Medina ‘Jeopardy!’ champ shares strategy
‘What is’ methodology cut down on stage fright
Heck. Just being on the show was pretty cool.
Going on a 38-game winning streak and landing second on the all-time list of consecutive games won on a legendary TV game show wasn’t too shabby either.
And then there’s the not-so-small matter of winning some $1.5 million in prize money — the third most in “Jeopardy!” non-tournament history.
But Matt Amodio said for his parents, who he credits for all his “smarts,” the biggest achievement from his crazy run earlier this year came a couple months later. Amodio said being enshrined in the Medina High School Hall of Fame — a place where he wandered the halls not that long ago as its 2009 valedictorian — is the coolest thing.
“I think my parents were more proud of that accomplishment than anything I did on ‘Jeopardy!,’” he said. “For them, that was the pinnacle.”
The glare of the television lights is over for now — though he will likely be back on the show for its Tournament of Champions next year — so he’s back to being just “Matt,” a student working to finish his doctorate in artificial intelligence at Yale.
Amodio said he never really put his studies on hold to be on the show. While the run stretched on for weeks and even over the summer break, in reality several episodes are shot in a single day and then aired later. So while it seemed like it took months, it was actually mere weeks. He said he would have a day off here and there between tapings when he would bury his head into trivia or hit the books for his doctoral studies.
The maddening thing, Amodio said, was never knowing when the streak would end. So he really just lived day to day in California during taping and would have to check out of his hotel each morning not knowing whether he’d need a place to stay for another night.
And sometimes that strategy didn’t work out well.
“There were times when I got back to the hotel and they’re like, ‘We don’t have any rooms left tonight,’ “he said. He was
left to scrounge around for another hotel so he’d be rested and ready to face the next round of contestants the very next day.
Amodio said there are still some clues kicking around his head that he didn’t answer right that, looking back, were pretty easy.
“I missed a big Daily Double which I wagered on, of one of the most famous computer scientists of all time,” he said. “It was Alan Turing, who I had just recently watched a movie about with Benedict Cumberbatch. And there just was no excuse at all for me to get that question wrong,” he said. “But lo and behold, I did. And those [clues] are kind of in my wheelhouse.”
He also had to rely on his math degree from Ohio State a lot to figure out what to wager not only on Double Jeopardy clues but also in Final Jeopardy, as some of the matches were pretty close and came down to the wire.
“Everything else is very time sensitive, and you are rushing with the game dynamics. But before Final Jeopardy wagering, they give you a piece of paper and a pencil, and then they give you pretty much as much time as you want to figure
out your wager,” Amodio said. “And to me that makes it even more stressful, because if I’m forced to do math in my head on the fly then that’s great. If I make a mistake then, I’m human.
“But when they give you this amount of time, there’s no excuse for any error ... so I was like double-checking, triplechecking, quadruple-checking my work because of just how embarrassing it would be for a math person of all things to make a mistake like that.”
The numbers — aside from the last game — usually worked out in Amodio’s favor, as he typically had large leads over his competitors.
As for the elephant in the room, or in this case, the “what.” Amodio said he didn’t start every one of his answers with “what” to irritate grammarians or “Jeopardy!” aficionados.
“’What is’ was absolutely a strategy, because I knew I had never performed in front of an audience of more than — I don’t know, three people — my entire life,” he said. “The lights would be on, the camera would be on, and they’d ask me my name, and I wouldn’t even be able to come up with it.
“I feared I might have crippling stage
fright, and so I figured I should just get in the habit of saying ‘what is’ to hopefully minimize the chance that I’d forget to phrase it as a question on the show.”
Amodio said he’s glad the what-ifs are behind him and happy he’s back to enjoying the occasional trivia nights at a local bar or a rousing round of Trivia Pursuit with his family when he’s visiting in Medina.
It was cool for the huge baseball fan to get to do things like throw out an opening pitch at an Akron Rubberducks game. But he’s still surprised — although he’s actually a part of trivia history and folklore — when folks recognize him when he’s out and about.
“I knew that a lot of people watch ‘Jeopardy!’ so I figured while my run was going I would have my 15 minutes of fame, and people would want to talk to me,” he said. “But then like I’d lose on a Monday, and by Tuesday morning I’m yesterday’s news. Everyone would forget about me, and nobody would ever want to talk to me again. I’ve been really surprised that that’s not the case.”
Craig Webb, who still has no idea who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, can be reached at cwebb@thebeaconjournal.com.