The fourth and final round of Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time aired tonight, and Ken Jennings was crowned as the winner. All last week, Jennings went head-to-head with the two other biggest winners in the quiz show history: James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter. Much like last week’s matches, all three burned up the board with big-money clues first and rarely firing off a wrong answer.
The final tally was Jennings with 88,600 points, Holzhauer placing second (though his two-game total wasn’t revealed) and Rutter once again coming in third with 1400.
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After four nights of competition, Jennings came out ahead with three wins total, earning him a cash prize of $1 million, a trophy presented by host Alex Trebek, and, of course, lifelong bragging rights. The two runner-ups will each take home $250,000.
The multi-night tournament, which began last Tuesday, was a huge ratings win for the network, drawing in more viewers than the other three broadcast networks combined. It even beat the number of people who tuned into the last round of NBA playoffs and the most recent World Series.
Jennings first burst onto the Jeopardy! scene in 2004, and thanks to the recently-lifted rule that limited contestants to five total wins, and stayed at the podium a record 74-straight games. He scored second-place in a handful of prior tournaments, including 2014’s Battle of the Decade and last year’s Jeopardy! All-Star Games. He also lost to Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, in 2011.
Holzhauer is the proverbial new kid on the block, who racked 33 straight wins from April to June of last year. Rutter first appeared back in 2000, when his winning streak was limited to five games. Prior to The Greatest of All Time, he’d never lost to a human competitor, only to Watson in 2011 and was considered the biggest winner in terms of total money won prior to this week. Despite his pedigree, Rutter failed to get on the board last week, which viewers took time to point out all last week.
Ahead of the nights first round of Double Jeopardy!, Rutter called it “a privilege and an honor” to be associated with the show. Throughout the four-night tournament, both Jennings and Holzhauer also took the time to pay their own tributes to Trebek. This included all three contestants wearing purple ribbons during The Greatest of All Time, which was a gesture of solidarity with Trebek, who was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer last March.
