Matt Amodio – 38 Game Champion - $1,518,601
Jonathan Fisher – 11 Game Champion - $246,100
Amy Schneider – 40 Game Champion - $1,382, 800
Mattea Roach – 23 Game Champion - $560,983
Ryan Long – 16 Game Champion $299,900
I don’t have to waste time or energy explaining why the last five people on this list deserve to participate in any future tournament; if you’ve watched Jeopardy this past year, you are more than familiar with their accomplishments and how they have made their mark in the show’s history. (Jonathan might stand out more for being the player who ended Matt’s run, but he was a successful champion in his own right. His eleven wins might seem modest in relation to this year but until this year only eight other players had gotten that far.) So instead I think it’s worth relating how they might do in the upcoming Tournament of Champions which is coming in just a few months.
I have learned fairly recent that this year’s Tournament of Champions will represent an alteration in the format that Jeopardy has been loyal to since its inception. Rather than feature fifteen players, it shall have twenty one. I’m not entirely certain how the math will end up working out when it comes to producing a winner (I will actually update all of you in a future article when I have more details to share) but I must admit I don’t have a real complaint with what many fans no doubt consider a radical shift in format.
I am willing to admit the tried and true methods of fifteen champions for a two week tournament has worked for Jeopardy for nearly forty years, I acknowledge that this transition in format might very well not be happening were it not for the passing of Alex Trebek, and I also acknowledge that if it doesn’t work, there is an excellent chance that Jeopardy will revert back to the old format for the next tournament, whenever it is. But in the case of this upcoming one, I actually think there is an excellent argument to be made for shifting the format. As I have mentioned in several article this past year, there have been several excellent champions over the past months who managed to win only four games, a number which is often more than enough to qualify one for a Tournament of Champions, but by the end of Ryan Long’s run this June guaranteed that you would be absent from it. I also questioned the logic of Megan Wachpress who won $60,603 in six games being guaranteed a position in this year’s tournament where as three of those four-game winners won more money than Megan in their runs. (In the case of Jackie Kelly, it was nearly twice as much: $115,100.) I argued about the unfairness of this and am actually overjoyed that all four of these four game winners will be allowed to participate in this year’s Tournament. (I still haven’t made up my mind about this so-called Second Chance Tournament next month; I’ll keep you appraised on that as well.)
The reason I’m writing this article is because I imagine those of you relatively new to Jeopardy are no doubt considering which of the big three winners – Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider or Mattea Roach – will end up winning the $250,000 grand prize. I am here to deliver a word of caution that the winner may turn out to be…none of the above.
As someone who has spent most of his life watching Jeopardy and who has always carved out two weeks of his life for the Tournament of Champions over the decades, I am painfully aware that the player who wins the most money in the regular season has no guarantee of winning the Tournament. If you have been reading the previous entries in this list, you might have picked up on this trend in some of those double-digit big money winners who are the list despite not having won the Tournament of Champions. But this trend has predated the elimination of the five day standard. Indeed, the greatest money winner in Jeopardy history is a prime example of it.
Brad Rutter won $55,102 in his original five games way back in 2000. This was prior to the dollar figures being doubled in 2001 but in Brad’s original run, he was actually almost right in the middle when it came to money won. Indeed, in his quarterfinal match in the 2001 Tournament of Champions, one of the players he defeated Doug Lach was the fourth highest money winner in Jeopardy history to that point. Brad trounced him in that match. When he made it to the finals, he faced off against Tad Carithers and Rick Knutsen, each of whom had won similar amounts of money and who played him dead even in the finals of the Tournament. Brad was very lucky to win his initial Tournament of Champions. Without that he would never have been picked to participate in the Million Dollar Masters, and would never have become Brad Rutter the legend.
Indeed, in the twenty years of Tournaments of Champions I have chosen to sample in my lists, I would say in only two of them have the player who was the odds on favorite – Roger Craig in 2011 and James Holzhauer in 2019 – went on to win the Tournament. And as I mentioned in previous entries, Tom Nissley was actually a better player than Roger that year, and James could have been defeated by Emma Boettcher.
One of the oldest clichés in sports history is that ‘anything can happen in a short series.’ But we all know that to be true, and if one considers a Jeopardy Tournament the intellectual equivalent of March Madness or the World Series, it has proven itself to be true time and again. The previous seven entries have told you about countless underdogs and Cinderella stories that have done the impossible. And while I feel certain that all five of the players listed above will be in a future tournament as little as a year and a half down the line, that doesn’t mean any of them will be there with the Tournament of Champions victory on their record. Hell, best case scenario, four of them can’t have it anyway.
So to close this, those five will be there. They’ve earned their place in Jeopardy history. But we can’t rule out the possibility that another spot will go to another great Jeopardy player who defeated one of them. Maybe it will be Eric Ahasic, a six game winner who won $160,000 and five runaway games defeating Ryan Long in his first victory. Or Andrew He, who won five games and $157,365 and was ahead of Amy Schneider at the end of Double Jeopardy in his sixth game before she defeated him to begin her remarkable streak. Hell, Jonathan Fisher might be able to prove that his defeat of Matt Amodio was not a fluke. You can never tell how a Tournament of Champions might go. That’s why fans like me have loved them for decades.
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