‘Jeopardy!’: Yogesh Raut Speaks Out After Winning TOC
Yogesh Raut is still on a high after winning the intensely competitive Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions and is now reflecting on his triumphant return to the Alex Trebek Stage.
The psychologist and podcast host from Vancouver, Washington, was crowned the TOC winner on Tuesday, March 19, after defeating fan favorite Ben Chan and professional quizzer Troy Meyer. In doing so, Raut bagged himself $250,000 and a guaranteed spot in the upcoming Jeopardy! Masters tournament.
“Jeopardy!’ is inherently a challenging game to play,” Raut said in an interview with the Seattle Times. “There’s a lot of luck involved, and over and over again, I benefited from the bad luck of other contestants.”
Raut’s victory was met with mixed reactions from viewers, as some still had lingering animosity from his first time on the show. He first appeared on Jeopardy! in January 2023, winning three games for a total of $96,403 (plus $2,000).
During his time on the show, he drew criticism for what some fans perceived as “arrogance” and “bad sportsmanship.” Raut later clapped back at his critics in a series of Facebook posts, where he also ranted against Jeopardy! itself, questioning the show’s relevancy.
Penning an article for the official Jeopardy! website, Raut touched on his original appearance. While he didn’t address the Facebook rants directly, he helped shed light on his comments, which were intended to point out there are other forms of skill and smarts beyond Jeopardy! trivia.
“As I sat on my flight back from LAX to PDX in November 2022, reflecting on my time on J!, I thought I had maybe proven myself to be pretty smart,” Raut wrote.
“Waiting for the plane to take off, I started playing the find-the-hidden-object game on the monitor in front of me,” he continued. “The woman next to me saw what I was doing and began playing too. It didn’t take long for her to completely outpace me. Eventually, her boyfriend commenced as well, and he zoomed past me in no time at all.”
“‘Oh, right,’ I reminded myself. ‘There’s many different flavors of “smart.”’ And so I got over myself and went back to my life,” he added.
Raut said he returned to his regular life and put Jeopardy! in the rearview mirror. “That changed in December 2023, when local ABC affiliate KATU surprised me on air with the news that I had been invited to the Tournament of Champions,” he shared.
“My head spun. Chuck Forrest. Dan Melia. Colby Burnett. Brad Rutter. My fellow Indian American Vijay Balse. Was there a chance I could join these legends and all the other hallowed winners of the J! Tournament of Champions? Yes. But only a 1/27 chance.”
Despite the big opportunity, Raut explained that he continued with his usual routine, updating his blog, hosting and editing his podcast, writing fun practice tests for Online Quiz League, and playing Sporcle quizzes.
“Not wanting to be attached to inaction, [I] bought a copy of former TOC winner Fritz Holznagel’s book Secrets of the Buzzer,” he added.
Something Raut didn’t do was research his fellow TOC contestants. “With a few exceptions, they were all strangers to me when I met them in the lobby of the Culver Hotel,” he wrote. “Emmett Stanton and I checked in at the same time, but based on the way he was dressed I simply assumed he was an exceptionally nice itinerant Irish folk musician.”
But Raut got his first taste of what was to come “when Juveria Zaheer’s husband Mike shook my hand and said, “It’s an honor.””
“I scanned for signs of irony but found none,” he continued. “It was then that it dawned on me that I was among people who valued and respected me — not just as a buzzer-presser, but as a human being.”
Raut went on to praise all 27 other contestants (including the alternate), as well as every single member of the Jeopardy! staff who “went out of their way to be complimentary, encouraging, and kind to me.”
“Our mutual web of love and support formed a protective cocoon that blocked out the rest of the world and allowed me to focus on the game at hand,” he stated.
Summarizing his experience and victory, Raut shared, “It took decades of hard work and dedication to put myself in a position to win the ToC, and it took a great deal of luck for me to triumph over equally skilled competitors. But at the end of the day, I’m still the guy who — based on how bad I was at that airplane game — can easily be outperformed on a mildly complex visual search task.”
You can read Raut’s entire article at Jeopardy.com.
