Jeopardy! records a week’s worth of episodes on each tape day, and the 10 new contestants who will play over the course of the “week” are randomly assigned to the day’s games. Sharp-Kellar didn’t know for sure that she would face Amodio. (Those marks also point to a shared prowess in buzzer timing: You can’t get to the Daily Double first if you aren’t ringing in first, too.) As he continued to win, Amodio’s scores kept growing: In his seventh game, he hit $74,000, the highest one-day total ever by anyone other than Holzhauer, Jennings, or Roger Craig, another all-time Jeopardy! great. Because Daily Doubles typically lurk among the lower clues, Amodio has found a whopping 77 percent of them in his first 23 games, including all but two of the ones in last week’s games Holzhauer uncovered 77 percent during his own streak. He’s not Julia Collins …’ And then he just kept winning and kept getting better and better.”Īmodio’s style bears more than a passing resemblance to Holzhauer’s, dependent most notably on bouncing around the bottom of the board and raking in the most valuable clues first instead of the classic top-down, one-category-at-a-time style. At first it starts out and I’m like, ‘Surely he can’t win 18 games and win out the season. “I’m watching every single day, I’m playing probably three or four practice games a day, I’m getting ready for this. As Sharp-Kellar’s taping got closer, she immersed herself in prep-including tuning in to each night’s episode of Jeopardy! as Amodio’s run began to air in July. “It’s a miracle that anybody ever wins multiple games.” -Matt AmodioĮmily Sharp-Kellar knew that her taping would be the first of the new season, meaning that the day’s contestants would play whoever the finale’s defending champion was. Pity, then, the group that spent the period between the airing of the Season 37 finale and the filming of the Season 38 premiere knowing that they would face him. “Like they’d gotten together with the champion and said, ‘Hey, let’s freak the newbies out a little bit.’” For trivia obsessives who’ve long dreamed of getting their shot on Jeopardy!, little chills the blood like the prospect of turning up and discovering that a buzz saw awaits them. “We thought they were pulling our legs,” Sexton said. Jay Sexton, who played against Holzhauer in the final game of the Las Vegas gambler’s 2019 winning streak, recalled his shock upon being introduced in the greenroom and learning that Holzhauer, whose first episode had not yet aired, had already racked up 32 wins and almost $2.5 million. Because the show generally tapes episodes about two months before they air, even historically successful contestants are usually a complete surprise to the people who learn they’ll be facing them when they arrive at the studio. In the world of Jeopardy!, dominant superchamps like Amodio are known as buzz saws, and they are a source of immense dread and anxiety among contestants who are getting ready for their day on the stage. With Holzhauer’s total of 32 wins now in reach, he is quickly emerging as a candidate to anchor the show during the most tumultuous period in its 57-year history-an anchor who just so happens to have lights-out buzzer timing and the sort of trivia knowledge that makes his fellow contestants shake their heads in amazement. Throughout all of it, though, Amodio has quietly carried on winning. But recent turmoil-beginning with last season’s raucous guest rotation and culminating in Richards’s stepping down last month just nine days after being named the new permanent host-has kept the spotlight thoroughly on the other side of the stage. Longtime host Alex Trebek was fond of saying that the show’s contestants, not its host, were the program’s stars. He’s also tacked on two more hosts: Mike Richards and, beginning Monday, Mayim Bialik. He now stands at 23 wins and $825,801, a streak and regular-season total that are good for third place in show history, behind just Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer. He closed out Jeopardy!’s 37th season last month as an 18-time champion, then last week kicked off Season 38 by blazing through five straight eye-popping runaway victories. Then it was David Faber and five more wins, then Joe Buck, and, well, you get the picture. He came back to find LeVar Burton at the lectern, and won five more games. This spring, Amodio, 30, walked into the Jeopardy! studio, where Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts was taking a turn as the show’s guest host. “It’s a miracle that anybody ever wins multiple games,” he says. If you would like Matt Amodio to tell you the secret to winning on Jeopardy!-or, better yet, the secret to winning more than $800,000 and a vaunted place in the quiz show’s record books-he is sorry to say that he can’t be of much help.
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