Tristan Williams. What is The Next Great Jeopardy Player of Season 42?

 

 

In the final two months of Season 40 the three top winners of that year arrived in almost immediate succession. Adriana Harmeyer would win 15 games and $349,600 before being defeated by Drew Basile. Drew, in turn, would win seven games and $129,601 before losing on the last day of June in 2024. And less than three days after he lost Isaac Hirsch would come to the Alex Trebek stage and win 9 games and $215,300 before losing to Jay Fisher.

A similar pattern is forming in Season 42. Just before the eligibility requirements of the 2025 Tournament of Champions ended Harrison Whitaker would win 14 games and just under $374,000 before meeting the defeating on December 1^st. For an incredible 31 days Jamie Ding would dominate the Alex Trebek stage eventually finishing 5^th in both games won and money won in one's original appearance. And less than two weeks after Jamie's run came to an end the third best player of Season 42 has arrived, clearly not at the level of Harrison or Jamie but by any other standard another superb Jeopardy champion who might very well get to their level.

Tristan Williams is a data scientist from Lincoln, Nebraska who for reasons that only the internet can explain has been compared to Woody from the Toy Story franchise in his physical appearance. On Wednesday May 6^th he made his first appearance and he has yet to leave, notching 8 wins and $158,501 to this point a performance that would be remarkable in many seasons but compared to the super-champions we've seen in Season 42 pale in comparison.

He managed runaway victories in five of his first six wins but they were not the kind of runaways that Jamie managed to pull off early on. He's nowhere near as good with Daily Doubles as Jamie was or indeed many super-champions. He can find them but his track record with them has been decidedly hit or miss. He found all three in his first appearance but got two of them wrong. The pattern was set in Double Jeopardy when he found them back to back: he gained $4000 on the first one and lost $5000 on the next.

In his second appearance he was lucky to win as he was tied for second at the end of Double Jeopardy with $9200 with Robert Yan. He and Robert both responded correctly to Final Jeopardy but Tristan bet everything and Robert didn't. Helen Yoas, who was in the lead, responded incorrectly and Tristan's streak kept going.

He's had some impressive victories: getting 30 correct responses in his first win and 29 in his second  but he undoes his good work with incorrect response on Final Jeopardy. In fact he has responded incorrectly on four of the first six games he was in. Fortunately in all four of them he had a runaway so it hasn't cost him yet and he's managed to get three out of his last four correct, including two much closer games.

For much of Friday's game it looked like this was the end of the road. Chayce Griffith was close to him in the Jeopardy round (because Tristan missed yet another Daily Double) and moved into the lead early when he got the first Daily Double correct in Double Jeopardy. Then a few clues later Tristan changed his luck when he found the other Daily Double in LET'S TALK ABOUT 'X'. With $6000, which was half Chayce's total he bet $4500:

Examples include silent scream and working vacation. He figured it out: "What is an oxymoron?" With that he was close to the lead and on the next clue managed to move ahead for good. Chayce made him work for it and Tristan finished with $18,900 to Chayce's $12.800.

The Final Jeopardy category was PLAY CHARACTERS. This title character of an 1890 play is often called 'the female Hamlet'. Tristan was the only one to figure out it was Hedda Gabbler and finished with $25,601, to date his biggest pay day.

To compare Tristan to super-champions of this season is horribly unfair and it isn't even worth it to compare him to previous seasons. He's just has a mix of getting Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardys wrong and he's been lucky he's still with it as this point and he absolutely knows it. Yet that makes him more relatable in many ways because he's not nearly as dominant during his streak and he's just as humble about how he can play poorly. This was perhaps most obvious on Wednesday's game where he had his biggest lead going into Final Jeopardy yet with $20,200 to Bridget Palmer's $4400. Then came Final Jeopardy.

The category was FILMS OF THE 1990S. "In French this 1993 films is called 'Un jour sans fin'.  Bridget translated it: 'a day without end', and figured it out: "What is Groundhog Day?" If you only knew day that might have given you enough yet Tristan wrote down: "What is Braveheart?" The greater irony: he was a big fan of Groundhog Day and it cost him $10,000 because he couldn't think of it. (Hey, I didn't know it either and I've seen that movie as much as anyone. Jeopardy's in it, for crying out loud!)

If Tristan wins three more games he will officially join the ranks of the Jeopardy elite. That may very well happen; this is coming from someone who underestimated Jamie Ding's run the longer it went. At this points its difficult to Tristan getting that far: he just isn't dominant the way Jamie or Harrison were in any of their wins and he's averaging a little more than $19,000 a victory – good for many Jeopardy players, severely lacking for a super-champion. For that matter in eight games he isn't in the same ballpark in relation to where Paolo Pasco managed to win in seven games at the start of this season.

It's easy to say he's done better than Laura Faddah did when she won eight games last year: that's a record Laura would rather not have. But just look at him in a relation to the three eight game winners of Season 36 as well as well as two of the seven game winners from Season 35:

 

Kyle Jones: $145,403 (7 WINS)

Josh Hill: $163,721 (7 WINS)

Karen Farrell: $159,603 (8 WINS)

Mackenize Jones: $204,608 (8 WINS)

Jennifer Quail: $228,800 (8 WINS)

Tristan Williams: $158,501 (8 wins)

These are the closest parallels to Tristan in recent Jeopardy history. It's not a bad group to be a part of frankly: for much of the first decade after Jennings had his incredible run 7 or eight wins was an impressive total and it remained so right up until James Holzhauer rewrote the book. Unless Tristan manages to find his groove quickly both in Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy – which again, very well might happen -  it's going to take him a while just to reach the level of earnings Isaac Hirsch managed in nine wins.

Still his otherwise superb play reminds us that the era of Peak Jeopardy continues. And as we may be waiting quite a while for the 2026 Jeopardy Masters or for that matter the next Tournament of Champions (I'll get to that later) it's good to know that we have players like Tristan reminding us why people like me watch the show in the first place.