Jeopardy! Masters has only one night of gameplay left, and the competition for the tournament finals is set after the final semifinal showdowns aired on Friday, September 4.
Game 3 of the semifinals kicked off Friday’s episode, with Victoria Groce, an author and speaker from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Andrew He, a stay-at-home dad from Concord, California; Paolo Pasco, a puzzle writer originally from San Diego, California, vying for semifinal match points.
No one took a commanding lead in Game 3, as The Jeopardy! Fan notes: Groce, He, and Pasco all found one Daily Double apiece, and Groce and Pasco were able to double their scores, but everyone’s score stayed in the four-digit range. Going into Final Jeopardy!, Groce led with 8,600 points, He had 6,000, and Pasco had 5,600.
Then came this triple stumper of a Final Jeopardy! clue in the “Geographic Named People” category: “Giulio Romano was a famed Renaissance architect; this medieval builder is portrayed as a chump in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.”
No one offered the correct response: “Who is Giovanni Pisano?”
Only Groce bet big, so she ended up placing second with 5,199 points, narrowing edging out Pasco and his 5,196 points, while He won the game with 5,684 points.
In Game 4, He and Pasco went up against Yogesh Raut, an applied cognition specialist from Vancouver, Washington. And Pasco game out swinging the Jeopardy! round, with a five-digit score more than double that of his closest competition, as The Jeopardy! Fan reports. Pasco came out on top in Double Jeopardy!, too, though both He and Raut rallied to block Pasco from a runaway game. Ahead of Final Jeopardy!, Pasco had 17,000 points, He had 14,400, and Raut had 8,600.
The Final Jeopardy! category was “Historic Americans,” and the clue read: “A creed once used by the U.S. Army’s Special Forces mentions him, born [circa] 1732 [and] called ‘the father of guerrilla warfare.’”
Raut and He both offered the correct response: “Who is Francis Marion?” He emerged victorious with 17,333 points, followed by Pasco with 14,500 and Raut with 14,401.
Christopher Willard/Disney
Alas, the one semifinal match point Pasco earned for his second-place finish wasn’t enough to earn him a place in the finals. Instead, it’ll be Groce, He, and Raut — with 7, 6, and 2 semifinal match points, respectively — who compete in that deciding episode, scheduled to air on Tuesday, September 8, at 8/7c on ABC.
On Reddit, Pasco reflected on his semifinals loss and expressed gratitude for the competition and everyone involved. “Juveria [Zaheer, fellow Masters player] caught me when I was in the middle of my post-elimination green room daze, and she said the most helpful thing that’s stuck with me for the past month and a half: It’s easy to think of the breaks that didn’t go your way, but it really helps to focus on the breaks that did,” he wrote. ‘Getting to this episode depended on a million lucky breaks throughout my regular-season run, the [Tournament of Champions], and the quarterfinals here, and I’d be a fool to ask for one more.
Jeopardy! Masters Finals, Tuesday, September 8, 8/7c, ABC, Streaming Next Day on Hulu
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