Ken Jennings

Kenneth Wayne Jennings III (born May 23, 1974) is an American game show host, former game show contestant, and author. He is best known as the current host of the syndicated quiz show Jeopardy!. Jennings was born in Seattle, Washington but grew up in South Korea and Singapore. He worked as a computer programmer before he tried out for Jeopardy! in 2004. During his initial run, Jennings secured a consecutive 74 wins, setting records and bringing significant media attention and viewership.

Afterwards, Jennings pursued a career as an author, writing about his experience and exploring American trivia history and culture in a series of best-selling books. He also appeared on other game shows, including The Chase, and hosted the Omnibus podcast. He returned to Jeopardy! in 2020 as a producer, and later guest-hosted the program after the death of host Alex Trebek the same year. He split full-time hosting duties initially with actress Mayim Bialik until 2023, when he was made permanent host.

Jennings holds numerous game show records: he is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different programs, including $4,522,700 on Jeopardy!. His original appearance on the program marks the longest winning streak, and he also holds the record for the highest average correct responses per game. Additionally, Jennings was awarded the first-place prize in Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time (2020).

Early and personal life
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III was born on May 23, 1974, in Edmonds, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. His father was an international lawyer, and moved the family to South Korea when Ken was in the first grade. His mother was a school teacher, and worked for the Department of Defense in that capacity overseas. Jennings grew up viewing Jeopardy! on the American Forces Network. Jennings spent 11 years living in Korea and also Singapore, and graduated from the Seoul Foreign School.

Upon returning to the United States, Jennings attended the University of Washington. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and spent two years as a volunteer missionary, serving in Madrid, Spain. In 1996, he transferred to Brigham Young University (BYU). One of his roommates was author Brandon Sanderson. He also played on the school's quizbowl team, at one point serving as captain, and graduated in 2000 with a double major in English and computer science. He met his wife, Mindy, at BYU, and they have two children.

After college, Jennings lived in Salt Lake City and was a software engineer for CHG Healthcare Services, a healthcare-placement firm in Holladay, Utah. Following his success on Jeopardy!, Jennings and his family later moved to Seattle, where he splits his time between his career as an author and Jeopardy! host.

Original streak
Before 2003, Jeopardy! contestants were limited to five consecutive wins. At the beginning of the show's 20th season in 2003, the rules were changed to allow contestants to remain on the show as long as they continued to win. After this rule change, and until Jennings' run, the record winning streak was set by Tom Walsh, who won $186,900 in eight games in January 2004. Jennings took the contestant exam for Jeopardy! in 2003, but did not hear back from the show for a year. He was given three weeks to prepare for his taping, and he prepared extensively, using a couch as a podium, his young child's toy as a buzzer, and having his wife use flash cards and keep score.

Jennings' run began during Jeopardy! 20th season with the episode aired on June 2, 2004, in which he unseated two-time returning champion Jerry Harvey, and continued into season 21. In that first episode, Jennings' entire winning streak nearly ended before it even began. The Final Jeopardy! answer was, "She's the first female track & field athlete to win medals in five different events at a single Olympics." Jennings responded with "Who is Jones?" using only the last name of Marion Jones (who was not stripped of her medals until December 2007). Host Alex Trebek said, "We will accept that, in terms of female athletes, there aren't that many." If the response had not been accepted, Jennings would have finished in third place, and challenger Julia Lazarus would have won the game instead. Jennings had taped 48 episodes before a single one made it to air.

His last program was taped in September, but did not air until November 30, 2004, timed to coincide with the end of television sweeps month. On his last show, aired November 30, 2004, his reign as Jeopardy! champion ended when he lost his 75th game to challenger Nancy Zerg. Jennings responded incorrectly to both Double Jeopardy! Daily Doubles, causing him to lose a combined $10,200 ($5,400 and $4,800, respectively) and leaving him with $14,400 at the end of the round. As a result, for only the tenth time in 75 games, Jennings did not have an insurmountable lead going into the Final Jeopardy! round. Only Jennings and Zerg, who ended Double Jeopardy! with $10,000, were able to play Final Jeopardy! as third-place contestant David Hankins failed to finish with a positive score after the Double Jeopardy! round. The Final Jeopardy! category was Business & Industry, and the clue was, "Most of this firm's 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year." Jennings appeared perplexed during the time allowed to write a response, while Zerg finished her response quickly. Zerg responded correctly with "What is H&R Block?" and wagered $4,401 of her $10,000, giving her a $1 lead over Jennings with his response still to be revealed. Jennings incorrectly responded with "What is FedEx?" and lost the game with a final score of $8,799 after his $5,601 wager was deducted from his score. After his response was revealed to be incorrect, the audience audibly gasped, and Zerg appeared to be shocked after realizing that she won. Jennings was awarded $2,000 for his second-place finish, which gave him a final total of $2,522,700 for his Jeopardy! run. Zerg, whom Jennings called a "formidable opponent", finished in third place on the next show. The audience gave a standing ovation in honor of both contestants, and Alex Trebek called Zerg a "giant killer" as Jennings embraced her.

Overall, Jennings answered over 2,700 questions correctly on the program. Jennings' run was interrupted by the off-season break (July until September), 2004 Kids' Week, the Tournament of Champions (aired from September 20, 2004, through October 1, 2004), the 2004 United States presidential election (Tuesday, November 2, 2004, pushing his weeks of episodes to air from Wednesday to Saturday) and the College Championship (aired from November 10, 2004, to November 23, 2004). As a result, he went the entire five months without a loss. Jennings did not participate in the Tournament of Champions, as invitations are extended only to champions (4 wins or more) who have been defeated (with the exception of the winner[s] of the College Championship). On December 1, 2004, the day after his defeat, Jennings made a guest appearance at the start of the broadcast, during which host Alex Trebek acknowledged his success and enumerated the various game show records he had broken.

Impact and television ratings
It took a span of 182 calendar days to broadcast Jennings' 75 matches. His run on the show brought significant media attention and television ratings. According to the Nielsen TV National People Meter, Jeopardy! ratings were 22 percent higher during Jennings' run than they were during the same period the previous year. For several weeks of the winnings' streak, Jeopardy! was ranked as TV's highest-rated syndicated program, with ratings 30 percent higher than before his appearance. By the end of Jeopardy! 20th season several weeks later, the show had surpassed sister program Wheel of Fortune in the ratings, though Wheel still benefited from the streak in markets where Jeopardy! is its lead-in in the common scheduling tactic for both shows. Jennings was credited with boosting the program's popularity as a whole, which at that point had been on the air for two decades but primarily attracted an older demographic.

The attention changed Jennings' life overnight, turning him into a household name. Jennings guested on several television programs, including The Tonight Show, Nightline, Live with Regis and Kelly, Sesame Street, and the Late Show with David Letterman, where he read the Top Ten List of Ways To Irritate Alex Trebek. Publicists for the program reportedly divided his appearances evenly between ABC and CBS—the former a frequent affiliate for the show and the latter a sister company to the show's syndicator. Taking advantage of the notoriety of Jennings' losing Final Jeopardy! answer, H&R Block offered Jennings free tax planning and financial services for the rest of his life, with a senior vice president for the company estimating that he owed about $1.04 million in taxes on his winnings. BBDO created an advertisement for FedEx in the USA Today newspaper three days after his final game, stating "There's only one time FedEx has ever been the wrong answer" and congratulating Jennings for his streak. Barbara Walters named him one of her 10 Most Fascinating People of 2004. In a 2011 Reddit AMA, Jennings recalled how in 2004 the Democratic politicians Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid unsuccessfully asked Jennings to run for the United States Senate from Utah. He commented, "That was when I realized the Democratic Party was [screwed] in '04". At the end of the decade, Entertainment Weekly put his run on its "best of" list: "Answer: A software engineer from Utah, he dominated the quizfest for a record 74 shows in 2004, amassing $2,520,700. Question: Who is Ken Jennings?"

Jennings donated ten percent of his winnings to the LDS Church. His streak made an impact backstage at the show as well, with the producers implemented some changes during his run. Normally, players only get a short time to practice, but more rehearsal time was added so that the new players could get comfortable with the buzzers. Additionally, the person who managed the buzzer system was changed. In his book Brainiac, Jennings says that the consistency of the original manager's timing had given an increasing advantage to continuing players, and that the change made a noticeable difference in the second season that he was on the show. At one point, announcer Johnny Gilbert stopped announcing Jennings' total wins during the show's opening.

His losing episode can be seen on the 2005 DVD release of Jeopardy!: An Inside Look at America's Favorite Quiz Show. In 2023, Jennings' entire run was made available for the first time, streaming on Pluto TV.

Tournaments
Jennings returned to the program several times over the years as a contestant in its tournaments. He first rejoined the show for the 15-week, 75-show Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005. The field totaled 145 players including Jennings, who, unlike the other competitors, was automatically placed in the finals. In the final round, Brad Rutter decisively defeated Jennings and Jerome Vered, with respective final scores of $62,000, $34,599, and $20,600. Jennings won the $500,000 prize for second place, but as a result of the Ultimate Tournament, Rutter temporarily displaced him as the highest overall winner of money on game shows.

He returned for the 2011 Jeopardy's "IBM Challenge", which featured the company's Watson against Jennings and Rutter in two matches played over three days, the first man-versus-machine competition in the show's history. The winner of the competition was Watson, winning $1,000,000 for two charities, while Jennings was second and Rutter was third, receiving $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter each pledged to donate half of their winnings to charity. At the end of the first episode, in which only the first match's Jeopardy! round was aired, Rutter was tied with Watson at $5,000, while Jennings was in third with $2,000. After the second episode in which the first game was completed, Jennings remained at third with $4,800 while Rutter at second had $10,400. The competition ended with Watson with $77,147, Jennings with $24,000, and Rutter with $21,600. Below his response during the Final Jeopardy! round, Jennings wrote on his screen "I for one welcome our new computer overlords." It was the first time Rutter had been defeated against any human player, although the defeat is not on Rutter's Jeopardy! official record, as the competition was deemed an exhibition. Jennings wrote about playing against Watson for Slate.

He participated in the 2014 Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades tournament, where he made it to the finals along with Brad Rutter and Roger Craig. Jennings placed second, winning a $100,000 prize, and Rutter won first place, securing a $1,000,000 prize. In the 2019 Jeopardy! All-Star Games, with 18 former champions, Jennings was one of six captains, choosing 2015 Tournament of Champions runner-up Matt Jackson and 2012 Jeopardy! College Champion Monica Thieu (who coincidentally eliminated Jennings in a 2016 episode of 500 Questions) to complete his three-person "Team Ken." Team Ken finished second to the team captained by Rutter, with Jennings winning $100,000, one-third of the $300,000 second-place prize. In January 2020, ABC aired the Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time tournament between Jennings, Rutter, and James Holzhauer. Jennings won the championship to be crowned with the "Greatest of All Time" title and a first-place prize of $1,000,000, bringing his lifetime Jeopardy!-related winnings to $3,522,700.

Hosting
In September 2020, Jennings signed on as a consulting producer of Jeopardy! for the show's 37th season, a job that included reading on-air categories. Alex Trebek, the longtime host of Jeopardy!, had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer the previous year. Trebek taped his final episode of the program on October 29, 2020. Contingency plans were made for him to miss the next taping, scheduled for November 9-10, as he planned to have a surgery. Supervising producers Lisa Broffman and Rock Schmidt had named Ken Jennings the interim host for the taping and Jennings had a final conversation with Trebek days before the rehearsal was set to commence. The rehearsal was scheduled for November 8, 2020, but was subsequently cancelled when Schmidt gave the staff the news that Trebek had died that day from his cancer.

Jennings was widely viewed as an heir to the role as host; Trebek had also reportedly considered Jennings his rightful successor. Trebek's widow Jean gave Jennings a pair of cufflinks Trebek wore as a gift prior to his first taping as host. Jennings was announced as the first in a series of guest hosts of the program in November 2020. His episodes aired from January 11 to February 19, 2021. Later, The Wall Street Journal reported Jennings was indeed intended to be sole host, but controversy over his remarks on social media hurt his standing, with poor ratings from focus groups and Sony executives fearing his selection could cause backlash.

After a brief period in which presenter Mike Richards was named as host and quickly dismissed due to controversy, Jennings resumed hosting the daily syndicated program alongside actress Mayim Bialik, who had also guest-hosted over 2021. The next year, it was announced that Jennings, along with Bialik, would split hosting duties full-time beginning with the show's 39th season. Jennings also began hosting the new Jeopardy! Masters series, a primetime tournament featuring six recent notable Jeopardy! champions competing against each other in a "Champions League-style" format, on ABC in 2023. The program premiered on May 8, 2023.

Following Bialik's withdrawal from Jeopardy! on May 11, 2023 due to the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes, the last 20 episodes of season 39 were hosted by Jennings. Five days later, it was announced that Jennings would host the second season of Celebrity Jeopardy!. In September of that year, Jennings received a nomination for Outstanding Host For A Game Show at the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards. In the wake of Bialik's departure, Jennings became the permanent sole host of Jeopardy! starting with the 40th season. According to reporter Claire McNear, "Many Jeopardy! staff members came to believe that Jennings had become the technically superior host, according to a source close to production, who says that Jennings’s improvement was the key factor that spelled the end for Bialik."

Writing career
After his initial success on Jeopardy!, Jennings secured a book deal, and left his career as a programmer to pursue his original love of writing. Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs details his experiences on Jeopardy! and his research into trivia culture conducted after the completion of his run, and was published in 2006. Ken Jennings' Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days, a hardcover book, is a compilation of trivia questions—with three categories and about 20 questions per day of the year. Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks explores the world of map and geography enthusiasts. Because I Said So! is a humorous examination of "the myths, tales & warnings every generation passes down to its kids". He also has written five books for his children's series, Junior Genius Guides.

Jennings has written and edited literature and mythology questions for the National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT), a quiz bowl organization. He has read questions as a moderator at the 2005, 2006, and 2009 NAQT High School National Championship Tournaments in Chicago. Jennings had a weekly trivia column, Kennections, in Parade magazine. In it, five questions were posed whose answers were connected to a mystery topic, which the readers had to guess. Parade ceased the quiz in early 2015, and removed links to archived quizzes in March 2015. Kennections now appears in the online version of Mental Floss magazine. Jennings also had a column in Mental Floss magazine called "Six Degrees of Ken Jennings", where readers submitted two wildly different things that Jennings had to connect in exactly six steps, in the style of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The column ran from November 2005 to the September–October 2010 issue.

Jennings also wrote a trivia newsletter called Trivia Tuesday, which ran from 2006 to 2021. Every Tuesday, beginning on July 4, 2006, Jennings sent out an email containing seven questions. The seventh, a question asking what several items have in common, was designed to be Google-resistant. Subscribers responded with the answers to all seven questions and the results are maintained on a scoreboard on Jennings' blog. Every 10 weeks, the respondent with the most seventh questions correct was awarded a signed copy of his newest book. After 800 quizzes, as of November 16, 2021, due to an ever-increasing amount of commitments related to Jeopardy!, book tours, and simply starting to run out of material for the seventh question, Jennings decided to discontinue the email.

Outside of his writing career, Jennings won the rookie division of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2006. He was an active member of the trivia app FleetWit, regularly playing in the live trivia races. As of March 2018, on average, he had answered 89 percent of questions correctly and has won over $2,000. He also competed regularly in LearnedLeague under the name "JenningsK". His last active season was LL85 (May 2020), where he played in the A Rundle of the Laguna league and finished the season in 5th place.

Other television and game show appearances
In the aftermath of his Jeopardy! fame, Jennings signed with the United Talent Agency, which hoped to expand him into a commercial pitchman or TV host. In 2005 and 2006, he engaged in several endorsements, including a deal with Microsoft to promote its Encarta encyclopedia software, and Cingular Wireless (now AT&T) featured Jennings in commercials portraying him as having lots of "friends and family" (coming out of the woodwork once he began winning on Jeopardy!). He was also involved in speaking deals through the Massachusetts-based speakers' agency American Program Bureau. University Games produced a Can You Beat Ken? board game, in which players vie against each other and Jennings in an attempt to earn $2.6 million first. Each question in the game was asked to Jennings, and his answers, both correct and incorrect, are recorded on the cards.

According to Variety, Jennings was slated to host a new game show for Comedy Central set to premiere in 2005 or 2006, but the project later stalled in development. Michael Davies was attached to produce the project. Jennings explained on his website that "Stephen Colbert's show was doing so well in its post-Daily Show spot that Comedy Central decided they weren't in the market for a quiz show anymore." As of mid-2006, he was still shopping a potential game show titled Ken Jennings vs. the Rest of the World. Davies later joined Jeopardy! in the 2020s and became its executive producer and showrunner as Jennings assumed the role as host.

In the interim years between his stint as contestant and host of Jeopardy!, Jennings appeared of dozens of other game shows. He taped a pilot for a proposed CBS revival of Pyramid, titled Million Dollar Pyramid, and was a contestant on other game shows including Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!  and 1 vs. 100 in 2006, Grand Slam in 2007, Stump the Master in 2008–09, 500 Questions in 2016, and @midnight in 2017. His appearance on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? in 2008 held the possibility of exceeding Brad Rutter's total game show winnings, had Jennings decided to risk the million dollar question. He also appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, as a frequent expert for the lifeline "Ask the Expert". Jennings appeared on Millionaire in 2014 as a contestant during Guinness World Records Edition themed week, where he won $100,000 after deciding to walk away on his $250,000 question. If he had gone for it, Jennings would have been right and would have won $250,000. Jennings was one of eight recurring "Trivia Experts" for Best Ever Trivia Show, which debuted in 2019; he was also one of the six trivia experts on Best Ever successor, Master Minds, from 2020.

In November 2020, it was announced that Jennings would be one of the three chasers on the ABC revival of The Chase, hosted by Sara Haines with Rutter and Holzhauer as the other chasers, joined by Mark Labbett in season 2. Jennings left after the second season. In May 2023, he competed against Mayim Bialik and Vanna White on an episode of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, winning $72,800 for the Equal Justice Initiative.

Outside of game shows, Jennings appeared on multiple episodes of Doug Loves Movies, hosted by Doug Benson. On September 7, 2017, HowStuffWorks unveiled a new show entitled Omnibus, co-hosted by Jennings and John Roderick, frontman of the indie-rock band The Long Winters. They pick topics they fear might be lost to history and discuss them. Jennings also narrated the audiobook version of Alex Trebek's autobiography, The Answer Is.... His rendition was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards.

Records
He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,700 on the U.S. game show Jeopardy!. From 2021 to 2023, Jennings and Mayim Bialik alternated as hosts of that show, as well as Celebrity Jeopardy! In 2023, Jennings received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Game Show. In December 2023, Jennings was announced as Jeopardy!’s permanent main host.

Jennings holds the record for the longest winning streak on Jeopardy! with 74 consecutive wins. He also holds the record for the highest average correct responses per game in Jeopardy! history (for those contestants with at least 300 correct responses) with 35.9 during his original run (no other contestant has exceeded 30) and 33.1 overall, including tournaments and special events. In 2004, Jennings won 74 consecutive Jeopardy! games before he was defeated by challenger Nancy Zerg in his 75th appearance. Jennings' total earnings on Jeopardy! are $4,522,700, consisting of: $2,520,700 over his 74 wins; a $2,000 second-place prize in his 75th appearance; a $500,000 second-place prize in the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions (2005); a $300,000 second-place prize in Jeopardy!'s IBM Challenge (2011), when he lost to the Watson computer but became the first person to beat third-place finisher Brad Rutter; a $100,000 second-place prize in the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades (2014); a $100,000 second-place prize (his share of his team's $300,000 prize) in the Jeopardy! All-Star Games (2019); and a $1,000,000 first-place prize in Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time (2020).

During his first run of Jeopardy! appearances, Jennings earned the record for the highest American game show winnings. His total was surpassed by Rutter, who defeated Jennings in the finals of the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions, adding $2 million to Rutter's existing Jeopardy! winnings. Jennings regained the record after appearances on several other game shows, culminating with his results on an October 2008 appearance on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, though Rutter retained the record for highest Jeopardy! winnings and once again passed Jennings' total after his victory in the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades tournament. In 2020, he once again faced off with and won against Rutter, as well as James Holzhauer, in a special primetime series, Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time.

Recognition
On March 3, 2020, the Washington State Legislature approved Senate Resolution 8704, congratulating Jennings for his achievements on game shows.

Controversial tweets
Jennings was an active Twitter user, and some of his tweets have been subjects of controversy. On September 22, 2014, Jennings received criticism after tweeting, "Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair." The tweet reignited controversy after resurfacing in 2020, which led to condemnation from noted disability rights activists such as Rebecca Cokley.

On November 10, 2015, Jennings was criticized when he tweeted a joke about the death of Daniel Fleetwood, a lifelong Star Wars fan who died of cancer. Fleetwood's dying wish was to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, fearing he likely would not live to see the film when it opened in theaters in December 2015. An online campaign was started on his behalf and his wish was granted only days before he died. Jennings said, "It can't be a good sign that every fan who has seen the new Star Wars movie died shortly thereafter."

Jennings again faced controversy when on May 31, 2017, he tweeted a joke involving Barron Trump, the youngest child of former U.S. President Donald Trump. After 11-year-old Barron saw an image of Kathy Griffin holding a bloody mask modeled after his father, he believed it was real and screamed. Jennings wrote, "Barron Trump saw a very long necktie on a heap of expired deli meat in a dumpster. He thought it was his dad & his little heart is breaking." After the tweet garnered controversy, Jennings said, "The joke doesn't mock Barron. It mocks using him for political cover."

In August 2018, he was criticized for his description of an elderly woman tweeting about her deceased son. When she tweeted about her son's love for the 1980s television character ALF, Jennings responded with "This awful MAGA grandma is my favorite person on Twitter."

In December 2020, Jennings offered an apology on Twitter for some of his past comments, and subsequently deleted said comments.

In January 2021, Jennings faced controversy again when his friend and podcast co-host John Roderick posted a Twitter thread where he discussed preventing his nine-year-old daughter from eating until she learned to open a can of baked beans using a manual can opener, which he approximated took six hours. The incident caused controversial past tweets to resurface in which Roderick made comments that were seen as using anti-semitic, homophobic, racist, and other derogatory language. Jennings defended Roderick, saying he was "a loving and attentive dad who ... tells heightened-for-effect stories."

2023 Writers Guild of America strike
In May 2023, the Writers Guild of America announced that its unionized writers would go on strike, as part of negotiations largely related to increases in pay, benefits, and protections against artificial intelligence. Jennings' then co-host on Jeopardy!, Mayim Bialik, refused to participate in the show's final week of filming as a result. Jennings was reportedly brought in as the host for filming "as a result of Bialik's decision"; some assumed this meant he had crossed the Writers Guild of America West picket line, but a rep from SAG-AFTRA clarified that since Jeopardy! is a Network Television Code show, it was not under the same contract as other shows on strike and therefore Jennings was not crossing the picket line and was clear to work. The show returned for season 40 in late 2023, using a mix of recycled material and newly-written questions made before the strike; the program had also made a similar move during the 2007-08 strike.