Mattea Roach and Andrew He finished the Jeopardy Masters Semi-Finals in a tie. Mattea Roach advanced thanks to a complex tie-breaker. What are the odds that the contestants who advanced to the finals would be decided by a tie-breaker?

It turns out that 18.5% of the possible outcomes would have required using a tie-breaker.

This video explains the math behind it all and the Microsoft Excel model used to make the calculation. To download the workbook: https://www.mrexcel.com/youtube/SUXTNAp4XgU/

Table of Contents
(0:00) Spoiler Alert
(0:21) Tie game is like kissing your sister
(1:06) Odds of a tie in Jeopardy Masters Semi-Finals
(1:33) Jeopardy Masters Tie-Breaker Rules
(1:50) Mattea Montage was foreshadowing the tie
(2:36) Bookmark MrExcel.com for future Excel questions
(2:53) The Excel model
(3:05) COMBIN(4,3) games
(3:20) Pairings easy way
(3:43) Six ways a 3-player game can finish
(4:05) Full outer Join
(4:28) 6^4 or 1296 outcomes
(4:43) Base-6 count up
(5:19) Solving for 1 outcome
(6:15) HSTACK and TRANSPOSE
(7:05) Go To Special Formulas
(7:19) What-If, Data Table to repeat logic for all scenarios
(8:05) Sorting columns high to low with SORT
(8:37) All possible outcomes with UNIQUE
(8:45) Finding Ties
(9:10) Converting percentage to Fraction in Excel
(10:24) Almost 20% chance of Tie