

“That was the first time that I saw Jeopardy! as a sport. “I remember watching Ken Jennings’s streak when I was a kid,” says Amodio, now 31. Amodio’s parents turned on the show every evening at dinnertime. Jeopardy! was ambient noise in the Amodio household in Medina, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. Where did that thrilling Jeopardy! ride start? The correct response: What’s Madison? Admitting What You Don’t Know Even the curmudgeonly CNBC host Jim Cramer called him “an American hero,” telling Amodio, “This is the first time my kids have ever watched the show, because they love you so much.”Īlong the way, fans dubbed his legendary run the Amodio Rodeo. (Contestant Amy Schneider has since surpassed Amodio’s streak.) His earnings - $1,518,601 - rank among the top 10 across all American game shows. His 38-game winning streak was the second-longest in Jeopardy! history, behind only Ken Jennings’s run of 74. But eventually, Amodio’s signature style won over just about everyone.Īlthough his run ended in October, Amodio still has plenty to smile about these days. The syntactic simplification scandalized Jeopardy! diehards early on. His humble, aw-shucks demeanor complemented his brilliant gameplay.Īmodio was so obsessed with gaining an edge that he answered every clue with what - what is Sauron, instead of the grammatically correct who - so he wouldn’t have to think too hard about phrasing Jeopardy! answers in the iconic question format. As a competitor, he showed you can be relentlessly kind and cutthroat. Amodio started to wear his emotions - doubt, surprise, amusement, joy - on his face. The answer revealed an introverted but playful personality that America came to admire. That was one of the first moments where I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot I’m allowed to smile while I’m playing the game, too.’ It was entirely genuine, and it loosened me up quite a bit.”

“I hadn’t done a lot of smiling on camera, because I was so focused on playing the game as well as possible. “What’s Sauron?” he answered with a wide smile and slight inflection. Late in the Double Jeopardy round, guest host David Faber read a $400 clue: “This evil necromancer is ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ ” The win itself wasn’t particularly memorable - Amodio would go on to win a remarkable 38 games, many of them with even higher earnings.īut the game proved to be a turning point: not for Matt Amodio, skilled trivia contestant, but for Matt Amodio, Jeopardy! star. By the Final Jeopardy round, his score of $36,000 nearly quadrupled his opponents’.
JEOPARDY RECORDS MATT JACKSON RANK TV
On August 3, Matt Amodio MS’17, a PhD student from New Haven, Connecticut, won his 10th consecutive game of Jeopardy!, becoming the 10th player to reach that milestone on the TV quiz show. The official Olympic website says this event “has its roots in survival skills” practiced in the snowy forests of Scandinaviaīritish zoologist George Shaw looked for stitches when he first saw this mammal in 1799, thinking he was being trickedġ: Alien. This phrase relating nutrition and health was popularized by fruit scientist J.

Ten years before a more famous work, he wrote in 1503 that the way to deal with rebels is to placate them or eliminate them Ninety-six miles in total during its three-decade existence, the most well-known part of this was about the same length as an Olympic marathonĪ new studio album in 2020 gave him a top-five album in six consecutive decades, his first in 1975Ī 2000 Library of Congress exhibit called this 1900 work “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale” political party that helped depose a king, the U.S. Two of the three women depicted on the first statue of real women in Central Park, unveiled in August 2020 Writer Dan O’Bannon based a scene in this film on his own Crohn’s disease, which felt like things inside him fighting to get out The trivia star correctly answered 29 of 39 Final Jeopardy clues, including these.
