Alex: “You know Roger, you could set a new one day record.”

Roger: “What’s the old one?”

Roger Craig should have known the answer, because he held the old record.

Craig says it works like Moneyball — a reference to the book and movie about the statistical techniques used by legendary Oakland Athletics coach Billy Beane to build a winning baseball team. Craig’s system also relied heavily on statistics.

“I actually downloaded this site called the Jeopardy! Archive, which is a fan-created site of all the questions and answers that are on the show.”

“Something like 211,000 questions and answers that have appeared on Jeopardy!,” says Esquire writer Chris Jones, a self-proclaimed “game-show nerd” who’s familiar with Craig’s tactics.

Using data-mining and text-clustering techniques, Craig grouped questions by category to figure out which topics were statistically common — and which weren’t.

“Obviously it’s impossible to know everything,” Jones says. “So he was trying to decide: What things did he need to know? He prepared himself in a way that I think is probably more rigorous than any other contestant.”

You can find the full article here, and the link comes to us via Tyler Cowen. To see Roger at work play, check out these clips: