Amy Schneider’s winning streak in Jeopardy! continued on Thursday as she reached another milestone: winning her 32nd consecutive game, which put her in third place with former champion James Holzhauer in most consecutive games won.
The 42-year-old Oaklander certainly could have broken that tie on Friday night and continued her Danger! glory. On Thursday, she took home the $32,800 victory, taking her total to $1,101,600 and the highest paid Jeopardy! story.
Schneider was well ahead of her competitors for most of Thursday’s game and won by giving the correct answer to Final Jeopardy: “What is a guillotine?”
The question from the category “Words of Victor Hugo” sounded like this: “This “object” is the highest expression of the law, and its name is revenge; it is not neutral and does not allow us to remain neutral.”
As the first transgender Jeopardy! A qualifier for the Tournament of Champions, Schneider has captivated viewers with her gameplay since her first appearance on the show on November 17th.
The engineer-manager has also gained a following through her active Twitter feed. She talks about her personal life and, somewhat modestly, about being an icon of the LGBT community. Schneider also exchanged congratulations with past Jeopardy! participants, writes themes that break every game, and reveals his methods of absorbing a seemingly endless amount of facts from history, science or pop culture.
However, her latest game thread is for the Tuesday night game. She admitted that she fell behind the publication because she contracted an unknown illness last week. She was also recovering from an injury sustained in a robbery at gunpoint in Oakland on January 2, when she lost her phone and ID.
In the game thread on Tuesday, she kicked herself for the wrong answer to Final Jeopardy. The question in the Broadway Musicals category was: “In every show that ran for more than two years, Ethel Merman and Sarah Jessica Parker played two different characters with that name.”
Schneider replied, “What is a Rose?” —perhaps referring to the fact that Merman gained acclaim for her role as “Mother” Rose Howick’s overbearing stage mother in the original Broadway version of Gypsy in the late 1950s.
The correct answer was: “What is Annie?” Merman played Annie Oakley in “Annie Get Your Gun” in the 1940s, and Parker, as a teenager, played the lead role of “Annie” in the late 1970s.
Schneider questioned on Twitter why she forgot that Parker was a child star on Broadway and why she talked herself out of the right answer. She also noted that she entered Final Jeopardy with $42,000, well ahead of the other contestants.
