Featured J!Buzz

Executive Producer Michael Davies takes you inside the premiere - and the evolution of Jeopardy!’s ultimate postseason championship 

Jeopardy! Masters is back, and while watching Wednesday night’s premiere, I couldn’t help but think about how we got here. 

Though I’ll always accept a compliment, there is nothing especially original about the idea for Jeopardy! Masters. There is, after all, a long history of inter-multi-season-Jeopardy!-champion competition within our game. 

Way back in 1990, there was the super funky summer primetime series, Super Jeopardy!, which featured 35 former champions from the first six seasons of the Trebek version, plus Burns Cameron, a former champion from the Art Fleming era.

 This was followed by a one-week 10th Anniversary Tournament in 1993, celebrating Trebek’s tenth season, and won by a New York City handlebar-mustachioed police officer, Lieutenant Frank Spangenberg.

 In 2002, the show traveled to Radio City in New York for Jeopardy! Million Dollar Masters, where star contestants from the pre-KJE (Ken Jennings Era), including Spangenberg, and the eventual winner, a 24-year-old Brad Rutter, battled it out for a giant cash prize of $1 million. 

Three years later, fresh off his 74-game winning streak, Ken Jennings was defeated by none other than Brad Rutter in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, this time for an even more staggering $2 million prize. 

After Ken and Brad were both beaten by IBM’s Watson in 2011, inter-decade action was introduced in 2014 with the appropriately titled Battle of the Decades. And guess who won that one? Yes, the pride of Lancaster, Pennsylvania — Bradford Gates Rutter. (This time he only won a measly $1 million!) 

And in 2019, Brad returned once again for Jeopardy! All-Star Games, teaming up with Larissa Kelly and David Madden to beat Team Ken and Team Colby Burnett in the final, winning yet another $1 million, this time split three ways. 

Finally, in January 2020, Rutter took to the ABC primetime stage, once again facing Ken Jennings and the latest Jeopardy! sensation, James Holzhauer, fresh off his own record-setting winning streak, in Jeopardy!: The Greatest of All Time. 

This time, Ken finally got his revenge. 

In the first-to-three-wins limited series, Ken won three of the first four games (becoming the first human to ever beat Brad and losing only the second game to James), while Brad finished without a win, in third place out of three. 

I write all this less as a history lesson (though I enjoyed the research project) than to give context to this year’s third edition of our annual Masters tournament — both generally and specifically. 

Because generally, while this tournament certainly builds on Jeopardy!’s long history of champion vs. champion competition, Masters is different. It’s not an occasional celebration. It’s our actual postseason championship: the place where the very best meet every single year to duke it out on the Alex Trebek Stage. 

And in this, our third year of our new and improved postseason, we expanded the Masters field and invited all three finalists of Jeopardy!’s three most elite postseason tournaments: 

• The 2025 Tournament of Champions (for this season’s top players): Neilesh Vinjamuri, Isaac Hirsch, and Adriana Harmeyer
• The 2025 Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament (for some of the best and most memorable players of recent and more distant seasons): Matt Amodio, Roger Craig, and Juveria Zaheer
• And of course, last year’s 2024 Jeopardy! Masters finalists: Victoria Groce, Yogesh Raut, and James Holzhauer*. 

Literally the best of the best. 

So by now, you have probably figured out why, specifically, I gave you all that backstory. 

We are definitely missing one of last year’s Masters finalists! 

James Holzhauer, the 2023 Jeopardy! Masters champion and last year’s third-place finisher, declined our invitation to participate. 

Graciously, he recommended that we reach out to the person who has won more money playing Jeopardy! than any human (or computer) alive: Ken’s rival of 20 years, Brad Rutter. 

So, when you saw that lighthearted exchange between Brad and Ken in the opening introductions — “I know you’re delighted to see me, Ken” — think about how many games, years, and decades went into the formation of that moment. Even a supercomputer was involved. 

Jeopardy! Masters: Behind the Clues 

Jeopardy! Masters is not just the pinnacle of the season for our contestants and viewers — it also represents the highest difficulty level of categories and clues we write all year. 

Our writers and researchers, our game material team (who prepare the photo, graphic, and video clues), and our clearance team (who ensure we have the appropriate permission and rights for every image) all bring their own Masters-level skills to the execution of these game boards. 

And the range of material we expect our Masters to master, even in the Jeopardy! Round is staggering:

•  Identifying Revolutionary War General George Clinton from a painting,
• Recognizing Apple’s Cupertino headquarters from a video,
• Naming Kendrick Lamar from a song title,
• Remembering that Rebecca Rolfe is the adopted name of Pocahontas,
• Figuring out that “intermediary” is the correct word with “ME” in the middle, meaning “middleman” or “liaison,”
• Oh, and yes, that small canine developed to herd livestock in the Scottish Isles…What is a Shetland Sheepdog? 

And remember: they not only have to respond correctly, they also have to buzz in just a hundredth of a second faster than the two other Jeopardy! Masters they’re competing against. 

Postgame Highlights: Game 1

There were definitely clues the Masters demolished that we weren’t sure anyone would get, even at this level. 

Some of these came up in the postgame chat (often posted on our YouTube or at Jeopardy.com). 

I was particularly impressed with two of Yogesh’s responses: 

• American History $1000 (Jeopardy! Round) — Who is A. Mitchell Palmer? 

  → In the postgame chat, Ken asked Yogesh how he knew about the Palmer Raids. Yogesh said he learned about it while reading about the First Red Scare, and mentioned that as a child, he would devour every book his brother checked out from the library — even when his brother didn’t read them. 

• Poetry-Pourri $2000 (Double Jeopardy!) — Who is Tiresias?

   → I personally studied T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for two years for my English Literature A Level. I read this category the night before, and the morning of recording — and I still didn’t get it! 

But nobody got “splotch” — an irregular stain or discoloration, a seven-letter word with just one vowel. Ever since recording this episode, I can’t stop saying “splotch”.

My personal favorite category? Bone of Contention (Double Jeopardy!). Who doesn’t love a well-contested category featuring the Pectoral Girdle?

Speaking of the Postgame Chat...

We love trying to get interesting personal stories out of the contestants about how they knew certain things.

Ideally: “That was my ex’s favorite book” or “I saw that movie on my worst date ever.”

Increasingly, though — especially at the elite level — the answer is simple: they studied.

That’s the spirit behind the Double Jeopardy! category in the second game of this episode: “Was That on Your Flashcards?” — info we figure there’s no way our players could have prepped, like:

• “Sleep when the baby sleeps” (they knew it), and
• That Dupixent and Rinvoq are eczema medications (they didn’t).

Stats Department: Knockout Game 1  

Points won: Yogesh (3), Victoria (1), Brad (0) 

Game Stats:

• Yogesh ended the Jeopardy! Round with 15,400 points — a Masters record by 1,800 points.
• He had 15 correct responses — tied for 3rd most in a single round in Masters history.
• Yogesh entered Final Jeopardy! with 24 correct responses, 30,800 points, and a runaway against two of the greatest players in Jeopardy! history.
• Victoria was the only correct player in Final (Bordeaux - water’s edge in French).
• Yogesh had the fewest number of buzzer attempts (35) to Victoria’s (44) and Brad’s (37), but Yogesh had the highest buzzer success rate (63%) to Victoria’s (48%) and Brad’s (30%)

My Postgame Thoughts: Game 1

Yogesh is one of the fastest starters I’ve ever seen on Jeopardy!.

He arrives on stage calm and locked in. Tough to beat on the buzzer right out of the gate — the Fernando Alonso of Jeopardy! Masters.

Victoria had a less successful game by her standards and still managed 21 correct responses. She’s a streaky player — but once she heats up, it’s over. Klay Thompson! (I’ll probably hear from Amy Schneider about that one.)

Brad clearly struggled with his buzzer timing, to be expected after five years away.

His Jeopardy! game is still there, though — and it was just wonderful to see him back. He has not only won more money than anyone in the history of our show, but he also went almost 20 years without losing on Jeopardy! to any human. Oh, and my favorite Brad fact? After his original five-day winning streak in 2000, back when consecutive appearances were capped at that number, he was offered a choice of Chevrolet cars. He chose two Camaros. Legend.

(Quick memory: I produced a quiz show for GSN in 2007 called Grand Slam, based on a UK format. Brad was the #1 seed, but lost to Ogi Ogas, who then lost to Ken Jennings in the final. The episodes are all on YouTube. These guys!)

Stats Department: Knockout Game 2  

• Points won:        Roger (3), Matt (1), Juveria (0)
• Notes:
  • Rematch of the 2025 Jeopardy! Invitational Finals (Matt won that one).
• Game Stats: (Crazy close game, statistically)
  • Matt: 17 correct, 36 attempts, 50% buzzer success.
  • Roger: 16 correct, 42 attempts, 48% success.
  • Juveria: 15 correct, 35 attempts, 54% success.
  • All three got Final right (“Paradise Regained”, or as I like to call it, “Paradise Lost 2”).
  • Roger found both DJ! Daily Doubles — key to his win. 

My Postgame Thoughts: Game 2

Three of the nicest — but fiercest — competitors I’ve ever met.

We love a closely contested game where anyone can win in Final. 

In the postgame chat, Juveria said she felt better about her performance today than the JIT finals, where she felt like she couldn’t buzz in at all against Matt and Roger. She also said that it’s just so much fun getting to play against people who have become friends. And Juveria is friends with basically everyone. 

Roger is a fan of “Men in Blazers” and misses me on the pod. He is clearly a gentleman of phenomenal taste and intelligence. 

Ken also spoke with Matt about wagering and how this was the longest he’s ever seen Matt think about his wager before Final Jeopardy!. Matt said that the fact that we eliminate one-third of the field after just two games in the new expanded format changed his strategy - “the value of 1 point in the first game is very different this year compared to last year”. Matt thinks a lot, and he’s good at it. 

Thunderbolts and Lightning 

The “Thunderbolts*” category began, obviously, as an idea to (cross-) promote the new Marvel movie produced by ABC’s parent, The Walt Disney Studios. 

But since no one has seen the movie yet, the category had to be based on pure Jeopardy! knowledge.

 Michele Loud, our co-Head Writer, immediately thought of “Bohemian Rhapsody” (“Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening!”) and built the category from there, finding thunderbolts (and one very loud explosion) in history, literature, film, and music. 

Perfect Masters-level material — and Florence Pugh and David Harbour brought it to life! 

Final Thoughts

 I enjoy every episode of Jeopardy! that we make. I feel so fortunate to have a front row seat witnessing what is essentially a living and ever-evolving American cultural institution. But the most elite level of our competition, Jeopardy! Masters puts pressure on all of us on the staff and crew to raise our games. I learn more about this program, and am more inspired during the two weeks we make these episodes than at any other time of the year. This post started with a reflection on how we got here. But all I really think about as I’m driving home from the studio every evening is where we are going. 

And how Jeopardy! continues to evolve: one clue, one buzz in, and one response at a time. 

For now, enjoy the next few weeks of the best of the best. I know how it turns out, and I still can’t wait to watch it with you and share some observations from inside the belly of the beast. 

Whether you’re reading on Jeopardy.com or my personal Substack, www.substack.com/@embassydavies, let me know what you want to hear more about in the weeks ahead. 

Stay in Charge, 
Michael Davies