Even Before His 19th Game Jamie Ding Had Officially Become Jeopardy James II

 

Compared to some of the feats of so many recent super-champions winning $500,000 might seem like a lesser accomplishment. In fact it's an even smaller club then those who have won 11 games.

From the day Ken Jennings won his sixteenth game in June of 2004 no one came close to winning half a million dollars in their original run until James Holzhauer hit that total on his ninth win no Jeopardy champion came close to winning half a million in their original appearance. Even when David Madden and Julia Collins had their runs of 19 and 20 wins respectively, neither could even come close to half a million dollars. David finished with $434,000; Julia $428,100.

 Furthermore, even with the $250,000 grand prize in the Tournament of Champions, no one came close to reaching that mark in the next decade.

Roger Craig would pass the mark when he finished in third place in the Battle of the Decades in 2014. Matt Jackson passed it when he finished second in the 2015 Tournament of Champions. It wasn't until the Jeopardy All-Star Games that Madden and Larissa Kelly passed that total as part of Team Brad when they won shared in the $1,000,000 prize for winning that special tournament. (Brad Rutter of course had become the biggest winner in Jeopardy history long before the 5 day limit was repealed.)

Not long after that James Holzhauer had his amazing run. Between April 2019 and December of 2022 seven different players won at least $500,000 and their names, like Holzhauer and Jennings himself, are inscribed in Jeopardy lore. Amy Schneider, Mattea Roach and Matt Amodio are now officially Jeopardy Masters and Jason Zuffranieri and Cris Panullo are legendary themselves.

So when Jamie Ding won his eighteenth game and brought his total to $530,372 he had placed himself on the 'Leaderboard of Legends' in a way that for all the brilliance of Ray Lalonde, Adriana Harmeyer, Scott Riccardi and Harrison Whitaker had never been able to achieve. He'd also done something in eighteen games that David Madden and Julia Collins hadn't managed to do in their original runs.

Technically nothing had changed in those two games on the leaderboard: Jamie was still in eighth place, mainly because of what were (for him) relatively low win totals in Monday and Tuesday's wins, which is where he was after his sixteenth victory. But even if you only started watching Jeopardy after James Holzhauer's run or even after Matt Amodio began his you knew just how impressive Jamie Ding was among the levels even of Jeopardy super-champions. (No matter how his run ended I'm officially christening him 'Jeopardy James II.)

So even before he tried to reach his nineteenth win, he was in a very real sense a better player then either of the two men in that position: Jason Zuffranieri and David Madden. He had caught and passed Madden on his sixteenth win and after his eighteenth he was basically dead even with Zuffranieri after 19 wins. Which was good because his nineteenth appearance was the clearest sign yet his days on the Alex Trebek stage might be numbered.

This initially wasn't clear during the Jeopardy round as yet again he was dominant against Dominex Kovacs and Erica Wagner. He finished with over $10,000 yet again at $10,400 to Dominex's $3800 and Erica's $1400.

Then early in Double Jeopardy Dominex got to the first Daily Double. At the time he had $7400, exactly half Jamie's total. He knew what he was up against and bet everything he had in A HISTORIC SETTLEMENT:

Around 120 B.C. Narbo Maritus, the modern town of Narbonne, was Rome's first colony in the land the Romans called this.

A pause: "What is Gaul?" Dominex was now tied with Jamie. He actually moved into the lead on the next clue but then Jamie took it back on the follow up. Then Jamie found the other Daily Double in THE ONE LETTER LAST NAME OF…

Jamie had not been challenged for the lead this late in a Jeopardy game for a while. He bet $8000:

The 1925 literary character who 'was informed by telephone that there would be a small hearing concerning his case.' Jamie had been having trouble with Daily Doubles in the last few games and this time he couldn't come up with a response: "What is G?"  I knew that it referred to Kafka's The Trial and Joseph K.

Jamie dropped all the way done to $8400 and for the first time in his run he couldn't close the gap by the end of Double Jeopardy. He finished with $14,400 to Dominex's $17,600. Erica was next with $4600.

The Final Jeopardy category was POP CULTURE PEOPLE. Adopted in 1979 this name reflected size and strength as well as a promoter's wish to appeal to Irish-American fans.

It was a tough one. Erica couldn't come up with a correct response. She lost $4400, dropping her to $200.

Jamie was next: What is Rowdy Rowdy Piper?" He had the right idea but he was wrong. He wagered $5199 and dropped to $9201. He was clearly betting to stay ahead of Erica by $1 if she had gotten in correct and wagered everything.

It came down Dominex. He couldn't come up with anything either. The clue referred to a different wrestler: the recently deceased Hulk Hogan. (Ken: 'Hulk' for the size – Hogan for the Irish fans.)

It came down to the wager. Dominex did what he had to do and bet $11,201. He dropped to $6399 and Jamie survived by the skin of his teeth with another $9201. This gave him a 19 game total of $539,573, for all intents and purposes a tie with Jason's $532,496.

Jamie had managed to continue his run. But it was getting more and more difficult to argue that Jamie was starting to prevail more on luck. This was the sixth Final Jeopardy in his last eleven games that he'd gotten wrong. He'd been saved by the fact that four of them had come in runaways and in the other two it had been a triple stumper. And Jamie was increasingly starting to struggle on Daily Doubles having gotten two of them incorrect the previous day.

On the surface it was yet another dominant win: 30 correct responses and only 3 incorrect ones. For any other player – any other super-champion – it would have been an incredible performance; for a man who'd gotten 43 correct responses three times in his run to this point, it was almost disappointing – and he had finished Double Jeopardy in second place.

Jamie is officially in the Jeopardy record books in a way that all but seven players have managed to get to this point. And no one will question he is one of the greatest players in Jeopardy history. But with this narrow escape the question is how much longer Jeopardy James II reign will continue?