Ken Jennings won Tuesday night’s episode of the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament, marking his third match win of the tournament and officially earning him the title of Jeopardy! GOAT. In the first-to-three-matches format, James Holzhauer won one match, while Brad Rutter consistently finished in third.
For people who aren’t diehard Jeopardy! fans or casual viewers just tuning in for the GOAT tournament, it’d be easy to wonder how Rutter earned his spot on stage with the others. But trust us: Brad earned it.
But throughout the tournament, Rutter noticeably struggled and got some bad bounces. To combat Holzhauer’s aggressive betting strategy, Rutter and Jennings agreed they’d have to go all in on each Daily Double, and while Rutter picked several of them, he had a lot of incorrect responses, which would regularly drop his score back down to zero and make it nearly impossible for him to catch either Jennings or Holzhauer.
Following the final episode of the GOAT tournament, Vulture spoke with Rutter about his experience. While the second runner-up said he will “absolutely” remember this tournament fondly — even though it was the first time he lost to a human being on Jeopardy! — he explained why his performance lagged.
Huge congrats to my old frenemy @KenJennings on his most impressive #JeopardyGOAT victory. That was the best playing I’ve ever seen and I’ve been watching @Jeopardy for 35 years. Pictured: me trying to absorb some buzzer mojo in case there’s a next time pic.twitter.com/B5bB7AnwCv
— Brad Rutter (@bradrutter) January 15, 2020
Here’s an excerpt from Rutter’s Q&A with Vulture this week:
Looking back at your matches, was there a moment when you realized things weren’t going in your favor? Was it missing all those Daily Doubles?
No, not really. It was just going that way from the beginning and never stopped. [Laughs.] If James had won last night’s game, I’d still be alive but have to win three matches in a row. I’ve done stuff like that, coming from behind, before in a show. I think the reason I’ve been successful at this point is staying focused on what was in front of me. I was just thinking, Okay, if I can get to match five, we’ll see what happens. Since it was going to be a new week, maybe my buzzer skills would magically come back. You never know.Do you think your buzzer reflexes weren’t as sharp?
Yeah, I do. It’s more timing, really, with the buzzers. We’re probably talking about hundredths of a second here. I’ve played a bunch of times before with Ken and I was always getting just as many responses as he was. Throwing another very quick buzzer into the mix hurt me. It’s impossible to figure out unless you have access to the actual buzzing-in data. In any sort of evenly matched match, the buzzer is going to be the number one thing. Ken and James were able to get the timing right and I wasn’t, and that was probably the biggest factor.
(Poor Brad. No, Rich Brad.)
An often overlooked factor about winning a Jeopardy! game is the buzzer. And buzzing in first is not as easy as immediately doing it one the clue comes up. It’s much more nuanced than that, as Jennings recently explained to Good Morning America.
MORNING EXCLUSIVE with @Jeopardy champion @KenJennings as he dishes on his dramatic win and being the #JeopardyGOAT! https://t.co/Yk2aBE7Lxj pic.twitter.com/tjaQt2bWrG
— Good Morning America (@GMA) January 15, 2020
“The timing of the buzzer is very tricky on Jeopardy!,” Jennings told GMA on Tuesday. “You can’t buzz when you know it. You have to wait for Alex [Trebek] to finish reading the question. If you buzz early, you get locked out for a tiny second. So what you need to do is to find this exact second and for me it’s just following the rhythm of Alex’s voice. We’ve heard him read tens of thousands of clues over the years, and you just know how he’s gonna say it, and then there’s gonna be one beat and then you buzz! But if I think about it, I can’t do it. It’s kind of a zen thing.”
Harder than it seems, and Rutter just got beat by the buzzer — and by a few tricky Daily Doubles.
While Jennings has a record 74 consecutive Jeopardy! wins and Holzhauer owns the top-10 single-game winnings records, Rutter, even after the GOAT tournament, still has the record for most money earned on Jeopardy!
He entered the special series with $4,688,436 earned and walked away with another $250,000 as the second runner-up. He would probably have more records or long win streak, but when he first appeared on the game show in 2000, contestants were limited to five game wins before having to retire undefeated. So Rutter won his five games and earned most of his money from winning tournaments, during which he beat Jennings multiple times.
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