This post is primarily going to point you to a few items that will get you into a good, informed mood for watching the Battle of the Decades the next two weeks.
First, if for some reason you weren't able to see my first-round game, the SportsCenter highlights version is included in this video, along with an interview they did after I won:
I'm glad Keith Williams started his site "The Final Wager," as it saves me some explaining. He has a nice summary of how Jeopardy!'s tournament structure works, so if you haven't followed one of the tournaments before, check it out: http://thefinalwager.co/2013/11/07/jeopardy-tournaments-structure-and-wild-cards/
The most important thing to keep in mind for this quarterfinal round is that you don't have to win to move on: there are also 4 wild card spots.
Also, as Keith notes, the contestants aren't allowed to watch the games prior to the one they play in, so are sequestered in the green room. During my ToC, I was in there until the Thursday game, and it wasn't all that much fun just sitting back there being nervous. This time I was fortunate to get called for the Tuesday game, so I only had to watch the first 45 minutes or so of "Sixteen Candles." (They give a small selection of DVDs to watch, and I don't recall why we chose this movie...I think I voted for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" but this won.)
I had conducted a similar analysis of the wild-card cutoffs prior to this tournament, but I was only considering ToCs (since the final clues seem to often be much easier in the college and teen tournaments, and especially the teen tournament) and I only considered the post-doubled dollar value era. The median cutoff in these tournaments was $9900 and the max was $13000. In contrast, the Million Dollar Masters tournament in 2002 (probably the closest analog to this one) had a cutoff of $17,400. These are numbers I certainly had in mind going into the tournament, but there's a lot of variation in where the cut falls that can be affected by a single really hard (or really easy) FJ.
You can check out the matchups for the quarterfinal round here: http://www.jeopardy.com/minisites/battleofthedecades/finals/. Going along with the "Battle of the Decades" theme, each game has one representative from each of the three decades.
Keith has some predictions for the quarterfinal round on his site as well: http://thefinalwager.co/2014/05/04/jeopardy-battle-of-the-decades-quarterfinal-match-ups/ We'll see soon enough how good they were! As you can see, my opponents are Tom Nosek and Pam Mueller -- more about them on Tuesday. And as you can also see, there are no easy matchups in this tournament: what an incredible collection of the best J! players in the show's history.
During the taping of the tournament, there were other camera-people following us around almost all the time: in the hotel lobby, on the bus ride to the studio, in the green room, and so forth. We all wondered what the result of all that filming might be, and it turned out to be this documentary-style YouTube video, which is really, really cool. I feel very lucky and honored to have been a part of this!
(A little even-farther-behind-the-scenes tidbit: I lost badly in that poker game in the green room. Fortunately we weren't playing for real money.)
The first game in the quarterfinals features Leszek Pawlowicz (80s), Robin Carroll (90s), and Roger Craig (00s). Three ToC winners. Leszek was once referred to as the "Michael Jordan of game shows". Robin won the International Championship in addition to the ToC. And Roger holds the one-day winnings record and the record for highest average winnings per game. I haven't seen this game (I was watching "Sixteen Candles," you'll recall) and am really looking forward to watching it!
