‘Jeopardy!’: Former Champ Matt Amodio Was More Concerned About Stage Fright Than the Quiz Board

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Jeopardy! is featuring a string of repeat winners in season 38. Quiz whiz Matt Amodio kicked the season off and charmed viewers with his amiable persona during his 38-game streak. The Ph.D. student admitted to being an introvert and even hesitated on trying out for the quiz show due to potential stage fright.

Former ‘Jeopardy!’ champ Matt Amodio | Paula Lobo/ABC via Getty Images

‘Jeopardy!’ has a tough audition process

Amodio spoke of the steps required to take in order to qualify as a Jeopardy! contestant, which involved more than just a high IQ.

“The process of getting on the show, it’s multi-staged,” he told Cleveland CBS affiliate WOIO in October 2021, as reported by Newsweek. “There are auditions that you have to do and at each point, you not only have to answer questions right but there are people evaluating you for personality.”

While he was confident in his knowledge base, the Ohio native felt he lacked the vivacity needed to be an engaging television personality.

“I’m a very introverted person,” Amodio shared. “I was more worried about seeming interesting enough to get on the show than I was about the actual questions.”

RELATED: ‘Jeopardy!’ Champion Matt Amodio Has ‘1 Real Regret’ During His Winning Streak

Matt Amodio didn’t want to freeze on camera

Amodio admitted he didn’t have any prior stage or entertainment credentials, and his lack of on-camera experience added to his concerns.

“I’ve never performed,” he remarked. “I’ve never been in theater or sung or played music in front of people, so I was really worried that I would have stage fright – forget my name, forget what the capital of Ohio is if they asked me.”

Despite his hesitation over screen time, Amodio made a name for himself on social media and racked up over 54K followers on Twitter thanks to his Jeopardy! fame.

“I’m still calling myself an introverted person, even though I’m now sharing my thoughts to all of these people on Twitter,” Amodio said. “I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. So maybe I’m not as introverted as I thought, and maybe it just takes a little bit to give people a push and they’ll enjoy it too.”

‘Jeopardy!’ champ loves his new title

Amodio will return for Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions later this year, and he’s psyching himself up for the challenge.

“In the Tournament of Champions, you’ve filtered it so that you only get people who have won at least five games of Jeopardy,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s going to be a more competitive stage than I’m prepared for mentally. So I’m quite worried about that. Hopefully I’ll do well, but I’ll be shaking in my boots a little bit.

With over $1.5 million in winnings and second place for most consecutive wins (which may soon be broken by current champ Amy Schneider), Amodio is more focused on the Jeopardy! title that he now possesses.

“The idea of just saying ‘Jeopardy! champion’,” he explained. “Once I won once, they call you a Jeopardy champion, and that moniker stays with me forever. I’ll try not to correct people too often when they address me as ‘Matt Amodio’ and say, ‘That’s Jeopardy champion Matt Amodio to you.’ But I’ll know that that always applies, and that’s just a tremendous source of pride for me.”

RELATED: ‘Jeopardy!’: Is Matt Amodio Married?

Amy Schneider unseats Matt Amodio for 2nd most consecutive games won on ‘Jeopardy!’

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EMBED >More News Videos Amy Schneider has been a “Jeopardy!” fan her whole life. Now, she’s become the first trans contestant to qualify for the ‘Tournament of Champions.’

LOS ANGELES – Amy Schneider continues to climb the “Jeopardy!” leaderboard. With her 39th victory on Monday’s episode, Schneider unseated Matt Amodio to claim the second-place spot for most consecutive games won in the show’s history. Schneider is now second only to Ken Jennings , who racked up 74 consecutive wins in 2004. Amodio, now in third place, logged 38 wins last year.As of Monday’s episode, her winnings total $1,319,800. She is the winningest woman in the show’s history and one of only four “Jeopardy!” players to reach seven figures in regular-season winnings.“It still feels unreal,” Schneider said Monday. “Knowing that I had this chance, I was definitely thinking about it. Then Ken said it, and I thought, ‘Alright, I just accomplished this huge thing,’ and it was pretty great.“While Schneider may have bested Amodio this time around, they both are set to compete in the next edition of the Tournament of Champions.“I’m definitely looking forward to it. I’m also a little bit intimidated by it. When I first started, I wasn’t sure if I might be going up against Matt Amodio and I was really hoping I wouldn’t. And now it turns out I’m going to have to anyway,” Schneider told George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview on “Good Morning America” Monday morning She added: “It’s going to be really challenging; a lot of strong players there, but it should be a lot of fun.“Throughout her run on the show, Schneider has fulfilled a prediction made by her 8th-grade classmates in Dayton, Ohio: She was voted most likely to be a “Jeopardy!” contestant based on her geography and spelling bee prowess.More significantly, she’s the first openly transgender person to qualify for the show’s tournament of champions. In a series of tweets last November, Schneider said she’s proud to be a trans woman and wants people to know that aspect of her, adding, “but I’m a lot of other things, too!”

Amy Schneider Beats Matt Amodio’s 38-Game ‘Jeopardy!’ Streak

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Amy Schneider/Twitter

With her 39th straight victory, Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider officially broke Matt Amodio’s summer winning streak on Monday night.

After host Ken Jennings introduced her competitors, Toledo nurse Joanne Mercer and New York attorney Erin O’Leary, Schneider quickly broke away from the pack. She leaped on “90s R&B & Hip-Hop,” answering the first question (about the rapper behind “U Can’t Touch This”) instantly.

“It’s Hammer time, yes,” Jennings said, smiling in response to Schneider’s correct answer.

Despite several Triple Stumpers, Schneider closed out the game’s first round with $6,600, thousands ahead of Mercer and O’Leary. By the end of the Double Jeopardy round, she had pulled away with a “lock” of $37,600, meaning that she had already won enough to guarantee her victory.

So although Schneider lost $25,000 after betting on the wrong answer to the Final Round, it didn’t matter. With 36 right answers, including two Daily Doubles, and cinching a final score of $12,600, Schneider was declared Monday’s winner, and a new record-holder.

Since beginning the game in November, Schneider has racked up game-show accolades alongside her daily earnings. With her 11th win in December, she became the first trans contestant to earn a spot in the Tournament of Champions. On Jan. 7, she became the first woman to earn more than $1 million in the game. And after Monday’s win, Schneider now has the second-longest winning streak of all time.

After passing Amodio, a Yale Ph.D. student from Medina, Ohio, Schneider, an engineering manager from Oakland, California, is second in victories only to the inimitable Jennings.

Amodio’s winning streak, dubbed the “Amodio Rodeo” came to an end in October when he missed out on two Daily Doubles and botched Final Jeopardy. He walked away from the blue board a champion, having earned over $1.5 million for providing 1,299 correct answers.

He also became the second-winningest player of all time when he broke James Holzhauer’s 2019 32-game streak. Of Amodio’s performance, co-host Mayim Bialik said, “He was unbelievable, and also really, really fun to watch… I don’t think that I’ve experienced in all the time that I’ve been here anything like that, with the pace and intensity that he was able to keep up.”

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Jennings, who shares the host’s podium with Bialik, said of Amodio, “The one thing I admire more than anything else on Jeopardy! is consistency. It’s so hard to come out and win day after day and week after week.”

But when Schneider began competing only a month after Amodio’s departure, her own pluck and skill proved that Jeopardy! would have two back-to-back winning phenomenons. And with Amodio’s record now behind her, and a grand total of $1,319,800 in earnings, Schneider will have to set her sights on Jenning’s own game-winning consistency. To earn the top winning-streak spot, she must now break Jenning’s 74-game winning streak, set back in 2004.

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Amy Schneider ties Matt Amodio’s second-place “Jeopardy!” record for consecutive games won

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Amy Schneider continued her climb up the “Jeopardy!” leaderboard on Friday, tying Matt Amodio’s second-place record for consecutive wins. Schneider, the first woman to break $1 million in winnings on the quiz show, has now won 38 games and $1,307,200.

To win her 38th game, she beat out an office manager from Georgia and a PhD student from Wisconsin. She found and correctly answered two Daily Doubles, and cruised into “Final Jeopardy” nearly $29,000 ahead of her second-place competitor. A correct answer about “Mountains” gave her another $20,000, bringing her winnings for the day to $54,000.

The win comes just a week after she broke the third-place record held by fellow “Jeopardy!” great James Holzhauer. When asked how it felt to have caught up to Holzhauer, Schneider said beating him had become “a target of mine” after she began to do well on the show.

She also spoke about beating Holzhauer on Twitter, writing that “One thing that may or may not be coming across is just how much fun I was having during all this! The winning is nice, sure, but it was also just a rewarding experience to be so focused on one particular thing.”

By the end of today’s @Jeopardy, I will have interviewed Amy 38 times. You can learn a lot about someone in almost 40 mini-conversations! pic.twitter.com/wxw7sDBzbs — Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) January 21, 2022

Now, only one “Jeopardy!” great — current host Ken Jennings — stands between her and the longest consecutive win streak. But Jennings is still far ahead, having won 74 games during a historic run in 2004. Schneider is in fourth place for the total amount of money won in regular season play, behind Jennings, Holzhauer, and Amodio.

Schneider is also the first transgender “Jeopardy!” contestant to qualify for the Tournament of Champions, and is the highest-earning female contestant in the show’s history.

Amy Schneider moves into 2nd place on all-time ‘Jeopardy!’ wins list, surpassing Matt Amodio

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Jeopardy! contestant Amy Schneider is breaking records.

Schneider surpassed Matt Amodio’s 38-game winning streak on Monday’s show, putting her in the No. 2 spot on the game show’s all-time consecutive wins list. Her winnings now total $1,319,800.

Making it extra exciting, the engineering manager from Oakland, Calif., is now only behind megachamp Ken Jennings on the winners list — and he was hosting the show for her big win. (Jennings has been splitting hosting duties with Mayim Bialik.)

“It still feels unreal,” Schneider said in a show press release. “Knowing that I had this chance, I was definitely thinking about it. Then Ken,” who set the record for 74 consecutive wins in 2004, “said it, and I thought, ‘Alright, I just accomplished this huge thing’ and it was pretty great.”

Jeopardy! contestant Amy Schneider won her 39th consecutive game on Monday, bumping Matt Amodio from the No. 2 spot on the show’s all-time consecutive wins list. Ken Jennings remains No. 1 with 74 straight wins. (Screenshot: Jeopardy via Instagram)

Amodio, who is now bumped to spot 3 on the list, just set his record for 38 consecutive wins in October. Schneider and Amodio will face off in the next edition of the Tournament of Champions, a yearly two-week Jeopardy! tournament featuring 15 players who’ve won the most games, later this year.

“It’s going to be an honor playing against you, and it’s going to be a tight competition,” Amodio said in a message to Schneider.

Schneider previously set a record for being the first woman to surpass $1 million in winnings on the show.

Schneider talked about her big run in her first live interview with Good Morning America on Monday. While she discussed her buzzer technique and what Jeopardy! fame has been like, the game show star, who is transgender, said the greatest part of this experience has been representing the trans community on TV.

“The best part for me has been being on TV as my true self, expressing myself and representing the entire community of trans people,” she said. “And just kind of showing a different thing than maybe some people have seen, of just being a smart, confident woman and just doing something super normal like being on Jeopardy!.”