Ken Jennings

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Ken Jennings
Kenjennings.jpg
Noted subjects Jeopardy!
Current college None
Past colleges BYU (1996-2000)
Stats HDWhite • NAQT

Ken Jennings is best known for his record-setting run on Jeopardy! that captivated the country in the summer of 2004. Jennings won a still-record 74 consecutive games and defeated numerous other quizbowl personalities, including Leo Wolpert and Jeff Hoppes, in the process. He is currently an editor for NAQT. He (and the various NAQT diehards of the mid-00s who were also interviewed at the time) took his newfound fame as an opportunity to use the mainstream media as the vehicle to settle feuds with ACF from 1995, by crowing that his victory on a game show had resolved some "format war" with which the contemporary quizbowl circuit was unfamiliar. This tactic blew up in NAQT's face when Jennings repeatedly lost on Jeopardy to Chip Beall acolyte Brad Rutter.

Ken Jennings was declared Jeopardy!'s "Greatest of All Time" in January 2020 after beating Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer in a first-to-three series of games, and returned to the game a year later as a guest host in place of the late Alex Trebek.

BYU Quizbowl

Jennings was part of of the BYU team from fall 1996 until 1999-2000. In 1998, Adam Fine ranked him as the 81st best quizbowl player he had seen play.

Other media

In 2015, Jennings appeared as himself on an episode of Mysteries at the Museum discussing the evolution of road maps. Ironically, this same episode also featured as segment entitled "Attack of the Killer Bees", which one expects he might have had greater in-depth knowledge of, given his background with NAQT.

On the April 2, 2017 episode of The Simpsons entitled "Caper Chase", Jennings voiced himself alongside scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, screenwriter/philosopher Robert McKee, and financial talking head Suze Orman, collectively referred to as "the greatest educators in the world" ... at least in the episode.

In the 2021 ABC reboot of The Chase, Ken plays alongside the aforementioned Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer as a "chaser," and attempts to prevent contestants from banking money by answering more questions correctly than them.

Links

Ken Jennings' website
"How I beat Ken Jennings", by James Quintong