Slate: All-time Jeopardy champ comes to defense of Arthur Chu

Regular viewers of the popular game show Jeopardy no doubt know the name Ken Jennings.

Jennings is the all-time Jeopardy winner with 74 wins to his credit.

Regular viewers of Jeopardy also likely have heard of Arthur Chu.

He’s only won four games but has caused a firestorm because he jumps around the game board at random in a bid to find the Daily Double.

It’s a chance for contestants to decide for themselves what they will wager on an answer.

Contestants use it when they are behind and in need of gaining ground on their competitors.

Others use it to distance themselves from the competition.

Although producers of Jeopardy encourage contestants to select answers from top to bottom in the order they appear in the category, Chu has pursued his own strategy. That has angered some long time viewers.

Jennings in a blog post for Slate has come to the defense of Chu.

There’s an obvious racial angle as well. Chu, a bespectacled man with rumpled shirts and a bowl cut, plays into every terrible Asian-nerd stereotype you’ve ever seen in an ’80s teen movie. Charmingly, he seems to enjoy the role of the scheming outsider. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, he pitted his own eccentric genius against me, “the angelic blond boy next door, the central casting ‘nice boy.’ ”

What do you think? Does Arthur Chu fit the nerdy stereotype? And is he being singled out because he’s Asian? Jennings says no. Read his blog in Slate and let AsAmNews know what you think.