‘Jeopardy!’: Scott Riccardi Speaks Out After Shocking Defeat
Scott Riccardi lost the final Jeopardy! game of Season 41, but that’s nothing to cry over because he is a 16-game champion with $455,000 in winnings. Some fans wished he would have won the last game of the season and continued on to Season 42, but he lost on the final question to Jonathan Hugendubler, Now, the super champion is speaking out about his time on the game show, his record-breaking streak, and his prep for the Tournament of Champions.
In an after-show interview with executive producer Sarah Whitcomb-Foss, she asked, “How does it feel to know where it ends for now?”
“It’s just hard to believe that it even came this far. I feel like I barely won a lot in my first few games. Then, I had a pretty tough week where I was kind of ramped up. There’s always a feeling like your momentum is not going to hold up, your luck is going to run out, but I’m glad I can just finally relax,” he said.
Riccardi went on to say that the whole experience didn’t feel real, and he feels like he is going to wake up one day and it was all a dream.
During his run, the super champion reached the Leaderboard of Legends, tying in tenth place with Ryan Long for most consecutive games won with 16. He is also in eighth place for Highest Winnings in Regular Season Play. Riccardi looked at the leaderboard and thought, “There’s no way this could happen.”
“In the tenth spot, someday, someone else is gonna pass that mark, and I’m hoping they’ll feel as accomplished as I feel, and how unbelievable it feels to pass someone like that. Whoever it ends up being, I wish them the best of luck,” he said.
Since he passed five games, Riccardi will compete in the upcoming Tournament of Champions. Whitcomb-Foss asked him, “How much do you enjoy this, and how much do you keep the pressure on yourself to keep preparing?” The Jeopardy! winner said in the past month of his reign, he “turned up the jets” with reading and studying. “So, I’m just going to try to learn new things every day over the break, but with a lot more leisure.”
Scott Riccardi also spoke out on Reddit about Hugendubler and the devastating Final Jeopardy answer. The category for Final Jeopardy was “20th Century Names.” The clue read, “According to one obituary, in 1935 he owned 13 magazines, 8 radio stations, 2 movie companies, and $56 million in real estate.” The answer was “Who is William Randolph Hearst?” Riccardi’s answer was Howard Hughes. With Hugendubler already $1 above Riccardi with his wager, he became the new champion with $23,601. Riccardi ended with $18,600.
“Congratulations to Jonathan for the amazing win! It’s truly deserved, and I can’t wait to see him return next season; he is a powerful competitor and all-around wonderful guy. Kudos to Charlotte [Cooper] as well for a very strong showing in tonight’s game. I apologize that I didn’t have any earlier opportunities to be active in these discussion threads, but I’m thankful for all the kind and insightful comments throughout what has been a completely surreal experience for me. I hope I didn’t overstay my welcome on the Alex Trebek stage for everyone who watched. There were too many talented challengers to be able to list them all here, but I’m hoping to be a proud supporter of each and every one of them in the hopes that they make up a sizeable subgroup of Second Chance competitors,” he wrote.
“As for Final Jeopardy, my mind unfortunately went straight to Howard Hughes mostly due to overestimating the importance of the movie companies part of the clue; any previous FJs that had come to mind immediately had worked out, so I trusted my initial response on this.”
“Hearst wasn’t on my mind at all until the moment Charlotte’s answer was revealed, and even then it didn’t immediately strike me as correct until Ken [Jennings] confirmed it. Truthfully, I was just especially unprepared to respond correctly to a clue about Hearst. I made a mental note before flying out that I was consistently forgetting to consider, of all things, Citizen Kane and the Tower of London as responses whenever they came up in archived practice clues; in the green room that week, I reminded myself about the Tower of London but could not remember the other half of that mental note,” Riccardi went on.
“Also, before I started my prep for the show in earnest, I had found that I was having a hard time properly retaining info on what I found to be a confusing amount of three-named Williams in publishing (William Randolph Hearst, William Lloyd Garrison, and William F. Buckley, to name a few), never circling back to that thought after I got the call to be on the show. So several information near-misses and a poor understanding of the timeline in the clue really piled up to prevent me from getting what I now understand to be a very gettable clue.”
Jeopardy!, fall 2025, check local listings
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