‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Yogesh Raut Addresses Day He Made a Kid Cry & His ‘Aggressive’ Reputation

Jeopardy! champion Yogesh Raut was once called an “aggressor” after he made another child cry while in school. He said the term haunted him because he wanted to be the best he could, not beat other people. Raut kept that same mentality when competing on Jeopardy!.

In an interview with his local newspaper, the Springfield State Journal-Register, Raut addressed the aggression that people projected onto him, which he said doesn’t exist. His earliest memories were ones from when he was in sixth grade at Iles Elementary School.

“My earliest memories are of Springfield, and that was where I started my education up through ninth grade (at Springfield High School),” Raut told the outlet. “So many of the things I learned, I learned there. Watching Jeopardy! as a child, that is where I lived. A lot of my early experience doing academic-based competitions, doing spelling bees, geography bees, Scholastic Bowls, all started there.”

He told the outlet about a photo that was published of him in the paper after he won a geography bee. The second-place finisher stood next to him in tears. The child’s mother leaped from her seat and held the loser in her arms. Raut had no idea what to do.

“For the next several weeks, people would come up to me and say, ‘Ha, you made a fifth grader cry,'” The Jeopardy! Masters champion recounted. “I certainly wasn’t trying to do that. I was just competing the way that people competed then. I certainly wasn’t taunting him.

“People projected onto me a level of competitiveness and aggression that is really not there, like, it doesn’t exist. I competed in these things because that’s how you show how good you are. To me, it was always about competing to be my personal best, not about beating other people.”

Raut went on to say that he views his competitors on Jeopardy! as “kindred spirits” who add “knowledge and learning” to the game show. He also said they are people who can tell interesting stories [about] whatever it is they’re passionate about.”

The Jeopardy! champion might not want to look like an “aggressor” because he tried hard to fit in as a kid. He said that he learned a lot as a child to relate to the other children because he was a child of immigrants from India. He didn’t have access to watching popular TV Shows or listening to music, so it made it harder for him to talk to other children about those things.

Raut entered geography and spelling bees and rattled off the state capitals in front of high schoolers when he was only four years old. To talk about something such as The Simpsons or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he had to do a lot of research and look up various articles. He learned those topics to “sort of not have to go through life always being on the outside of every conversation.”

But all of the studying and vast knowledge led him to a two-decade journey with Jeopardy! where he was a three-day champion in 2023, the 2024 Tournament of Champions winner, and the 2025 Masters champion.