The Answer Man

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. By the Final Jeopardy round, his score of $36,000 nearly quadrupled his opponents’. The win itself wasn’t particularly memorable — Amodio would go on to win a remarkable 38 games, many of them with even higher earnings.

But the game proved to be a turning point: not for Matt Amodio, skilled trivia contestant, but for Matt Amodio, Jeopardy! star.

Late in the Double Jeopardy round, guest host David Faber read a $400 clue: “This evil necromancer is ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ ”

Amodio’s expressionless face lit up.

“What’s Sauron?” he answered with a wide smile and slight inflection.

“I love Lord of the Rings,” he says now. “I hadn’t done a lot of smiling on camera, because I was so focused on playing the game as well as possible. 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.”

The answer revealed an introverted but playful personality that America came to admire. Amodio started to wear his emotions — doubt, surprise, amusement, joy — on his face. As a competitor, he showed you can be relentlessly kind and cutthroat. His humble, aw-shucks demeanor complemented his brilliant gameplay.

Amodio 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. The syntactic simplification scandalized Jeopardy! diehards early on. But eventually, Amodio’s signature style won over just about everyone.

Although his run ended in October, Amodio still has plenty to smile about these days. His 38-game winning streak was the second-longest in Jeopardy! history, behind only Ken Jennings’s run of 74. (Contestant Amy Schneider has since surpassed Amodio’s streak.) His earnings — $1,518,601 — rank among the top 10 across all American game shows. 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.”

Along the way, fans dubbed his legendary run the Amodio Rodeo. Where did that thrilling Jeopardy! ride start? The correct response: What’s Madison?

Admitting What You Don’t Know

Jeopardy! was ambient noise in the Amodio household in Medina, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. Amodio’s parents turned on the show every evening at dinnertime.

“I remember watching Ken Jennings’s streak when I was a kid,” says Amodio, now 31. “That was the first time that I saw Jeopardy! as a sport. I was looking at statistics and seeing him in the record books, and it just reminded me of the way I was interacting with baseball and my Cleveland Indians.”

His love of statistics prompted him to pursue a math degree from Ohio State University. He worked as a consultant and data scientist for IBM and an IT company after graduation, but he soon became bored. “I did not care for the lack of freedom and the kind of mundane intellectual work that was in front of me,” he says. With a bit of industry experience, Amodio applied to master’s programs in computer science.

“I had never taken a computer science course in my life, and nonetheless, Wisconsin admitted me into their program,” he says, laughing.

At the UW, Amodio spun a web of cross-disciplinary research: machine learning and neural networks with Professor Thomas Reps in the Department of Computer Sciences; computational biology with Professor Colin Dewey in the School of Medicine and Public Health; and advertising analytics with Professor Neeraj Arora in the Wisconsin School of Business. His doctoral work today at Yale University builds on much of that foundation.

“He was very good at talking with me about the things he didn’t understand,” Dewey says. “A good sign of a good graduate student is that they’re willing to admit what they don’t know.”

The same skill has served Amodio well in the trivia world. He’ll sit at a computer for hours and read through a nesting doll of Wikipedia entries, seeking to fill gaps of knowledge. Reading with curiosity, he suggests, is the great equalizer.

“You have to start to be interested in the things that you don’t naturally like,” Amodio says. “If you’re a big baseball fan, you probably already know just about all you need to know about baseball for trivia. But if you know very little about boxing, like I did, then that’s what you need to read about.”

Amodio considers pop culture his primary weak spot, so to prepare for Jeopardy!, he spent weeks bingeing on award-winning films and TV shows.

While working on his master’s degree at the UW, Amodio applied to Jeopardy! for the first time. His father was planning to take the precursory online test and encouraged him to do the same. Amodio scored highly enough to earn an in-person audition, but he never received a callback — a rejection process that some Jeopardy! contestants endure for years before getting cast on the show.

“They say after 18 months, if you haven’t heard anything, you have to start all over,” he says. “Then I started all over, and, that time, I got on to the show.”

The Likeliest Ways of Winning

With predictable modesty, Amodio insists that winning multiple games of Jeopardy! in a row is a miracle. After all, there is a degree of luck to each game: the types of categories, the quality of opponents, the hidden Daily Doubles that allow score-boosting wagers.

But Amodio’s strategy — guided by his academic background — sought to minimize luck and maximize probability at every step.

“We’re really in the midst of the Moneyball [analytics] era of Jeopardy!, and I think Matt Amodio is in so many ways the perfect example of it,” says Claire McNear, author of Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to Jeopardy! “In the past, a contestant might study an encyclopedia or an almanac or maybe watch a few episodes with a pen in hand. But today’s players really dig into the statistics and probabilities, and they try to pull some numerical certainties out of the game that has nearly 40 years of data to offer from its modern iteration.

“Yes, there is luck and chance in Jeopardy!,” McNear continues. “But there are also ways to sort of hack that system and look at what the likeliest ways of winning are.”

Probability is why in the first round, with lower stakes and only one Daily Double, Amodio played most aggressively. While many players try to find a foothold by starting with the lowest-value clues or staying in a comfortable category, Amodio blitzed through the highest-value clues and worked his way up the board to the lowest. That allowed him to quickly accumulate money before finding the Daily Double and wagering it all. And since Daily Doubles typically lurk among the highest-value clues, Amodio found nearly three-quarters of them during his run. Amassing large leads early on allowed him to play from ahead more conservatively in the second round.

“He was incorporating parts of what we’ve seen other players do, but he obviously did it better than just about anybody has,” says McNear, who also covers Jeopardy! for the entertainment website The Ringer.

Amodio’s analytical gameplay has been compared to that of James Holzhauer, who won 32 games in 2019, though Holzhauer’s overall wagering was more aggressive.

“He came in with a professional gambler’s mentality, and I came in with an academic probability mentality,” Amodio says. “And in the end, that’s very similar with just some minor differences on the edge.”