Asian American wins ‘Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions’

Asian American Yogesh Raut recently won the “Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.”

According to KOIN, Raut won the tournament on Tuesday, March 19 after the six games. He will take home $250,000.

Raut, according to The Columbian, is a blogger, freelance writer and podcaster. He has lived in Vancouver, Washington since 2017 but is originally from Springfield, Illinois.

Raut was born the year the current version of “Jeopardy!” premiered. A few decades later, he appeared on the show in January 2023. He went on a four-day run during which he won a total of $98,000, The Columbian reports. That winning streak qualified him for the Tournament of Champions.

The Jeopardy champion attributes his success to a combination of skill and luck. On Tuesday night, he won the tournament by making a smarter wager than his two opponents.

“Jeopardy! is inherently a challenging game to play,” Raut said in an interview, per The Seattle Times. “There’s a lot of luck involved, and over and over again I benefited from the bad luck of other contestants.”

Throughout the tournament, Raut would post reflections about the process on his Facebook page. He told The Columbian he is hoping to shatter the stereotypes surrounding people who enjoy quizzes.

“People think of Sheldon from ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ or someone with eidetic memory,” he said. “In many ways those (stereotypes) are harmful.”