Jamie Ding kept his run alive Tuesday night, defeating Philadelphia software engineer Max Ernst and stretching his winning streak to 28 games on Jeopardy! The 33-year-old from Lawrenceville, Mercer County, is now closing in on James Holzhauer’s 32-game streak.
Through Tuesday, Ding had won $774,601 before taxes, putting him fifth on the show’s all-time consecutive-wins list since the cap was removed in 2003. He tied Ken Jennings’s record for most correct responses in a single game with 45 during his third win, a burst that helped turn a promising start into one of the longest runs in the show’s modern history.
That progress has come with a look as deliberate as his buzzer work. Ding, a New Jersey public policy wonk, has worn varying degrees of orange clothing on the show, and he said the wardrobe choice is not accidental. If the pattern gets too busy, he has said, it will not look good on TV, and he added that contestants also have to be ready to discover random stains or tiny holes they never noticed before.
The streak has already carried Ding past Canadian champion Mattea Roach and South Jersey’s Cris Pannullo on the all-time wins board. The only players ahead of him in winnings are Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, Holzhauer and Jennings. That makes every additional victory feel heavier than the last, because each one pushes him closer to a tier occupied by the game’s biggest names.
Tuesday’s game also showed how narrow the margins can be. In Final Jeopardy, Emmett Laurie missed the clue in the category 90s Television: “Northwest Passage was the working title of this series that was renamed for mountains.” Ding answered, “What is Twin Peaks?” while Laurie wrote, “Hi Zoe?” It was the kind of finish that has kept Ding’s run intact, even as the field gets harder and the spotlight grows brighter.
Ding has entered Final Jeopardy in second place only once, on April 9, when the clue involved a famous wrestler adopted in 1979. The correct response then was Hulk Hogan. He said afterward that it had not fully sunk in and that he loves history, which is why making some history himself has been so satisfying. This is where the jamie ding jeopardy streak stands now: 28 straight wins, with Holzhauer’s mark still ahead and Jennings’s place in the record book already within reach.
