As Jeopardy savant James Holzhauer
marches on, the secret to his success is increasingly clear: He’s quite smart.
Well, you already knew that. You also knew that we don’t have much control over our IQ, and that some extremely smart people go nowhere while people of average intelligence succeed wildly.
What is increasingly clear as Holzhauer slaughters his opponents game after is that he leverages his intelligence by taking enormous risks when he has time to recover. He turns conservative once he has an insurmountable lead.
Holzhauer’s a professional sports gambler. He bets big early in the game to outdistance the two competitors. Once he can no longer be caught he wagers safely; He does not bet the ranch once he has the deed to it. He rarely lets the outcome come down to Final Jeopardy, where one question affords the opportunity for a weaker player to win.
I’ve been working on a freelance article about Aflac CEO Dan Amos for Investor’s Business Daily. The article’s not quite finished. When it is you’ll be able to find it on IBD’s Leaders and Success Page here.
Amos, who has a degree in risk management, said he has seen Holzhauer compete once or twice on Jeopardy. He likes the way Holzhauer starts with the $1,000 questions to build up his war chest. Companies, too, must take risks when small, Amos says, which he did by risking $1 million to launch the Aflac duck in 2000. That was when all other insurance commercials were as dull as pharmaceutical commercials are today.
Three-fourths of Aflac’s business is in Japan and Amos remembers when he could have made a killing hedging the Japanese yen. He was certain he was right. However, if he were wrong he could have bankrupted the company. He didn’t make the bet, which proved costly, but he’s at peace with his decision. There was simply too much at stake.
I interviewed professional poker player Annie Duke, who has a chapter in my book Advice From the Top: 1001 Bits of Business Wisdom from the Great Leaders of the Recent Past. It’s available as an ebook for the Father’s Day price of $3.99. Duke is now a decision strategist and she says decisions are neither right or wrong, they are made with the probabilities and alternatives in mind. If a business owner has a 80 percent chance of winning, a big bet should be made. If the 20 percent happens, the business owner has not made a mistake, Duke says.
Holzhauer figures he has about an 80 percent chance of getting the Daily Doublescorrect on Jeopardy. One day, he will be wrong at the worst time, but that won’t mean he should have bet small. He is playing the odds––and has forever changed the way the game of Jeopardy will be contested in the future.
Del Leonard Jones, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, authored the historical novel, The Cremation of Sam McGee built upon the poem of Robert W. Service. The historical novel is perfect for Father’s Day. The narrator is a fabricating newspaper reporter working for William Randolph Hearst during the Spanish-American War and Yukon Gold Rush. The first chapter is here.The novel is getting five stars on Amazon and Goodreads. Readers who buy the bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing on Amazon are also buying Sam McGee.
