Ken Jennings: James Holzhauer’s Jeopardy! strategy ‘puts the fear of god’ in competitors

Ken Jennings is officially the Jeopardy! GOAT, but he said any one of them could have won the tournament.

Ken Jennings managed to keep a massive Jeopardy! secret to himself for the few weeks between the taping and airing of the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament. He told no one that he won the tournament, was crowned the Jeorpardy! GOAT and earned $1 million.

Well, almost no one.

While speaking with Good Morning America on Wednesday following Tuesday night’s airing of the fourth match of the Jeopardy! GOAT, Jennings admitted that while he didn’t tell his kids or his parents about how he fared against James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter, he did tell his wife.

“My wife knew,” Jennings said on the morning show from Seattle. “I didn’t want her to divorce me. I told my wife immediately. But my kids didn’t know, my parents didn’t know. We totally kept it under wrap. I just thought it would be more fun for them to have the surprise, and it was a lot of fun watching it together.”

In the race to win three matches (made of two regular games combined for one-hour episodes), Jennings won the first game, Holzhauer won the second and Jennings won the third.

Then during the fourth match Tuesday night, he bet big on a Daily Double on his way to winning Game 1. And in Game 2 as he tried to fend off hard-charging Holzhauer, he didn’t have to wager anything in Final Jeopardy. The category was Shakespeare’s Tragedies, and Jennings, who entered Final Jeopardy in second, bet nothing, while leader Holzhauer went all in and got the question wrong.

Because of that with their combined earned points from the match’s two games, Jennings won his third match and officially became the Jeopardy! GOAT. Rutter finished third in all four matches.

“It was not a dominating win at all,” Jennings told GMA about the tournament. “I think all three of us are very experienced Jeopardy! players, and if you run this back 10 times, you’re going to get a different winner. You’re never going to get the same winner twice in a row.”

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Each of the three GOAT contestants left their marks on the game. Jennings has the longest win streak ever with 74 regular-season games, Holzhauer owns all the top-10 single-game winnings records and Rutter has earned the most money on Jeopardy! with $4,688,436 prior to the tournament. (While Jennings won $1 million, Holzhauer and Rutter each earned $250,000.)

Particularly with Daily Doubles and sometimes in Final Jeopardy, Jennings and Rutter adopted Holzhauer’s aggressive strategy of going all in. By doing that during his regular-season run in 2019, Holzhauer was often able to put the game out of reach for his competitors early on.

About adjusting their strategies to follow Holzhauer’s lead, Jennings said:

“It’s really just a credit to James, how much he’s changed the game of Jeopardy! that Brad and I both came in realizing we were going to have to play like him if we were going to have any hope of containing him. That’s just how smart and demoralizing his strategy is. You’ve gotta make those big bets even if it scares you because he puts the fear of god into the other two contestants.”

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