James Holzhauer’s 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.
… Holzhauer answer the question correctly but was counting on his competitors to get it wrong: “The line ‘A great reckoning in a little room’ in ‘as you like it’ is usually taken to refer to this author’s premature death.”
… 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.
… Holzhauer’s loss actually took place well before Friday evening — it was taped on March 12.
… 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.