Boettcher, 27, studied meticulously for her first appearances on “Jeopardy!,” keeping a notebook with her scores from playing along with the show at home. For this month’s tournament, she tried to study up on categories she knew she was weaker at, like pop and folk music. (Boettcher lost her fourth game in June because of a Final Jeopardy clue for which the correct response was Woody Guthrie.)

Boettcher said in an interview that her favorite moments on the “Jeopardy!” stage were not the clues that she studied hard to get right but the ones that reminded her where and when she learned the piece of trivia.

“I know some of them because I’ve studied, but more often I’ll know them because of a person or a conversation I’ve had,” she said. “There’s a clue about Bernoulli that I got and I know that primarily because I remember my dad trying to explain it to my sister and me when we were little.”

(The clue: “This Swiss mathematician’s principle says the pressure in a fluid moving horizontally decreases as its velocity increases.”)

In the Tournament of Champions, recent big winners on “Jeopardy!” face off against one another. Close watchers of the show had debated online whether Boettcher’s winnings earlier this year, which amounted to just under $100,000, were low for a champions contestant, and some speculated that the show chose her for the potential ratings bump that would come with a rematch. But her victories in the first two rounds of the tournament, which began with 15 players, quieted any doubts.

Boettcher said that she was indeed surprised about being chosen for the tournament, but that she didn’t pay attention to the commentary. “At that point I was focused on studying,” she said.