There were moments during Amy Schneider's historic Jeopardy! streak where she felt a twinge of mercy for her victims. Schneider notched 40 consecutive victories and $1.4 million in winnings from late 2021 to early 2022, often trouncing everyone else at the podium. An average Schneider game wrapped up with her comfortably out of range from even the most brazen Daily Double wagers. She was ice cold, relentless, impervious, flexing unparalleled Potpourri superiority over us clueless bar-trivia novices.
Jeopardy! used to be a game filled with modest two-day champions and tightly contested matchups, but lately the wheat has been separated from the chaff. A new generation of players have unleashed a reign of terror on America's greatest game show. It's nice to know that Schneider was capable of remorse, at least, even when she was tripling, sometimes quadrupling, our score.
"I had to be really conscious of fighting [my mercy],” Schneider tells IGN. “When I was getting pumped up before the game I was telling myself, 'This is for a house. These people are trying to take away me and my wife's house. I can't let that happen."
Schneider's 40-game streak immediately propelled her into Jeopardy!'s all-time pantheon. Ken Jennings is still the king with his 73 victories, completed back in 2004 when stringing together more than four games was cause for celebration. But the more you scroll down the record, the more you'll see that an outsized number of great Jeopardy! runs occurred within the last two years. Matt Amodio plowed through 38 games just before Schneider's dynasty; Mattea Roach, a tutor from Toronto, knocked out 23 games in April and May with a ridiculous 93 percent correct-answer rate; and Ryan Long wrapped up a 15-episode campaign last month — an incredible feat that has been unfortunately diluted by the dominance of his fellow trivia sharks.
Jeopardy! has been on the air in some form since the ’60s and has kept the same competitive format since 1984. And yet, for some reason, its players have gotten significantly better at the game seemingly overnight. Nobody is sure why, but everyone who loves Jeopardy! has their own theories.
"When we first started seeing this barrage of winning streaks, there were a lot of people — including some of the champions themselves — who argued that this was just a statistical aberration. It was the infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters theory: If you put enough nerds at enough buzzers for enough time, sooner or later you'll get some very successful nerds back to back to back," says Claire McNear, a journalist at The Ringer who wrote the definitive book about Jeopardy!, Answers in the Form of Questions. "But there's no doubt in my mind that we're also seeing the Moneyball-ing of Jeopardy."
McNear is referring to a new metagame stratagem embraced by some of the more calculative Jeopardy! champions. The goal is to approach Jeopardy like a card-counter at a blackjack table, looking for any edge to beat the house. For James Holzhauer, the player who best embodied this approach and rattled off 32 games in 2019, that meant seeking out Daily Doubles early, and putting forth aggressive, all-in wagers when he found them. Those Daily Doubles are the unwieldy agents of chaos in an otherwise staid, measured trivia tournament, and Holzhauer correctly determined that they weren't being used to their full potential. It's like how the 2015 Golden State Warriors took advantage of a three-point line that was ignored by all the other teams; sometimes all it takes is one innovator to permanently change a game.
"My whole life I felt like people were too conservative with their wagering. It's hard to do it when you're on stage, because it's your own money. But people do wager more aggressively than they used to," says Schneider. "If you're successful it makes those late-game comebacks a lot less likely."
McNear points to some other, goofier innovations players have weaned themselves on as they continue to take apart the game mathematically. She mentions the practice buzzers the Jeopardy! community have built to better simulate the precise, nanosecond-to-nanosecond rhythms of answering a clue, and the ridiculous amount of data consolidated at the J! Archive, which is essentially a sports almanac for Jeopardy!. Log on, and you can find a full breakdown of questions, answers, and categories from practically every episode in the show's history. "As with anything else, how intensely you prepare isn't the only thing that matters, but there are now so many people in the Jeopardy! contestant pool who walk into the studio not just because they love Jeopardy! but because they've specifically studied how to play Jeopardy! and maximize their odds of winning," says McNear. Casuals beware.
But perhaps the most surprising hypothesis I’ve heard from various Jep-heads is that the game show's pandemic contingencies widened its overall player base. Andy Saunders, who runs the incredibly in-depth blog The Jeopardy! Fan, tells me that during the COVID-19 lockdown, casting producers for the show pivoted to online, Zoom-based auditions. Aspirant Jeopardy! challengers no longer needed to burn a day by hustling through an interminable series of trivia trials in some beige studio; no, they could just test their mettle anytime, anywhere, with the program's newly launched "Anytime Test" module, which serves as a digital pipeline for potential contestants. Perhaps there are a million Jeopardy! geniuses hiding in plain sight, like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.
"It reduced the barrier of entry for a lot of people, because prior to that, you had to make a pretty big investment of time or money, because if you weren't in a big city, you'd have to travel to the audition," says Saunders. "It was hard to commit, especially when there was no guarantee they were going to get on."
Schneider also mentions that the COVID-era Jeopardy! set is a bit less intimidating than it was before the pandemic. There was no studio audience for her run, which means that she didn't feel the eyes of strangers and loved ones on her as she laid it all on the line. "That might make things a little easier," she says. Of course, you'd expect Jeopardy! to get back to herding in viewers to the theater in the future, so that's at least one advantage streak-holders won't be able to count on going forward.
That's good news for some hardcore Jeopardy! fans. Some of them complain about the new direction of the show, mostly because watching an incredible, Mensa-level champion drub lesser players every weeknight isn't especially compelling. I will admit that I prefer a final category with some drama, and that's been in short supply lately. But as a longtime fan of the show, who mourned with the rest of the country after Alex Trebek passed away and watched with exasperated rage as a bitter power struggle consumed the search for his successor, it's oddly reassuring to know that, in 2022, there are still so many people obsessed with deciphering the mystery of Jeopardy!. The show will never die. In fact, against all odds, it's never been more alive.
"It's becoming more like a sport. There are people like I am who've been studying hard and going there to win," says Schneider. "It's more professionalized, and I think it's a great change."