‘Jeopardy!’ champ used technique created in ’80s

ST. LOUIS — Donn Rubin would like to set the record straight.

“I feel a bit cheated,” he says good-humoredly.

For weeks, all eyes were on James Holzhauer, whose stunning winning streak on “Jeopardy!” came to an end last week. Holzhauer used a technique fans of the show call the “Forrest Bounce,” named for Chuck Forrest, a winning contestant in the 1980s.

Typically, players work through a single category of clues. But Forrest’s technique involves bouncing around the board, choosing clues from different categories, to throw off competitors.

But even Forrest, 58, will tell you the technique is actually called the “Rubin Bounce,” so named for a friend who helped him practice back in the day.

That’s Donn Rubin. Rubin, 57, president and CEO of BIOSTL, feels that the media and the internet have taken off with the wrong name: Forrest’s.

“It’s not as if I’m claiming something that he claimed,” Rubin says. “If you were really a ‘Jeopardy!’ maven, you’d call it the Rubin Bounce, right?”

The story starts in 1985 at the University of Michigan. Rubin and Forrest were classmates in their first year of law school.

“Jeopardy!” advertised that it planned to come to Detroit to look for contestants. Rubin didn’t try out, but Forrest and another friend, Dave Abrams, did. The three watched the show together and then quizzed one another, using Rubin’s shoulders as buzzers. Rubin determined who buzzed in first depending on which shoulder got the first smack.

“I thought, ‘This is humiliating,’” Rubin says.

During the process, Rubin devised a strategy of bouncing around the board. It gave players the advantage of speed, knowing a fraction of a second sooner where to look on the board before your competitors. Rubin knew from his undergrad psychology class that memory works like a file drawer — with, say, baseball in one file, Shakespeare in another. While other competitors are still focused on the Shakespeare file, a Rubin bouncer is a bit ahead of the game, searching in the baseball file.

“So the Rubin Bounce is founded on some dime-store psychology, along with sort of my own sports instincts of keeping opponents off balance,” Rubin says.

They scrawled a contract on paper: If Forrest made it to “Jeopardy!,” he would give Rubin one half of 1% of all his winnings.

That summer, Rubin went backpacking in Europe. When his dad picked him up at the airport, he had news: Rubin had won $364. This meant that Forrest had been selected to play on “Jeopardy!” and had won $72,800 — at the time, the biggest “Jeopardy!” win. Players were limited to five days of play, so Forrest had competed and returned home.

Rubin didn’t collect his winnings right away.

“We eventually had a party,” Rubin says. “He paid me the $364 in pennies.”

The two are still friends. Forrest lives in a suburb of Rome and is a senior legal officer for the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Rubin would still like a bit more credit. He recently wrote a letter to the editor at the Economist after it published a story about Holzhauer and referenced the Forrest Bounce.

But otherwise, he’s happy: “I got my $364.”