Arthur Chu was sitting in the green room with other Jeopardy! contestants.

It was November and inside Sony Pictures Studios, just outside of Los Angeles, an orientation meeting was underway. The dozen or so people assembled in the room just before 8 a.m. had broached the inner sanctum of television’s brainiest franchise. They had moved from the online test to the written test, the screen test, the interview, a mock game and, finally, had been summoned from the waiting pool.

Getting on Jeopardy! is the game show equivalent of joining the Bilderberg Group. Many try, few do. But for Chu, who first applied four years ago, this was no time to blink or exhale, not with a head full of bubbling strategy.

MORE:

Most of us think of Jeopardy! as a trivia game. From world geography to U.S. presidents, science to literature, it’s what you know that matters. But with only a month to prepare, Chu decided to think of Jeopardy! in a different way: it’s how you play the game that matters. That simple decision would soon make him one of the most polarizing players in the show’s 30-year history.

During the meeting, show handlers gave the jittery charges a pep talk. They encouraged the players to cycle through each category, from top to bottom. This “traditional” style simplifies life for production staff, the writers, host Alex Trebek and, most important, the 25 million viewers at home who watch the syndicated show each week.

Then the handlers said a few past contestants had “jumped” around the big blue board. While bouncing was not ideal, they added almost with an invisible sneer, it was also not against the rules. It was acceptable. They even named names.

Sitting there, Chu didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He probably knew more about the history of bouncing than any other contestant in the room. He had spent hours analyzing the strategy, dissecting the games of Jeopardy! superstars, including David Madden, who went on a 19-game winning streak in 2005; Roger Craig, who in 2010 set the one-day record with a $77,000 win; and Chuck Forrest, the 1986 Tournament of Champions winner and pioneer of jumping around the board, which is why enthusiasts call it the “Forrest Bounce.”

Chu was ready to jump. What he wasn’t ready for was the blowback.

“I was expecting a bit of a negative reaction when I did it,” says Chu, who returns to the show on Monday to defend as the four-day champion with $102,800. “I just didn’t expect that there would be this much attention paid to the negative reaction, that it would become a story in and of itself. I don’t know why that happened.”

When his first match aired on Jan. 28 — the regular season was on hiatus over the past three weeks for tournament play — Chu inadvertently set off radioactive blasts in living rooms across North America. The mushroom clouds drifted over social media as users flocked to Twitter to rail against his disheveled mien (“looks like he was hit by a car”), his perceived inhumanity (“despicable human being”), his fashion sense (“fix your tie you bum”), his body (“looks like he just ate a pizza in bed”), his clicker etiquette (“he’s acting like he’s on ecstasy pushing the buzzer a mile a minute”), and his skull grooming (“he stole Kim Jong-un’s haircut”).

People, this is not Jersey Shore . This is Jeopardy!

“My wife was shocked by how many negative tweets there were as people were live-tweeting it and getting so mad at me for whatever reason,” says Chu. “Then I started responding to them. Then it became a conversation. Then it became I think a story about me versus this gathering storm of angry Jeopardy! fans.”

The grievances were endless.

Chu was called a “thug,” a “robot” a “bad sport” and “disrespectful,” apparently for glowering at rivals and failing to smile or clap. Not that any this was obvious to those present during the taping.

“I never felt disrespected by Arthur,” says Don Gwinn, a special education teacher from Illinois who lost to Chu in the Jan. 31 game. “I think people sometimes are a little put off by something that’s different. But doing things differently, in a way that works better, that’s interesting to me. I like that.”

Not everyone did. Cue more negative reaction.

Soon after that match aired, a narrative drumbeat — “evil genius cracks the code on Jeopardy! and infuriates viewers with unorthodox play” — pounded its way into the echo chamber that is the mainstream media.

Through the unlikeliest of Trojan horses, Jeopardy! , Chu stormed popular culture. He’s been the subject of dozens of stories. He’s appeared on CNN, ABC and Fox News, where bewildered hosts often ask him to explain himself, as if he’s just robbed a bank using telekinesis.

Lost in the reaction to the reaction were his actions.

While others have bounced — framed photos of renowned jumpers hang in the studio’s Hall of Fame — Chu is like a rubber ball inside a paint-shaking machine. He makes wagers that seem insolent or slapdash — $5 on a Daily Double here, everything on another one there, twice betting to tie during Final Jeopardy. But all he’s really doing is following the algebraic wisdom of the number-crunching demigods embedded inside the show’s online community.

Chu is not an inventor. He is a creation.

Then there’s the top half of the board, which might as well be festooned with explosives. Chu stays clear and focuses on the higher-value clues down below where the Daily Doubles usually lurk, seeking them out like a heat-seeking missile.

“Arthur is much more aggressive in hunting the DDs,” says Chuck Forrest, who came up with the bounce idea in 1985 while in law school in Michigan and who now lives in Italy where he’s a lawyer with the International Fund for Agricultural Development. “I mainly bounced from one category to the next, but I didn’t jump down to the lower rows. I think this is the first time that someone has gone digging down at the bottom, leaving the upper clues unselected.”

“I jumped around a little bit but I only did it at certain points,” says Rogers Craig, now the director of Data Science and Predictive Analytics at Penton in New York City. “Arthur jumps around a lot more. And he does it the whole episode.”

That’s Chu, the player. Which brings us back to Chu, the TV caricature.

When the game is on, he emits the kind of aloof, vaguely menacing gaze you might expect from Anna Wintour in the front row of a clumsy Prada show. He clicks his buzzer so rapidly, so repetitively, it’s as if his thumb is operating independently of his body and is powered by metallic hydrogen.

When making his board requests to Trebek, Chu often shortens categories and dollar values to keep things moving. Why say “six hundred” when you can say “six”? It’s like he’s speed-dating the questions and none are worthy of his love. He also speaks quickly. Very quickly. Veryveryquickly . So quickly, it feels like there was a technical malfunction and the poor guy was accidentally locked in fast-forward.

But it’s the bouncing that seems to grate the most.

Unfortunately, since there are more important things to study like medicine and climate, there is no scientific literature on the neurological effects of bouncing. But the advantage, in short, is the jumper knows what’s coming next.

Chu is “breaking the set” and possibly interfering with the memory and recall of his opponents, who now must handle the added cognitive burden of unpredictability. He is in the lead. Opponents are one step behind. Viewers are bumping into walls.

“This is akin to creative problem solving where the unconscious processing — that is, the incubation — is done more offline until a solution pops into awareness,” says Rex Jung, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico. “Whether there is scientific validity to bouncing – who knows? But it does map onto some of the ideas we scientists are playing around with.”

What it also does, very clearly, is cause mass exasperation.

One of the chief grumbles about Chu is that he’s making the show unwatchable by making the game impossible to follow. On this point, there may be some validity.

“When I watched my own shows, when I was jumping around, I got confused myself,” says Craig. “I didn’t even know what category the clue was in. And I was the guy who did it. So I understand how it makes the viewing experience not ideal. It can confuse a lot of home viewers. It confused me. And I was the one who was playing.”

If bouncing confused a computer science grad who once downloaded a website containing over 200,000 questions and answers from the show and who then proceeded to write a software program to look for patterns and compute frequencies, imagine what it’s doing to your great aunt in Florida.

So far, Chu tells me, the show has not suggested he knock it off. Mind you, he’s only won four games. If the streak continues, it’s possible he will soon enter the show’s communal dressing room to find two burly men in sunglasses waiting with a whispered message: “Alex says, ‘Start at the top.’”

David Madden was a graduate student living in Berlin in 2005 when he was tapped to be a contestant. While preparing, he continued to follow Jeopardy! by calling his folks in New Jersey, who’d place the phone next to their TV each weeknight, a long-distance workaround made feasible by a 1-cent-per-minute calling plan.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“I like anyone who is a bit of an iconoclast and who thinks for himself,” says Madden, the founder and executive director of The International History Bee and Bowl who is in China this weekend, organizing quiz tournaments in Shanghai and Beijing.

“The show has its own prerogatives and that is all well and good. But I found it practically condescending when the show — after I had been using this tactic successfully for a number of games — came up to me and said, ‘You really should start at the top. It allows you to get a better sense of the category.’”

All of this raises a larger question: Why don’t more contestants bounce their way to success? Why has this strategy not caught on during the show’s 30 seasons?

“The truth is, it’s really hard to bounce around,” says former college champ Keith Williams, who now runs The Final Wager , an influential blog that discusses optimal betting strategies on the show by making wagering and game theory accessible to those who may not know a Nash equilibrium from a backward induction.

“You’re trying to throw people off. But at the same time, you can throw yourself off. Personally, I tried bouncing around in one game and I found it impossible. I went back to straight down the board with my tail between my legs.”

“Most contestants do not come from a psychological or cognitive background,” adds Ogi Ogas, a Boston neuroscientist who has appeared on Jeopardy! , Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Grand Slam . “That’s another layer of preparation and reflection involved. It’s hard enough just to memorize trivia. The problem with bouncing is that it puts a cognitive load on you too.”

So if anyone is worried about a coming plague of prime-time jumpers, those fears may be unfounded for the same reason you don’t see a lot of people juggling machetes while riding around town on unicycles.

“I can say with reasonable confidence that you are not going to see a groundswell of contestants attempt to copy Arthur’s strategy,” says Steve Beverly, an associate professor at Union University in Tennessee and a game show historian. “Most people just can’t play the game this way.”

Or as Williams frames it: “Arthur is a machine.”

It’s hard to accurately gauge just how much emotional distress this machine has inflicted on viewers because, as one Jeopardy! publicist tells me, the show does not compile complaints. This seems odd. But for some perspective, let’s remember: the Culver City switchboard once lit up with feverish protest after Trebek shaved off his moustache.

With his six-figure winnings so far, and given the TV caricature, you might expect Chu, who just turned 30, to have big plans. You know, like build an army of bespectacled robots that are programmed to irritate random strangers. Or maybe use the money to run for public office so he can pass a law against smiling.

This is where the gap between the TV caricature and the real person becomes an absurd chasm. Unlike the super-smart, chuckle-free nerd behind the podium, Chu is a bit of a goof. He’s dabbled in stand-up comedy and improv. While this Jeopardy! stuff was blowing up this month, he’d make the short trek from Cleveland to Akron, finding solace on the community theatre stage.

The guy who allegedly has ice water for blood also has a funny bone. And a heart.

Chu plans to donate money to help raise awareness for fibromyalgia, a poorly understood disease that can cause widespread pain and fatigue. His wife, Eliza Blair, suffers from the condition. This is one reason they don’t go out very much, why they’re usually at home in the glowing company of Netflix or the musty presence of books borrowed from the library.

One suspects they’ll be able to buy a few hardcovers now.

As for how long his run will last, nobody will say. Jeopardy! treats such matters with the same level of secrecy the CIA does with black-ops work. If Chu wins on Monday, he’ll qualify for the Tournament of Champions. If he doesn’t, he may go down in history as the most over-analyzed Jeopardy! contestant of all time.

If that happens, he may grapple with a deeper remorse down the line.

You can’t begrudge Arthur Chu for wanting to win money. You can’t. He and Eliza graduated from Swarthmore College in the midst of a recession. Their adult lives have been punctuated by financial insecurity, a reality that’s affected everything from where they live to the children they intensely want but doubt they can afford.

So more income, yes, this makes perfect sense.

But you can wonder if Arthur Chu, a compliance analyst by day, has somehow botched a chance to charm the world given his own career aspirations.

“This was something I was worried about,” he says one morning. “Here I am presenting myself as a voiceover artist and saying I’m an aspiring actor. And yet all of my preparation for Jeopardy! was not about chatting with Alex or being charismatic on TV. It was about winning the game.”

There is a pause.

“Then I watched myself and thought, ‘Yeah, I am kind of robotic. I am kind of hyper-intense.’ Because I kind of had to be. Jeopardy! is really hard and it’s really stressful. So in a sense, I kind of sort of regret that I was so focused on getting all that money while I was up there that the side that America sees is the side that’s a Jeopardy! machine.”

But just as the game can change with one true Daily Double, Chu’s narrative may change as early as next week. Those kind of sort of regrets can fade.

After his first four shows were in the can, Chu was stopped by Maggie Speak, the show’s official contestant producer and unofficial den mother. She mentioned his demeanor, his intensity. She looked troubled. Then she politely encouraged him to lighten up a bit, starting with Monday’s show.

“I did try to take her advice to heart,” Chu tells me. “We’ll see if I had any success being any more charming and likable when my next game airs.”

Whatever happens, this much is certain: when future Jeopardy! contestants gather in the green room, and handlers wax ambiguously about notorious jumpers, Chu’s name will be mentioned.