.

The bottom area is where a lot of the action is (as expected), and about 38 percent of Daily Doubles were found in the fourth row. The fourth row in the first column has the highest rate of Daily Doubles, and you’ll have less luck in the second and last columns. This pattern doesn’t seem to change much season to season.

Become a member. Support an independent site. Make great charts.

See What You Get

Learn to Visualize Data See All →

How to Make a Custom Stacked Area Chart in R

You could use a package, but then you couldn’t customize every single element, and where’s the fun in that?

Using Transparency in R to Improve Clarity

When you plot a lot of data at once, points and lines can obscure others and hide patterns. Transparency can help reveal what is really there.

How to Make a Customized Excess Mortality Chart in Excel

Show current evolution against expected historical variability and add one or more series that could account for the difference.

How to Make Alluvial Diagrams

Here’s how to do it in R from start to finish, plus editing in illustration software. Make design choices and trade-offs for more readable charts.

Favorites

Interactive: When Do Americans Leave For Work?

We don’t all start our work days at the same time, despite what morning rush hour might have you think.

Think Like a Statistician – Without the Math

I call myself a statistician, because, well, I’m a statistics graduate student. However, the most important things I’ve learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data.

Watching the Growth of Walmart

The ever so popular Walmart growth map gets an update, and yes, it still looks like a wildfire. Sam’s Club follows soon after, although not nearly as vigorously.

How You Will Die

So far we’ve seen when you will die and how other people tend to die. Now let’s put the two together to see how and when you will die, given your sex, race, and age.