‘Jeopardy! Masters’ Night Four: James Holzhauer Gets Shut Out & Victoria Groce Makes a Rare Misstep

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The final boss met his match(es) on Friday night’s edition of Jeopardy! Masters. James Holzhauer, for the first time in the competition so far, walked away empty-handed from the fourth night of competition after facing the two frontrunners of Season 2 together in what can only be described as a very competitive Game 8.

Here’s a look at the major highlights of this two-game episode of Jeopardy! Masters.

Game Seven

This match-up put the three lowest-scoring contestants coming into the evening together: Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, and Mattea Roach, each of whom had just one match point to show for the previous three nights of competition.

In the first round, Schneider took a healthy lead, thanks in part to getting the first Daily Double correct (Cuba was the right answer to the “Coming to America”-categoried clue of, “From 1960 to 1962 a covert program called Operation Pedro Pan brought thousands of children to the U.S. from this country,” and doubling her $3,000. At the half, she led with $7,400, with Amodio trailing with $3,600 and Roach keeping up the rear with $1,600.

In Double Jeopardy, Schneider once again got a Daily Double and made it a true one, with $10,600 on the line. Fortunately, she was able to surmise that the 12-or-more-letter word “insubordination” was the answer to this clue: “Regarding his firing of Douglas MacArthur who defied orders, Pres. Truman later wrote, ‘I could no longer tolerate his’ this.”

Roach got the second Daily Double of the round and also put their entire pot on the table, thus doubling their $5,200 when correctly guessing “Oort” was the person indicated by this clue: “In 1950 he said there’s a cloud beyond Pluto where long-period comets come from.” Heading into Final Jeopardy, the scores were: Schneider leading with 26,400, Roach with $18,000, and Amodio lagging with $8,000 (after a score correction due to a later-accepted answer).

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The Final Jeopardy of this game was, in the category of “The 20th Century,” “Hearing about the speech that launched this eponymous process, the head of the CIA wondered if Nikia Khrushchev had been drunk.” All three of the contestants guessed right (“What is Destalinization?”), and while Amodio risked everything, and Mattea bet nothing, the ranking didn’t change a bit. Schneider took her first win of the season with $36,001, Roach took second with $18,000, and Amodio barely missed his match point with $16,000.

Game Eight

The second game of the evening was in a different class of competition than the first, frankly, as all three gunners came together for a pretty epic shootout. Victoria Groce, Yogesh Raut, and James Holzhauer, who led the game with 9, 7, and 5 match points respectively, joined the stage to find out who’s boss, and the game was peppered with high-scoring ties, major misses, and consequential bets that changed everything.

In the first round, amid host Ken Jennings’ hilarious efforts to recite “baby, baby” song lyrics with any modicum of seriousness, Raut got off to a sprinting lead over the other two, thanks to a true Daily Double. (He correctly guessed that in the category “Made You Say It,” the phrase “military-industrial complex” was the correct response to, “Irony was likely not lost on Ike in 1961 when he warned of grave implications due to the rise of this combination.”) He went into the second round with a massive $11,200, with Holzhauer behind him at $4,600 and Groce way behind at $3,200.

Groce knew she had some “catching up to do,” so she used her fresh start in the Double Jeopardy round to her advantage right off the rip, nabbing the first Daily Double and pushing all her chips forward. Fortunately for her, she knew that Marfan Syndrome is the disease some speculated Abraham Lincoln might’ve had to cause his height and lankiness.

Holzhauer got the second shot at a Daily Double (thus making them an even three-way split of finds), betting it all with good results. (In the Arts category, the clue was, “St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Belgium is home to Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb better known as this,” and he correctly identified it as the Ghent Altarpiece.) This got him tied up with Raut, and then there was a three-way tie at a staggering $17,200 before Groce pushed through to take a slight lead.

Going into Final Jeopardy, they were neck-and-neck, with Groce at $20,800, Raut at $18,400, and Holzhauer with $18,000. The category for the last clue was “The American Theater,” and the clue was, “Director & author, their 1960 rift over a new play set in the South ended ‘the most important collaboration’ of 20th Century U.S. Theater.

Holzhauer, perhaps surprisingly, was the only one who guessed wrong (he chose Tennessee Williams and Stanley Kubrick, the latter of which was not correct) and dropped his score to $14,732. Meanwhile, both Raut and Groce guessed that the director in question was Elia Kazan, but it was the wager that made all the difference. Since Raut risked $17,601, he barreled to the top with $36,001 and added three match points to his score, while Groce’s tiny $3,200 wager left her in second with $24,000.

As such the current leaderboard is as follows:

1st = Victoria Groce – 1 tonight, 10 total*
2nd = Yogesh Raut – 3 tonight, 10 total
3rd = James Holzhauer – 0 tonight, 5 total
4th = Amy Schneider – 3 tonight, 4 total
5th = Mattea Roach – 1 tonight, 2 total
6th = Matt Amodio – 0 tonight, 1 total*

Jeopardy! Masters, Night Five, May 13, 8/7c, ABC