With Jeopardy! winning streaks snaring millions, former brainiac contestants are revealing how you can game the game and score big, too!
Champs say the REAL smarts involve how and what to study — including children’s books, pattern recognition and buzzer technique!
“If anything has been on TV for 35 years, it comes with plenty of trends,” says 12-time winner Austin Rogers, 43, who pocketed $411,000 from the show in 2017.
The 43-year-old New York City bartender says he spent 11 hours a day for two weeks playing old Jeopardy! quizzes going back to 1985, limbering up his fingers for the buzzer, and deep-diving into online databases.
“It tells you that if Cubist comes up, the answer will almost always be Picasso,” says Rogers, who shares his smarts in “The Ultimate Book of Pub Trivia by the Smartest Guy in the Bar.”
James Holzhauer, the toothy 37-year-old Las Vegas gambler who famously won nearly $2.5 million in 2019, said he pored over children’s history books to get some easy basics.
And Jeffrey Williams, a Los Angeles TV editor who appeared on one of late host Alex Trebek’s final episodes in December 2020, watched movie adaptations of famous books and did mental gymnastics for remembering lists of minerals.
