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    Amy Schneider Becomes First Woman to Surpass $1 Million on ‘Jeopardy!’

    Schneider, a software engineering manager, is the fourth contestant in the game show’s history to reach the milestone.Now that Amy Schneider has experienced what it’s like to dominate on the “Jeopardy!” stage, she wonders why streaks like hers don’t happen more often.Once you get used to the buzzer and the cadence of the clues, she explained in a recent interview, you have a significant advantage over a candidate who comes in cold.And Schneider has certainly settled into her groove.On Friday, she became the fourth contestant and the first woman in the history of “Jeopardy!” to surpass $1 million in winnings during regular-season play. She did so on her 28th game, a runaway in which she won over $42,000, continuing a streak that has captured the attention of game-show fans across the country.“It’s not a sum of money I ever anticipated would be associated with my name,” Schneider, a 42-year-old software engineering manager who lives in Oakland, Calif., said in a news release.Schneider, who grew up watching “Jeopardy!” at home with her parents and in eighth grade was voted most likely to appear on the show, has had a whirlwind of a week — for good reasons and bad. On Monday, she tweeted that she had been robbed, losing her credit cards, identification and phone. (As a result, she said she would need to pause her detailed recaps of each game on social media).The $1 million mark is a rare one to reach — Ken Jennings was the first player to do so, in 2004, 30 games into his record 74-game run. But fans have gotten increasingly used to seeing contestants achieve it. James Holzhauer became the second person to hit $1 million during his 32-game streak in 2019. Three months ago, Matt Amodio surpassed $1 million as well, amassing $1.5 million before he was beat after 38 wins.The recent pattern of streaks on the show has fueled theorizing among fans watching from their couches and among members of the show’s production team. Some have postulated that pandemic-related delays in production have benefited some contestants by giving them more time to study. Some point to the increasingly vast amount of resources online. Or, it could just be chance.“To some extent, I think it’s just got to be a statistical fluke,” Schneider said.Schneider is doubtful that the extra time she had to prepare during the pandemic helped her significantly. Ultimately, she said, it’s not something you can cram for.“To be good at ‘Jeopardy!’,” she said, “you just have to live a life where you’re learning stuff all the time.” More

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    Matt Amodio Beats James Holzhauer’s Streak on ‘Jeopardy!’

    The Yale Ph.D. student, who is studying computer science, has won 33 games in a row, making him No. 2 on the game show’s hall of fame roster for longest streaks.Two years ago, one “Jeopardy!” contestant, James Holzhauer, captured the imaginations of game-show fans who watched nightly to see his lightning-fast buzzer reflexes and risky bets.Holzhauer’s 32-game run put his face (with his trademark strained smile) all over the “Jeopardy!” hall of fame. But on Friday, another contestant, Matt Amodio, a Ph.D. student at Yale, won his 33rd game, smashing through Holzhauer’s streak and taking his place as No. 2 in the record book for most games won in a row. The first spot is held by Ken Jennings, who won 74 games and ultimately became a consulting producer on the show.Amodio’s victory brought him to $1.27 million in total winnings, and he has a long way to go to beat Holzhauer’s $2.46 million. With such an extraordinary total, Holzhauer was poised during his 33rd episode to possibly surpass Jennings’s record of $2.52 million won during the regular season, but he was bested by Emma Boettcher, a librarian who wrote her master’s paper on “Jeopardy!”The fanfare around Amodio — some on social media are calling it the “Amodio Rodeo”— is perhaps a relief to the people behind the game show, who have been struggling to find a replacement for Alex Trebek, the beloved host who died last year. The show’s former executive producer, Mike Richards, was announced as the new host, then swiftly stepped down after The Ringer reported on offensive comments he had made on a podcast he created several years ago. The actress Mayim Bialik and Jennings are hosting episodes until the end of the year.“Jeopardy!” superfans are also rejoicing at the shift in focus from behind-the-scenes drama to what’s actually playing out onstage.Andy Saunders, who runs the website The Jeopardy! Fan, said Amodio and Holzhauer have similar approaches to the game: In the first round, they both start by tackling all of the $1,000 clues, then try to find the Daily Double, to double their winnings and gain a significant lead over the other competitors. Where the two diverge, Saunders said, is in the next round, where Holzhauer tended to inflate his score by betting large sums on the Daily Double clues.“Where James might bet $13,000 or $14,000, Matt is betting $5,000 or $6,000,” he said in an interview. “And that’s pretty much the difference in their scores.”Saunders thinks that Holzhauer’s aggressive strategy comes from a higher level of confidence that he is going to give the correct response. Based on Saunders’s statistics, Holzhauer tended to get three or four more correct answers than Amodio does each episode, providing more of a foundation for that confidence. The willingness to bet big could also have come from Holzhauer’s background as a sports bettor, where he grew comfortable putting down large sums of money on games.That difference in strategy makes it unlikely that Amodio, who is studying computer science, will start to best Holzhauer in the category of single-game winnings, which Holzhauer completely dominates.However, if Amodio keeps up his dominance, he has a chance at beating Jennings’s 74-game streak from 2004 and setting a record for all-time winnings in regular-season play.Amodio tends to be humble about comparisons to the “Jeopardy!” all-stars, saying in a news release that it was “surreal” to be beside Jennings in the hall of fame and, on Twitter, writing that Holzhauer is better than him “in literally every way.”Amodio’s star turn, only two years after Holzhauer rose to fame, has raised the question: Is “Jeopardy!” getting easier, or are players just getting better?Saunders, who tracks the results of every game, thinks it’s that players are getting better. He said he doesn’t see substantial changes in the content of the clues but, instead, thinks that contestants have taken note of Holzhauer’s winning strategy and are taking advantage of a vast internet archive of past “Jeopardy!” clues to prepare.As for Jennings’s record, Amodio still has to double his streak, then win nine more games, to beat it.“Let’s look at that in another month,” Saunders said. “Then maybe Ken should start to get worried.” More

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    Matt Amodio, the Latest ‘Jeopardy!’ Star, Breaks $1 Million

    The Ph.D. student in computer science at Yale is only the third contestant to reach that level of winnings.“Jeopardy!” has another seemingly unstoppable sensation.On Friday, Matt Amodio, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Yale, won his 28th game, amassing over $1 million in winnings. He is only the third contestant to do so in regular-season gameplay, after Ken Jennings, the contestant-turned-producer for the show, and James Holzhauer, the phenom who captured audiences with his winning streak in 2019.Amodio’s success is no doubt a welcome distraction for the game show, which has been struggling to permanently fill the role of host after Alex Trebek died last year. Some of the shows during Amodio’s streak were hosted by Mike Richards, who was then the show’s executive producer. (Richards was named host of the show — but then stepped down after The Ringer reported that he had made offensive comments on a podcast taped years ago.) The actress Mayim Bialik, who had already been chosen to host the show’s prime-time specials, took over in his place. (She and Jennings will host the show until the end of the year.)Amodio — whose winnings currently stand at $1,004,001 — researches artificial intelligence at Yale and has said that he has been watching “Jeopardy!” since before he was “even able to understand the words.”He is a reliably dominant player. According to the website The Jeopardy! Fan, he gets more than 90 percent of clues that he answers correct and is first to the buzzer more than half of the time. In betting, he tends not to take as many risks as Holzhauer, who surpassed $1 million in half the time as Amodio.But there is another way Amodio can surpass his record-breaking rivals. If he wins five more games, he will surpass Holzhauer’s 32-game streak; he has much longer to go on Jennings, who won 74 games. Because the game show is taped ahead of time (Friday’s episode was taped a month ago), it is possible that Amodio’s fate has already been sealed, but audiences will not know until next week’s episodes air.It is obvious that Holzhauer — a sports bettor whose “Jeopardy!” stardom propelled him to a role on the ABC game show “The Chase,” alongside Jennings and Brad Rutter, another “Jeopardy!” champion — knows that Amodio is on his heels. He ribbed Amodio on Twitter earlier this week, pointing out that Amodio had made much less money than him during the same number of games.Amodio playfully sniped back, tweeting, “Must be nice having time to throw shade on Twitter. Us ‘Jeopardy!’ champions with zero career losses have actual work to do.” More