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FMIA: Annual NFL Training Camp Tour Begins—And It’s Already In Jeopardy

NBC Sports

LAS VEGAS — I have led my football column with girls softball, and written way too many words about the death of my dogs, and the death of my brothers, but I must say this: I have never written about a “Jeopardy” contestant. And I certainly have never met my column subject at a Jack in the Box restaurant a few bounce passes from Jerry Tarkanian Way, 10 minutes west of the Las Vegas Strip.

James Holzhauer has had that effect on people over the past couple of months. We’re here because this Jack in the Box has a Coke Freestyle machine. (God, I’m old.) This machine has the diet grape soda Holzhauer loves, and he goes back for two refills in an hour. He’s a pretty simple man, ever after his 15 minutes of fame. It’s a placid hour for Holzhauer here, which has become rare for him. Holzhauer never was noticed, even in his adopted town of Vegas, till his magical two-month run on “Jeopardy,” when he won $2.46 million in 33 episodes. He started getting recognized in Prague, Barcelona and Lisbon because of his hot streak on the game show that’s been alive since before man walked on the moon. (True story: “Are you the Jeopardy guy?” he got asked on his European vacation in June. Several times.)

No one before or since ever won $100,000 on a “Jeopardy” episode. Holzhauer did it six times. He treated money unemotionally, and he had no fear about betting big at all times. Well, until his last bet, but there’s a story there, and I’ll get to that.

The NFL noticed.

“James Holzhauer? He’s awesome,” Aaron Rodgers told NBC’s Chris Simms recently. The Packers quarterback watches “Jeopardy” nightly.

The praise was cool for Holzhauer when I told him, but hardly overwhelming. “Aaron’s one of the best players ever on ‘Celebrity Jeopardy,’ for those who don’t watch,” Holzhauer said. “I know he’s a fan of the show. I’m a Bears fan though, so …”

The Lead: Holzhauer

As training camps open in full this week, I’ll detour to Holzhauer for a bit. You also come along on my tour of the new Raiders stadium in Las Vegas, with cool images from NBC Sports videographer Annie Koeblitz, then take you with me to Denver, for two days of Broncos training camp.

There’s a football element to Holzhauer, which is mostly why he’s in this space. He’s a big football bettor, and he’s so good at it that he’s got limits of how much he can put down on his bets at most Vegas sports books. So we talked “Jeopardy,” but we talked a lot of NFL too.

“If I had to pick a team or two to make it to the Super Bowl, win the Super Bowl, the boring answer is the Patriots and the Rams,” he told me, sitting a table away from an octogenarian couple. They were nibbling at chicken sandwiches before noon Sunday. “Everyone knows these guys are the best teams out there. But if you’re looking to invest in a futures ticket, I would say that the big thing to avoid is look away from the teams that have all the hype surrounding them. I can’t believe we live in a world where the Cleveland Browns are the most hyped team in the preseason. But I would say they’re probably the single worst bet to win the Super Bowl right now.”

Whoa.

Another story … I sat across the aisle from CBS broadcaster Andrew Catalon on my flight from Denver to Las Vegas late Saturday afternoon, and told him I was headed to Vegas to chat with Holzhauer. When I got off the plane, one of the Delta flight attendants said she overheard our conversation, and she was a big “Jeopardy” fan, and thought it was so cool that I’d have a chance to speak to him.

“Tell James we miss him,” the flight attendant said.

Apparently. The premier of “America’s Got Talent,” a pretty popular TV show, was seen bv 9.7 million viewers in late May. A week later, the climax Holzhauer episode—when he lost to a Chicago librarian in his final “Jeopardy” show—drew 14.5 million viewers. That’s more than watched a scintillating Chiefs-Broncos Monday-nighter in Week 3 last year, more than watched Brady-Luck on a Thursday night in Week 5 … and almost twice the audience of the Ravens-Chargers playoff-implication game on Saturday night in Week 16. I couldn’t look away. My brother-in-law, who is not a “Jeopardy” fan, somehow got hooked during the Holzhauer run and watched so intently that he’d call or text us after most episodes. All of it blew Holzhauer away.



“A lot of things in my life have changed,” he said. “I really underestimated how many people are paying attention to Jeopardy and what’s out there. I figured, maybe one in five, one in 10 people would recognize me. But no, it’s everywhere, especially in Las Vegas. I think the city’s kind of embraced me which is good. There’s a lot of attention on me which can be good, it can be bad. Sometimes my daughter’s acting up in public and I really wish I could become anonymous for a few minutes.”

On the show, I thought it was interesting to watch Holzhauer play the board from the bottom, making the big bets first instead of working up from easy to hard. It was cool to watch him bet absurd amounts all the time. “It’s a lot easier when it’s me doing the work than when I’m watching a player fumble away my bet at the last second,” he said. “You get the idea that money comes and goes especially in this line of work I’m in. I’m a pro sports gambler. You have winning days and you have losing days. But you know if you’ve got the right strategy, you’re going to get it in the end.

“I started taking the online tests to get on the show about 13 years ago. If they had called me that first year, honestly, I probably would’ve just been another forgettable contestant. As time went on, it kind of felt like, ‘Hey wait a minute. I only got one shot at this, maybe I need to really maximize that one shot.’ Do everything I can right. Take a little time, do my studying, know what I need to know and develop a really good game plan going in and just think, How would a gambler approach Jeopardy to maximize his winnings? That was basically how I was playing up there.”

On the last show, Holzhauer did something that appeared to be wholly uncharacteristic. He went light on his “Final Jeopardy” bet. “A modest one [bet] for the first time!” host Alex Trebek exclaimed. I was stunned too. I just figured, This guy’s human. He wanted to go back to his normal life. He’d won enough, and it was time for someone else.

Nope.

“Certainly not,” he said, cradling his diet grape soda. “I certainly did not want to lose. I would still be playing if they let me.”

Here’s how it went down: Entering “Final Jeopardy,” Emma Boettcher had $26,600, Holzhauer had $23,400 and Jay Sexton, the third contestant, had $11,000. If Holzhauer bet it all and won, Boettcher could beat him. He knew that. She knew that. She was really smart. He knew that too. So he set his sights on making sure no matter what, he would beat the third-place guy. Holzhauer bet $1,399 and America gasped. Well, America in the King living room, at least.

Holzhauer: “Some people said, ‘Oh you know, you couldn’t even have covered Emma if she’d bet zero.’ I thought there was a very low chance she was gonna bet zero in this spot. Even though she had never met me before this episode aired, she’d heard that I was a 32-time champion. She knew she was gonna have to shoot for the stars to beat me which is why she went big on those Daily Doubles bets [in ‘Double Jeopardy’]. And I thought to myself there was maybe like a 5 percent chance she’s not gonna bet big enough to cover me if I go all in. What I really need to worry about is the situation where she misses and then I need to worry that the third-place contestant isn’t gonna be able to double up and overtake me. The small bet was the way to protect against that. If I had gotten it right and Emma had gotten it wrong, and bet zero, then oh well. She played poker better than I did I guess.”

I said: “As I look at the science of it, if you had bet your max, you could’ve ended up at exactly $46,800. She ended up betting $20,201. So she ended up with $1 more than you could’ve won at your max.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“By her getting that, there was no way you could’ve beaten her anyway,” I said.

“Exactly. And you know, maybe there’s some small chance that she says, OK, this guy’s a pro gambler, maybe he knows that I would do this so maybe I should try to outfox him by making a small bet. But you know, 95 percent of the time, the player in first is gonna make that big bet and you just have to react accordingly.”



Life goes on. And football betting goes on. One of the bets Holzhauer likes this year, and every recent year, is a futures bet on the two teams with the playoff byes. “If you dig deep into the numbers,” he said, “you can get an idea of which teams have the inside track at the bye weeks and the tiebreakers come into play. There are times where there’s a decent chance that two teams will end up tied for the second and third spot, but one team has the tiebreaker locked up and you don’t always see that reflected in the odds … The one seed, just by virtue of having to play only two home games, would win the conference about 35 percent of the time and make it to the Super Bowl. The two team makes it about 29 percent, and the three seed makes it like 11 percent. That’s just an enormous gap between the two and the three. At least the past five or six years, something like that, you keep seeing the one and two seeds advancing to the Super Bowl.”

One other thing: Bet on Sunday nights for the week ahead. “If they put the odds up for next week’s football games on a Sunday night, there’s not a lot of thought that goes into that,” he said. “But you give people a week to bet on this, the odds are going to be a lot more efficient.” Oh, and one other thing after that: Bet on college football. There’s not as much attention paid to those games.

Before he got his last diet grape refill at the Coke Freestyle machine, Holzhauer told me about the time in his life when he was told he couldn’t do something. And damn if he didn’t sound like a undrafted rookie who’d been doubted, and then rushed for 1,000 yards or caught 80 balls. Seriously: This line coming up made Holzhauer sound like Broncos running back Phillip Lindsay, ignored in the draft and then rushing for 1,037 yards as a rookie, ninth in the league last year.

“This is kind of a thing throughout my life,” Holzhauer said. “When I was 10, I got the, You’re wasting your time studying sports statistics. When I was 20, it was, You’re wasting your time gambling, playing poker.’ When I was 24, it was, You’re wasting your time gambling on sports. Then when I was 30, it’s, You’re wasting your time studying for Jeopardy. I hope I’ve proven all these things wrong.”