This is a recorded interview between host Ramit Sethi and Arthur Chu (11-time Jeopardy champion) about how game strategy, preparation, and mindset—beyond factual knowledge—led to Chu's success. Chu explains studying gameplay tactics (citing David Madden and contrasting Ken Jennings), deliberately accepting public dislike to maximize winning chances, and argues for preparing aggressively and playing to win rather than relying on luck or perceived entitlement.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Arthur Chu, a Jeopardy. Champion writer and public speaker, talking about how my being the most hated man on Jeopardy. Led me to where I am today.
How do you become a champion? Many people think about winning as simply a matter of luck. And I have to say, there is an element of luck in winning. But top performers know that you give yourself every advantage. You go in with the right strategy, you execute flawlessly, you implement the use of systems. Let's welcome Arthur chu. He's an 11 time Jeopardy. Champion culture columnist for the Daily Beast and recently a public speaker. Arthur, welcome.
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for being here. You've been behind the set. You know what goes on. Do the people that get on the show study Jeopardy. Strategy?
For the most part, no, not really. And I've always found that kind of interesting that people kind of think of the show as just a test of knowledge. So if they study, they're just going to study on, you know, what they, what they need to know on the facts. And that's good. But so much of the game is about how you play the game. And it's almost like people, they're not on their radar or they think it's like less than honorable to study that side of it.
So. As if just the facts should make me win.
Right?
And people think about this at Jeopardy. They also think about this in life. Like, just judge me on the facts. And yes, you have to have the facts on your side, but there's also a whole other game being played around you as well. All right, so how did you even discover that there was this whole side to the game?
Really what it was, was I didn't feel confident. When they called me and told me I was going to be on the show. I asked myself how good am I relative to the people I see on tv? And the answer was I'm okay, but not great. And I just decided I really want to maximize my chances of coming home with something. So if I can't learn everything that I need to know, if I can't vastly expand my knowledge in like 30 days, what can I do? And I can learn about the strategy behind the game. And there's been a few people who've done very well despite not necessarily being the smartest people by having a clever way of playing the game.
Love it. So you're brutally honest with yourself about how good you are, because we're not always the best at everything. In fact, there's almost always someone better than us. And you went and studied other people who had won Talk to us about that. What did you discover when you started studying them?
Um, it's actually interesting. Uh, Ken Jennings is famous for being just kind of a Jeopardy. Savant. He's very naturally good at the game. His strategy has been criticized a lot as not being very good, but it didn't matter because he was so smart and it's, it's very hard to imitate that. But an almost forgotten story was a year after Ken Jennings epic run on Jeopardy. In 2004, there was another guy named David Madden who, who was an extremely polarizing figure because he won 19 games of Jeopardy. In a row. And he did it by kind of annoying people, by bouncing around the game board, by getting daily doubles wrong, but betting a very small amount of money on them and just sort of like eliminating a lot of the, a lot of the swinginess of the game, eliminating a lot of the variants of the game. And it actually made people really angry. And he kind of retreated from the public eye because of that. So he's, you don't hear as much about him as Ken Jennings, but you can see it was very successful for him. And you know, it sparked all this discussion about is he. All the stuff that happened to me in 2014 happened to Dave Madden back in 2004, 2005, but people just don't talk about it anymore. But it was very interesting to me to read that and it's like, well, if it worked for him, the only cost to what he did was people didn't like him. Well, I'm willing to bear that cost and I'm willing to do what he did.
You know, fascinating. So you said my goal is to win. My goal is not to make friends and it's not to appease the public's appetite for winning in a certain way. So any pro athlete, if you ask him, why are you playing the game? They're like, I'm playing to win, I'm here to win. There's nothing surprising about it, but there's a certain reluctance to going into certain other situations, like a job interview. You know, when a lot of people think about it, it's like, oh, I'm gonna see how it goes. I'm gonna give it my best versus I'm going in there to win. I'm getting, I'm gonna be over prepared. In fact, I'm gonna already have met the people socially, take them out for coffee before. I'm gonna have read the CEOs interviews with fast Company, et cetera. I'm gonna go in and do everything we call it that 80% of the work is done before you ever walk in the room. That's how we talk about it. Why do you think there's this reluctance to play, to win?
It's. I mean, I can't say it's. It's 100% a bad thing. It's. People aren't sure they deserve, you know, what they're trying to get. And it's almost like I want to see if the universe, you know, rewards me. I want to see if I. I'm supposed to get this job. And to some degree, I can see that. I could say, like, the point of a job interview is not just to get the job, it's to get the right job. But I feel like people kind of abdicate control over that to a degree that they have too much faith that the system is right. A job interviewer doesn't necessarily know whether it's the right job for you either. If you go in and let chance play out, you might, you know, lose your dream job just because of random stuff you didn't control that day. And one. One thing, this is a. This is a random story. I don't want to put it on the spot, but there was the college championship in Jeopardy this year. This is like a perfect example. It came down to the finals, and this. This lady was in the lead. This girl was in the lead, and there was a guy just behind her, and she deliberately made a bet in Final Jeopardy where if both of them got it right, he would overtake her and he would win. And she actually said it was because he seemed to want it so much more than I did. Afterwards, she said, like, I felt like I'd already, you know, I wasn't supposed to win. He was the one who was desperate to win. He was the one who cared so much about it, but he ended up getting it wrong, and she ended up getting it right, and she won anyway. And I was like, think about how self defeating that mindset is. Like, you're both here for the same reason. You both have every reason to try to win. You both need the money. You both are representing yourself and your school. But I was just thinking, this is a very intelligent young lady. She wants to be a doctor. She's at Princeton, and she's already absorbed the script of, oh, I'm going to try 50%. I'm going to. To sabotage myself a little bit. And if I'm supposed to win, then the universe will, like, overcome that for me, you know.
And your angle was, let me give it all I've got. I'm here. I might as well give myself every advantage. And if I win, I win. If I don't, I don't. But I'm going to have gone 100%.
Yeah. And it's like you ask yourself, at the end of the day, it's just a game, right? The rules are arbitrary. If they wanted things to not be allowed, they could change the rules. But if something's allowed by the rules, why shouldn't I do it? Yes, it's that question, like, why shouldn't I win? Why shouldn't it be me? There's no. It's not. There's no, like, cosmic rule of who deserves the money. If I don't get the money, it's going to be some other random person or it's going to be, you know, Sony Pictures Entertainment keeps the money and their corporate coffers, but, you know, why shouldn't I be the one to win this money and then decide what I want to do with it? And if I want to, you know, give it to charity and make the world a better place, that's my decision. But, you know, to say, like, I don't deserve this much. I don't deserve this reward. That's. Then why even. Why even be there in the first place?
