Jeopardy contestant Emma Boettcher definitely impressed viewers worldwide when she became the person to break fellow contestant and champion James Holzhauer‘s month-long winning streak on the television game show, and her background proves she was the perfect candidate for the win. Before the 27-year-old Chicago native beat 35-year-old James by betting a wager of $23,400 and ultimately giving the correct answer, “Who is Kit Marlow”, she was a massive fan of the show and gained an extensive amount of knowledge by studying various topics. Here’s everything you should know about her.
1.) She works as a librarian. She has been the user experience resident librarian at the University of Chicago since 2016, and previously earned a master of science in information science from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, so she’s certainly a smart one!
2.) She used to play along with Jeopardy while watching it on TV. Emma told the New York Times that she watched the show religiously for many years and would play along by using a pen as the makeshift buzzer while documenting her scores in a notebook.
3.) Her impressive win was most likely due to her smart strategy. She made sure she knew the percentage of times she answered correctly for each row on the game board, so she would know how much to bet in the end and she also used this strategy for the Daily Doubles. “I knew going in that Daily Double hunting was something that I could do and feel confident doing,” she told the Times. “I don’t need to be cautious around that.”
4.) Before she appeared on Jeopardy, she won an award for an essay she wrote about the show. Emma won the Elfreda Chatman Research Award in 2015 for her master’s proposal “What is Difficulty?: Estimating the Difficulty of Fact-Finding Questions Using the ‘Jeopardy’ Archive”, according to her LinkedIn page.
5.) James praised her after his loss. “I lost to a really top-level competitor,” he said about Emma in an interview after her win. “She played a perfect game. And that was what it took to beat me.”