What it takes to be a Jeopardy pro - and how you can become one

The greatest Jeopardy player of all time has been crowned, and it has again brought the contestants’ incredible memory and recall abilities into the spotlight.

As a contestant on Jeopardy, one must be able to maintain composure while recalling an immense number of facts on a variety of topics.

For the show’s recent Greatest of All Time - or GOAT - competition, the three Jeopardy champions known for having the most impressive ability to correctly answer the show’s questions were brought back: James Holzhauer, who won the most money in a single game in 2019, Rutter, who has won the most money ever, and Jennings, who won the most regular-season games in a row with a total of 74.

After a tense week of competition, Jennings, a 45-year-old software engineer walked away with the grand prize of $1m - and the title of GOAT.

For viewers, the competition, the sheer volume of knowledge and the subsequent defeat was awe-inspiring.

“Thoroughly enjoyed the Jeopardy Greatest Champions competition,” one person wrote on Twitter. “The knowledge all three contestants have and can recall is incredibly impressive.”

Another said: “It blows my mind that the contestants on Jeopardy know all this random knowledge.”

But it isn’t just studying a wide range of topics that makes you a potential Jeopardy pro, as memory and ability to quickly recall facts comes into play - a fact that publishing house Random House jokingly pointed out.

“Wanna know what made those Jeopardy contestants so smart?” the publishing house tweeted. “Reading lots and lots of books. And hard work. And a genetic disposition for memorising large quantities of information. But also books.”

Interestingly, it's not clear that a good memory is something you're born with - which leaves open the possibility that you can train your brain to be better.

Samuel J Gershman, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, told The Independent it is hard to judge whether memory is a genetic skill because “it is difficult to know if a person’s superior memory is due to their experience, genes, or some interaction of the two”.

“For a complex cognitive function like memory, it is likely to depend on an interaction between experience and genes,” he explained.

According to Professor Gershman, the idea that it is possible to increase memory capabilities is evident in examples of those “with extraordinary memory”.

"The most famous account of one such individual is ‘The Mind of a Mnemonist’ by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria,” he told us. “But there are also examples like Joshua Foer's ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’, in which a person with unremarkable memory can be trained to win memory contests.”

Mr Gershman points to one study conducted by Chase and Simon (1973) on chess memory in experts and novices that proves memory can be learned.

According to Mr Gershman, the “study found (not surprisingly) that chess experts have superior memory for board configurations than novices. However, more surprisingly, the experts were only better when the board configurations displayed positions from actual games.”

“If the pieces were randomly arranged, they were no better than novices,” he continued. “Simon argued that the difference between experts and novices lies in the mental library of meaningful units that can act as schemas for efficiently storing information. A bit like how egg cartons have the right shape to carry eggs: expert memory consists in acquiring the right cartons for holding memories.”

Previous studies have also found that it is possible to improve memory skills through certain strategies.

One such strategy, developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans for learning “complex material like long speeches,” is still used today, Mr Gershman told us.

“The techniques used today are not all that different from what were used in ancient times. Of particular importance is the 'method of loci', which consists of exploiting the high fidelity of human spatial memory,” he said. “By attaching arbitrary objects to spatial locations in a familiar environment, the objects can be effectively remembered by walking through the environment and picking up the objects as you go. Luria observed that the memory expert he studied also used a spatial technique for memorising arbitrary material."

Another memory-boosting strategy is to overlearn something through a variety of contexts - as memories are always stored with context such as where the learner was, and how the memory was acquired, according to Michael J Kahana, a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology.

Speaking to the Seattle Times, Mr Kahana explained that if you reinforce your knowledge through a variety of contexts, when a question about the topic is asked, there is an increased chance that it matches the information stored - meaning you are then able to retrieve it faster.

Thinking of knowledge relevant to a category beforehand also increases the likelihood of knowing more about the topic when the time comes, according to Mr Kahana - a skill that is especially useful for Jeopardy contestants.

For example, if a Jeopardy category is about US state capitals, thinking of the ones you know when the category is first introduced means you'll be able to recall them faster later on.

If increasing your ability to remember seems too tedious, you can always attempt Holzhauer’s winning technique - which has a lot to do with betting strategy.

“All good professional gamblers are selectively aggressive,” the 34-year-old previously told NPR. “You need to pick your spots and bet big when you identify them.

“That’s basically my Jeopardy strategy in a nutshell.”