Amy Schneider Just Took Over This Jeopardy! Record
Making it look far too easy, Amy Schneider won her 39th consecutive "Jeopardy!" match during the January 24 episode, becoming not only the all-time women's champion, but also the second-place leader for consecutive games won (via the New York Post). The game put her ahead of Yale grad student Matt Amodio, who had held the second-place record since October 2021. Only the legendary Ken Jennings — who is now the guest host of the show — has won more matches.
In what has become a familiar scenario for the game show's fans, Schneider jumped to an early lead and easily held it to the very end. It didn't hurt that she landed on two Daily Doubles and swept a tricky "Before and After" category that mashed up dates with familiar titles and phrases containing numbers ("What is 1812 Angry Men?"). Schneider had more than $30,000 going into the Final Jeopardy! round, so she felt confident betting big on the category of "U.S. Museums." Alas, she didn't come up with the right answer, but she was still comfortably ahead of the competition and brought her winning total to an eye-popping $1,319,800.
Reflecting on her historic win, Schneider said in a statement, "It still feels unreal. Knowing that I had this chance, I was definitely thinking about it. Then Ken said it, and I thought, 'All right, I just accomplished this huge thing' and it was pretty great," as per TVLine.
Some past champions think the game should change
As fans also know by now, Amy Schneider is also making "Jeopardy!" history by being the highest-winning trans player in the game. She recently told ABC's "Good Morning America," "I think that the best part for me has been being on TV as my true self, expressing myself and representing the entire community of trans people. And just kind of showing a different thing than maybe some people have seen, of just being a smart, confident woman and just doing something super normal like being on 'Jeopardy!'"
While some are cheering Schneider on to extend her winning streak, other fans think enough is enough. Once upon a time, "Jeopardy!" had a limit for wins; after five games, champions had to retire. With the lifting of that restriction, players like Ken Jennings and Schneider can go on indefinitely. As Good Housekeeping reported, some Twitter followers find it dull to see the same person win day after day. One former champ, Tom Nichols, has called for the five-and-done rule to be reinstated. "'Jeopardy!' was originally a kind of celebration of the smarts of the average American, not a colosseum where the crowds could cheer the slaughter of new players who had no real shot against champs who had mastered the game mechanics through sheer repetition," he wrote in a recent essay for The Atlantic.
Nichols has even called for the iconic game to be retired, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Now, viewers will be looking to see how close Schneider can come to topping Jennings' incredible 74-game win streak.