For the past month, \u201cJeopardy!\u201d episodes have followed a pattern.<\/p>\n
The theme music plays. The three contestants stand at their lecterns. Then two of them are clobbered by a mild-mannered bureaucrat from New Jersey named Jamie Ding.<\/p>\n
But on Monday\u2019s episode, the unthinkable happened: After 31 victories, Ding lost.<\/p>\n
His streak is the fifth-longest in \u201cJeopardy!\u201d history. He fell just one win short of matching James Holzhauer\u2019s 2019 run<\/a>, and he left the Alex Trebek Stage with more than $880,000 in winnings.<\/p>\n Early in the game broadcast on Monday, Ding found himself lagging behind Greg Shahade, an International Master in chess who was lightning-fast on the buzzer. During Final Jeopardy, Ding jotted down the correct response to a clue about South African languages \u2014 but it wasn\u2019t enough to make up the deficit.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was over, just like that,\u201d Ding, 33, said in an interview.<\/p>\n Contestants who went up against him included a statistician, a librarian and a professor. Ding produced so many correct answers (always in the form of a question) that it seemed he might never run out.<\/p>\n \u201cWho was Trotsky?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are non-Newtonian fluids?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are waffle fries?\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout his reign, he was matter-of-fact as he came up with arcana in a split second (\u201cWhat is cuneiform?\u201d). He endeared himself to viewers through his comically humdrum banter with the show\u2019s host, Ken Jennings, about such topics as his favorite color (orange), his favorite letter (F) and his favorite number (6).<\/p>\n As the streak continued, the drama-free anecdotes and humble bits of personal information shared by Ding seemed to amuse Jennings, a former \u201cJeopardy!\u201d champ who holds the record for consecutive wins, with 74.<\/p>\n The depth of Ding\u2019s knowledge went along with a lack of bluster. He proudly identified himself as a \u201cfaceless bureaucrat.\u201d When he won a game, he looked pleasantly surprised, as if he had been given an unusually good free sample at Trader Joe\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cPut Jamie Ding on the $20 bill,\u201d one fan demanded in a tribute<\/a> on the newsletter platform Substack.<\/p>\n After his \u201cJeopardy!\u201d<\/a> loss had been taped but before it was broadcast, Ding gave a video interview from his two-bedroom apartment in Lawrenceville, N.J.<\/p>\n There he was, in front of an orange couch and a stuffed orange clownfish. He said he had remained calm throughout his final game, even as he realized that he was on his way to a loss. He went backstage and stared at the mostly orange clothes he had brought along in the hope that his streak would continue.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring it, I was trying to stay grounded,\u201d he said. \u201cPlanning to win a whole bunch of games of \u2018Jeopardy!\u2019 just feels like asking to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n Ding filmed the show in five-episode chunks in Los Angeles during vacation days from his job as a program administrator for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. His work involves administering tax credits to build affordable housing in the state.<\/p>\n In an early appearance, he praised New Jersey\u2019s efforts on the issue compared with those of New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. \u201cIf you\u2019re from one of those states, then shame on you,\u201d he said. \u201cBuild more housing.\u201d<\/p>\n He spends his time away from his job studying law at Seton Hall University. He said he did not expect his \u201cJeopardy!\u201d windfall to change his life all that much. He planned to donate some money and put the rest in a high-yield savings account.<\/p>\n In a way, Ding said, he had been preparing for the show since childhood. The son of a neuroscience professor and a high school math teacher, he grew up in Grosse Pointe Shores, a suburb of Detroit. He competed in geography bees and on his high school quiz bowl team. He recalled losing a sixth-grade spelling bee when he misspelled the word \u201cbolero.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cB-a-l-l-e-r-o,\u201d he said. \u201cTerrible.\u201d<\/p>\n As an undergraduate at Princeton, he studied molecular biology, thinking he might become a doctor. But a year as an AmeriCorps Vista program member in Jersey City, N.J., nudged him toward working to address the housing crisis.<\/p>\n Ding admitted he was not a regular \u201cJeopardy!\u201d viewer until early this year. Still, he had taken the online qualification test several times. In November 2024, a producer asked him to audition over Zoom. After learning he had been cast, he started studying in earnest.<\/p>\n \u201cI checked out a big stack of books, like an atlas and a book about Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n His sister, Jessie Ding, a 31-year-old lawyer, caught him up on pop culture, telling him all about the HBO show \u201cIndustry\u201d and helping him identify the faces of various celebrities. He practiced buzzing in quickly using a retractable highlighter.<\/p>\n By his third victory, it was clear that Ding had the stuff to make a deep run, said Andy Saunders, the publisher of the website The Jeopardy! Fan<\/a>. In that game, he responded to 45 clues correctly, tying a record set by Jennings during his streak in 2004.<\/p>\n Ding was a relatively conservative player, avoiding the all-in wagers on Daily Doubles that were a go-to stratagem for Holzhauer. But he was unusually fast on the buzzer and seemed to have few weak categories.<\/p>\n \u201cThe key to Jamie\u2019s run really has been his incredibly wide base of knowledge in just about any category you can think of,\u201d Saunders said.<\/p>\n Ding used a tactic he called \u201cknight moves\u201d \u2014 traversing the board in an L-shaped pattern, like a knight in chess. Maybe it threw his opponents off-balance, or maybe it was just nice to have a simple rule to follow, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s basically a guaranteed way to pick something of a different difficulty, and in a different category,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n He watched his first \u201cJeopardy!\u201d appearance at Pint, a bar in Jersey City, with friends from so many different groups that it felt like a wedding. He is still getting used to the attention that comes with being a TV star.<\/p>\n \u201cWatching my episodes, I can be pretty self-critical \u2014 like, Why did you do that? Or, What\u2019s wrong with your face?\u201d he said. The outpouring of support has been worth the discomfort. \u201cI\u2019m trying to keep a list of people who did nice things for me because it\u2019s so many,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Now that his streak has ended, he can return to his hobbies, like constructing cryptic crosswords<\/a> and running an Instagram account rating General Tso\u2019s<\/a> chicken with his sister. He is also part of a group of intervenors seeking to block<\/a> the U.S. Department of Justice from obtaining New Jersey\u2019s voter registration records.<\/p>\n It won\u2019t be long, though, before he starts studying for the \u201cJeopardy!\u201d Tournament of Champions. He might even need some more orange clothes.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a reputation to uphold,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n