‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Amy Schneider Is 4th In Show’s History To Win $1 Million

Topline

Jeopardy! anointed its fourth ever million-dollar champion Friday, after Amy Schneider — a 42-year-old California-based engineering manager who ranks as Jeopardy!’s longest-running female contestant — secured her 28th win on the long-running game show.

Amy Schneider is the fourth contestant in ‘Jeopardy!’ history to pass $1 million in regular-season … [+] winnings, and she’s the show’s highest-earning female contestant and the first transgender competitor to qualify for the Tournament of Champions.

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Key Facts

Schneider won $42,200 in Friday’s game, bringing her total winnings to $1,019,600.

Only three other Jeopardy! contenders have won more games or raked in more cash from regular-season play than Schneider: Cohost and greatest-of-all-time Ken Jennings (who won $2.52 million across 74 games in 2004), James Holzhauer ($2.46 million over 32 games in 2019) and Matt Amodio ($1.52 million over 38 games in 2021).

Schneider is also the show’s longest-running and top-earning female contestant, surpassing Julia Collins ($428,100 across 20 games in 2014) late last year, and she’s the first transgender competitor to qualify for the show’s annual Tournament of Champions, a faceoff among each season’s top contestants.

Crucial Quote

“It’s not a sum of money I ever anticipated would be associated with my name,” Schneider said in a Friday statement from Sony Pictures Entertainment, the show’s producer.

What To Watch For

Schneider could boost her earnings even more if she returns to play against other successful contestants during the show’s tournaments. Some popular competitors have earned small fortunes. Brad Rutter has netted $4.94 million from tournament and standard games (winning streaks were capped at just five games when Rutter initially appeared on Jeopardy! in 2000, so his regular-season earnings didn’t top $1 million), Jennings has won a total of $4.37 million from the show and Holzhauer has collected $2.96 million.

Key Background

An Ohio native who lives in Oakland, Calif., Schneider was voted “most likely to appear on Jeopardy!” by her eighth-grade class, she told the New York Times last week. In interviews with the Times and the Washington Post, she attributed her success on the show to a childhood interest in trivia that included a top-10 finish in Ohio’s 1992 geography bee, her parents’ fixation on encyclopedias and her girlfriend’s pop-culture knowledge. She also wrote in a piece for Defector that her brain “retains knowledge well,” her reflexes on the buzzer are quick and she focuses on parsing clues to decipher their often-opaque meaning.

Surprising Fact

Schneider lost her phone and credit cards after being robbed in Oakland on Sunday, she tweeted, adding that she’s “fine.” Oakland Police Department spokesperson Candace Keas told Forbes it’s investigating a Sunday afternoon armed robbery, and no arrests have been made (the police didn’t release the victim’s name). The robbery likely didn’t impact this week’s gameplay, as episodes of Jeopardy! are typically taped months in advance.

Tangent

Jeopardy! has faced a turbulent year. Longtime host Alex Trebek died in November 2020, leading the show’s producers to hand out guest-hosting stints to more than a dozen celebrities and television personalities in 2021. Sony eventually chose Mike Richards, the show’s former executive producer, to serve as permanent host last summer, but he stepped down just weeks later after The Ringer unearthed offensive comments he made on a years-old podcast. This season, Jennings and actress Mayim Bialik — whom Sony initially hired last year to host Jeopardy!’s primetime specials — have traded off interim hosting duties. Despite this upheaval, Jeopardy! has continued to draw fairly large audiences: The show averaged nearly 8.7 million viewers in the second-to-last week of December, outpacing other game shows like Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune, according to Nielsen’s most recent syndicated ratings data.