A 27-year-old librarian from Chicago dethroned the reigning “Jeopardy!” champ James Holzhauer on Monday, ending his 32-game winning streak.
Emma Boettcher won Monday night’s game after watching the show since she was a child, The New York Times reported.
She has auditioned for the show four times, initially at age 17, and she even wrote a 70-page thesis on the game in her master’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.{mosads}
“It’s an amazing feeling, truly,” Boettcher told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Just being on ‘Jeopardy!’ was one dream for me. And then to be on and hold my own was another dream. And then to be on and hold my own and then win was just way beyond anything I ever expected.”
During Final Jeopardy, Boettcher was leading Holzhauer, the new game show star, by $3,200. Holzhauer, a 34-year-old professional sports gambler, had racked up $2.46 million by making large bets early in the game. He was set to beat Ken Jennings’s 2004 record for $2.52 million won on the show.
But, when the Final Jeopardy clue was “The line ‘a great reckoning in a little room’ in ‘As You Like It’ is usually taken to refer to this author’s premature death,” Boettcher — a former English major — responded with a confident gamble. She waged more than $20,000, significantly more than Holzauer, and walked away with $46,801 after correctly guessing Christopher “Kit” Marlowe.
Boettcher prepared for the game by standing in front of her television and holding a toilet paper holder to practice buzzing in for questions, the closest stand-in for the real thing, according to The New York Times. She also calculated the percentage of questions she answered correctly and picked out her most comfortable shoes for the show.
During the game, Boettcher was trying to “stay focused, stay in the zone and not get too hung up on any clue that I didn’t know,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times.
The episode was actually taped on March 12, so Boettcher kept her win a secret for more than two months.
After the game, Holzhauer gave the new champ a high-five.
“Nobody likes to lose,” Holzhauer said in an interview with The New York Times. “But I’m very proud of how I did, and I really exceeded my own expectations for the show.”