Meeting with Emma Boettcher, who has just dethroned James Holzhauer

TO CLOSE

"Peril!" competitor James Holzhauer continues to break the records of the game show.
UNITED STATES TODAY & # 39; HUI

All three "Jeopardy!" The candidates, Monday night, answered correctly the question of the final round. But it was Emma Boettcher who won not only a $ 46,801 win, but also a unique role in the show's story: the challenger who finally knocked out superstar James Holzhauer.

"I lost against a very high level competitor," Holzhauer said in an interview with The New York Times. "She played a perfect match. And that's what it took to beat me. "

Holzhauer won $ 56,484 just before breaking Ken Jennings' all-time record for non-tournament play. He made waves on the series by making important bets, and his fall was partially imposed after placing an unusually low score in the last round.

The latest clue, published by the Times: "The phrase" A great calculation in a small room "of" As You Like It "is generally used to refer to the untimely death of this author. (For non-English majors Kit Marlowe?" Was the right answer.)

Boettcher tackles the last question with a $ 3,200 advance on Holzhauer. He bet only $ 1,399, bringing his total for the day to $ 24,799. She is betting $ 20,201. His scoreboard totaled $ 46,801 as Holzhauer headed for the top of his successor.

As a spectator, Boettcher said that she had scored her scores in a notebook, thus calculating her percentage of correct answers.

"I knew that participating in the Daily Double hunt was something I could do and that I could do with confidence," she told the Times. "I do not have to be careful about it."

A librarian specializing in user experience at the University of Chicago, Boettcher earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2014 and a master's degree two years later from the University of North Carolina.

In the host's chat, she confided to the host Alex Trebek that she had written a master's article on "Jeopardy!".

"I did a series of text extraction experiments to see if a computer could predict how difficult an index was," according to factors such as its length, syntax, and sound or visual elements. What did she predict? Trebek wondered. "It's very hard to do."

James Holzhauer was finally declared "Jeopardy!" champion after 32 wins and nearly 2.5 million dollars in prize money. (Photo: Jeopardy Productions)

But she knows how to build good questions: her resume cites her experience by writing "anecdotal questions about" pub quiz "style for the History After Hours events at the Museum of the American Revolution.

Theater and history lovers would love this one: "What's your name, man? was (a category) on the pseudonyms used by Alexander Hamilton, "said Boettcher.

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