Not only has he come to dominate the list of highest single-game payouts, but Holzhauer has also become only the second contestant to earn more than $1 million in regular-season play. On Monday night, he continued his streak, winning his 18th game by just $18.
For some contestants, winning might usher in 15 minutes of fame and a small, unexpected windfall. But for players like Holzhauer, securing records, fame and big winnings can be transformative, creating opportunities and providing a level of financial security unthinkable to many Americans.
We caught up with a few “Jeopardy!” stars to ask them how their time on the show affected their lives.
Ken Jennings
Before he became a “Jeopardy!” legend, Ken Jennings was a 29-year-old computer programmer living in Salt Lake City, wondering if there was any way out of a career in coding.
“My wife says I kept talking about going to law school, that’s how desperate I was,” he joked.
Jennings had double-majored in English and computer science and always wanted to write, but after graduating and getting engaged he took a job at a tech startup to pay the bills. Then he qualified for “Jeopardy!”
In 2004, Jennings won 74 games in a row, earning more than $2.5 million. No one has come close to beating his streak (the nearest challenger won 20 consecutive games), though Holzhauer is closing in.
In April, Holzhauer became the only contestant to join Jennings in earning more than $1 million in regular-season play. (Another contestant, Brad Rutter, has earned more than either of them, but he earned the vast majority of his winnings — more than $4.5 million — in arguably more difficult tournament games.)
For Jennings, “Jeopardy!” significantly altered the course of his life. “It changed what I did every day,” he said.
After the show, Jennings decided to write a book about the history and appeal of trivia in America. In 2006, he published “Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs,” which did well enough for him to keep going.
“Each book sold better than the last, which is what publishers are into,” he said.
His books since include a trivia almanac, a debunking of myths passed down to children, and a book about how comedy has come to dominate culture. Jennings says he is now working on his 13th book, a travel guide to various depictions of the afterlife throughout human history.
(When he isn’t writing books, Jennings writes about travel and trivia online and hosts, with musician John Roderick, a podcast about historical oddities called “Omnibus!”)
More than anything, his time on “Jeopardy!” gave him precious freedom from a rigid career.
“The main thing that the show got me, honestly, is that I don’t work a 9-to-5 anymore,” he said. “I’m a freelancer, so I can be here when my kids come home from school, I can drive them to the bus, I can go to the midday middle school choir concert. To me, that means more than the money, honestly.”
Larissa Kelly
For Larissa Kelly, appearing on the show in 2008 and 2009 provided a lifeline for her and her husband, who were graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, facing a job market in the throes of the Great Recession.
“Having the money from ‘Jeopardy!’ meant that we had the freedom to think about where do we want to go, what do we want to do,” said Kelly, whose appearances then and since have made her one of the highest-earning contestants in the show’s history, with winnings of more than $660,000.
The money has allowed Kelly and her husband, Jeff Hoppes, to buy a house in Richmond, California, and given them the freedom to pursue jobs related to what they love.
“For the last six or seven years, we’ve both been doing professional trivia, and it was feasible for us to do that in a way that I don’t think it would have been without the cushion provided by ‘Jeopardy!’,” she said.
Kelly now edits questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments, which runs national quiz bowl championships at the middle school, high school and collegiate levels. Her husband is the organization’s vice president for communication.
Unlike other “Jeopardy!” champions, though, Kelly doesn’t get much opportunity to gloat. Not only were her sister and husband on the show, but Jennings, who beat her husband, is also a colleague at National Academic Quiz Tournaments.
“For a lot of people, it’s likely that they might be the only person at their company who was on ‘Jeopardy!’,” she said. “For me, I am never going to be the premier ‘Jeopardy!’ player at my company.”
Monica Thieu
Monica Thieu was technically still in high school when she first appeared on the show, but because she was enrolled in classes at the University of North Texas, she was allowed to compete in the show’s college championship in 2012.
Thieu won the title and $100,000, a prize that helped her pay for tuition at Stanford University.
“We might not have been able to afford it if we didn’t have the ‘Jeopardy!’ money,” she said.
At Stanford, Thieu worked in a psychology laboratory dedicated to the research of memory. She graduated in three years as a psychology major and is now a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, where she mostly studies how people perceive emotions.
The show, she said, probably enabled that career path.
“If I had gone somewhere else, I might have done something else,” she said. “I might have made my parents happy and been in medical school right now.”
Thieu appeared again on “Jeopardy!” in 2013 and for this year’s “All-Star Games” (in which she played on Jennings’ team).
Since her first appearance, though, Thieu has avoided telling people up front about her time on the show for fear that it would come to define her.
“I don’t want to be the ‘Jeopardy!’ girl,” she said. “I would like to be the girl that has these other hobbies and interests.”
Fortunately, it hasn’t been much of a problem. Aside from a few fan encounters, Thieu has, for the most part, continued to live a life of anonymity.
Roger Craig
Before Holzhauer obliterated the record, the title for most money won in a single game of “Jeopardy!” belonged to Roger Craig. (Before him, it belonged to Jennings.)
Craig became famous among fans of the show not only for that record — which he claimed by winning $77,000 in a single game in late 2010 — but also for how he achieved it.
To prepare for the game, Craig, who was finishing graduate school at the time, used a background in machine learning to analyze tens of thousands of past “Jeopardy!” questions and answers, which he downloaded from a fan-run website. He used his findings to direct his studies for the show and to hone his strategy during the game.
“That was probably the biggest thing that was unique to me, was becoming known for that because it was also related to my line of work,” Craig said.
But unlike other big winners, his life did not hugely change after he appeared on the show.
His sizable winnings gave him some financial freedom, but he still works in machine learning and artificial intelligence, now as a consultant, he said. And while people recognize him from the show, that recognition fades with the passage of time.
Appearing on “Jeopardy!” and in subsequent interviews with journalists did, however, help strengthen Craig’s public speaking abilities.
“Once you’ve done a television show and you’re up there in front of millions of people, to me, speaking in front of a few hundred or a few thousand people is not a big deal,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.