The world of Jeopardy was met with a pretty cataclysmic event today, when James Holzhauer’s 32-game winning streak came to a surprising end. Those who have been keeping up with the over month-long saga have made quite a lot of comparisons between Holzhauer and Ken Jennings — and it looks like they played off in a pretty amusing way. Jennings took to Twitter on Monday to address Holzhauer’s loss, with the help of an Avengers: Infinity War meme.
Actual photo of James Holzhauer walking off stage at Jeopardy, his reign of destruction completed. pic.twitter.com/Xdf5PFR3QD
โ Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) June 4, 2019
The tweet, which you can check out above, features a screenshot of Thanos (Josh Brolin) entering the “soul world” after he snaps half of the universe to dust in Infinity War. As Jennings joked, this bore a similarity to Holzhauer leaving the show after “his reign of destruction” was completed.
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Holzhauer, a professional sports gambler who is originally from the Chicago suburbs, did quite a number on Jennings’ Jeopardy records, which have been in place for fifteen years. Holzhauer’s daily earnings went as high as $77,000, significantly outgrossing Jennings’ daily average of $33,000. According to The New York Times, Holzhauer’s streak ended just $58,484 shy of Jennings’ overall record of $2.52 million. Holzhauer did complete his feat in a significantly shorter period of time, though, compared to Jennings’ 74-day reign. Even with all of these contentious records between them, the two men have been joking around on Twitter for the past few days, which makes this comparison to Thanos not that surprising.
Holzhauer’s loss came at the hands of Emma Boettcher, a Chicago-area librarian who ended up beating him by more than $20,000. Ironically, because the series tapes well in advance of its airdates, Holzhauer’s streak had not yet become public knowledge when Boettcher went into the taping…so it was not long before she had to beat him that she even knew who he was and how dominant he had been.
“It was weird to be a daily watcher of Jeopardy! and somehow there’s this phenomenon that I’d never heard of,” Boettcher said.
Boettcher won $46,801, which she plans to use to pay off student loans and give back to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science — where she wrote her master’s paper on predicting the difficulty of trivia questions using Jeopardy! clues.
What do you think of Jennings’ Infinity War-themed take on Holzhauer’s loss? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!