James Holzhauer’s amazing 32 game win streak on Jeopardy ended Monday.
Going into this game, he had cumulative winnings of $2,462,216 on the show — only about $60,000 short of what Ken Jennings had won during his 74-game streak in 2004. Had Holzhauer won Monday it’s likely that he would have broken Jennings’s record, given that Holzhauer had been averaging about $75,000 in winnings a night.
Monday’s episode outcome leaked over the weekend. Andy Saunders, who runs the blog The Jeopardy Fan, said that each night’s episode of the show is typically distributed to local TV stations the weekday before — meaning that Monday’s episode would have been in the hands of countless producers by last Friday evening. So it was an employee of a local station who put the entirety of the episode online over the weekend. Rumors say that an investigation is currently underway, and will include criminal/civil prosecutions for the leaker.
Holzhauer’s loss actually took place well before Friday evening — it was taped on March 12, 2019.
Jeopardy’s record for the longest winning streak is held by Ken Jennings, who competed on the show from June 2 through November 30, 2004, winning 74 matches before being defeated by Nancy Zerg in his 75th appearance. He amassed $2,522,700 over his 75 episodes, for an average of $33,636 per episode.
The record holder for lifetime Jeopardy-related winnings is Brad Rutter, who has won a cumulative total of $4,355,102 across five episodes of the regular series (when the rules stipulated that a contestant who won five consecutive days retired undefeated) and six Jeopardy tournaments and events (winning four of those specials).
The holder of the all-time record for single-day winnings on Jeopardy is James Holzhauer. Holzhauer first surpassed the record of $77,000, held since 2010 by Roger Craig, when he earned $110,914 on the episode that aired on April 9, 2019. Holzhauer pushed his own single-day record to $131,127 on the episode that aired April 17, 2019 by amassing $71,114 over the episode’s first two rounds, then successfully wagering an additional $60,013 in the Final Jeopardy round.
Emma Boettcher, the 27-year-old University of Chicago librarian ,beat Holzhauer, by racking up $46,801, for the win.
From ChicagoTribune.com:
But Boettcher, who has been watching “Jeopardy!” for a long time and tracking her scores at home in a notebook for five years, already had a strategy to go for higher-value clues and find the “Daily Doubles.” Holzhauer got the “Daily Double” in the first round right, and Boettcher nailed the two “Daily Doubles” in the second round.
She led Holzhauer by $3,200 going into “Final Jeopardy” and she was “delighted” to see the final clue was about William Shakespeare’s era. Boettcher knew it was her category — she was an English major at Princeton University and her undergraduate thesis was on Shakespeare’s plays.
Susan Saunders 6/5/19
