My observations after answering 4601 Final Jeopardy questions

That's 31 seasons worth of questions, as included on the j-archive.com website....

- If the aim of the Jeopardy producers is to make Final Jeopardy a toss up they've done an outstanding job over the years. Actual TV contestants, all winners and losers, scored 6732 correct and 6917 incorrect answers, for a 49.3% success rate.

- TV winners scored 2423 correct and 2220 incorrect (52.2%), which means that losers answered correctly 47.8% of the time and there's typically not much difference between winners and losers.

- Jeopardy final question writers over the years have a peculiar fascination with Henry David Thoreau... I think there must be at least 20 questions over the years with Thoreau as the subject/answer. Other over-represented topics are Ernest Hemingway, Liberia, Surinam, Prince Edward Island, Rosa Parks, and John Brown.

- The questions about US presidents are tougher than you'd imagine them to be, and in my view a sucker's bet. They're typically not about major accomplishments, such as the Square Deal or who dropped the atom bomb, but of the type say, how many presidents did we have in this span of ten years?

- Similarly, the US States category, a frequent one, is also tough. They're typically of the type "it's the only state name that can be typed on one row of a QWERTY keyboard". While that type of question is not necessarily unfair, it doesn't really separate from the knowers from the unknowers, but only the quick processors from the slower ones.

- I believe that the average man on the street, without intense Jeopardy practice, would score about 10 to 15% of the answers correctly.