Scott Riccardi‘s 16-day winning streak on Jeopardy ended on the season finale last week and internet theories have popped up claiming that he lost on purpose, which he says isn’t the case.
The Jeopardy champ is opening up about why he got that Final Jeopardy question wrong and what was going on in his head during that moment.
Scott lost the game because of a question about newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, which many felt was an easy one.
The “20th Century Names” category had the following clue: “According to one obituary, in 1935 he owned 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies and $56 million in real estate.”
While Scott answered Howard Hughes, the correct response was, “Who is Hearst?”
After winning $455,000 across his 16 wins, Scott went on Reddit to talk about his loss.
Keep reading to find out more…
Read Scott’s full message below!
Hi everyone, Scott here. Congratulations to Jonathan for the amazing win! It’s truly deserved and I can’t wait to see him return next season; he is a powerful competitor and all-around wonderful guy. Kudos to Charlotte as well for a very strong showing in tonight’s game. I apologize that I didn’t have any earlier opportunities to be active in these discussion threads, but I’m thankful for all the kind and insightful comments throughout what has been a completely surreal experience for me. I hope I didn’t overstay my welcome on the Alex Trebek stage for everyone who watched. There were too many talented challengers to be able to list them all here, but I’m hoping to be a proud supporter of each and every one of them in the hopes that they make up a sizeable subgroup of Second Chance competitors.
As for Final Jeopardy, my mind unfortunately went straight to Howard Hughes mostly due to overestimating the importance of the movie companies part of the clue; any previous FJs that had come to mind immediately had worked out, so I trusted my initial response on this. Hearst wasn’t on my mind at all until the moment Charlotte’s answer was revealed, and even then it didn’t immediately strike me as correct until Ken confirmed it. Truthfully, I was just especially unprepared to respond correctly to a clue about Hearst. I made a mental note before flying out that I was consistently forgetting to consider, of all things, Citizen Kane and the Tower of London as responses whenever they came up in archived practice clues; in the green room that week, I reminded myself about the Tower of London but could not remember the other half of that mental note. Also, before I started my prep for the show in earnest, I had found that I was having a hard time properly retaining info on what I found to be a confusing amount of three-named Williams in publishing (William Randolph Hearst, William Lloyd Garrison, and William F. Buckley, to name a few), never circling back to that thought after I got the call to be on the show. So several information near-misses and a poor understanding of the timeline in the clue really piled up to prevent me from getting what I now understand to be a very gettable clue. I’m sure I have other scattered thoughts about this game and all the others; I’ll try to address what I can within a reasonable time. Glad to have had the chance to be a meaningful part of this season!
Host Ken Jennings recently opened up about his future with the show.