On Tuesday, April 23, Jeopardy! savant James Holzhauer won his 14th game, pushing his total winnings $1,061,554. With an average score of $75,825, Holzhauer is on pace to surpass all-time regular season Jeopardy! record holder Ken Jenning's tally of $2,520,700 within a few weeks. Here's the strategy that got him there. This story was original published on April 10, and has been updated to reflect the latest totals.

Plenty of Jeopardy! champions have rung up six-figure payouts. But until James Holzhauer put up his $110,914 total on April 9, no one had done it in a single game. Since then, Holzhauer has amassed over a million dollars in winnings, and has notched the seven-highest single-game tallies in Jeopardy! history. He did it with smarts—but also with a nearly flawless command of Jeopardy! game theory.

The Jeopardy! board is arranged in a grid featuring 30 total clues across six categories. You’ll often see players work their way through a single category, from easiest clue to hardest—and least to most valuable—before moving on to another column and repeating the process. That’s one way to play, sure, in the same way that a light jog is one way to complete an Olympic steeplechase course.

Holzhauer does not jog. He blitzes the bottom of the board, where the hardest and most valuable clues reside. He staggers from category to category, stalking the invaluable Daily Double clues that let players bet any portion of their winnings to that point. And he goes all in as often as he can.

“My approach isn't complicated: Get some money, hit the Daily Doubles, bet big, and hope I run hot,” Holzhauer said in an email to WIRED after his record April 10 performance. And if you think he sounds more like a gambler describing his craft than a game show contestant, that's no coincidence: Holzhauer, a Nevada resident, bets on sports for a living.

“I don't have a mental block about betting $38,314 on one trivia question. It's only money.” James Holzhauer

While he says he developed his playing style on his own, Holzhauer acknowledges similarities to other past champions. His darting around the board is a variation of what's known among Jeopardy! aficionados as the “Forrest Bounce,” named for Chuck Forrest, a storied contestant in the '80s who pioneered the technique to catch opponents off guard. Holzhauer and other contemporary Jeopardy! elites deploy it instead to find Daily Doubles—the same reason they typically focus first on the middle and bottom of the board. And like Holzhauer, the previous single-game record holder, Roger Craig, also got there by betting it all when he had the chance.

“What I saw was basically someone who took a playbook that has existed and executed it flawlessly,” says Buzzy Cohen, winner of the 2017 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. By pure chance, Cohen was in the audience for the taping of some of Holzhauer's episodes. “The shift isn’t necessarily in the strategy, the shift is in the execution, and that’s a harder thing to wrap your head around after one game.”

Pulling it off also involves more than just knowing the answers. Most people at that level do. Holzhauer supplements a near-encyclopedic command of trivia with a quick buzzer finger and a gambler’s fortitude. “The real advantage I draw from my job is that I don't have a mental block about betting $38,314 on one trivia question,” he says. “It's only money.”

That amount isn’t arbitrary; it’s how much he wagered in the Final Jeopardy round of his record-setting game, to get a final tally that invokes his daughter’s birthday: November 11, 2014. Holzhauer spent several games at the beginning of his run engineering final tallies that commemorate special dates, but seems to have run out.

His leads have so far been so comfortable that he can afford, literally, to get a little playful. “I did want to lock each game up before Final Jeopardy, to avoid losing to a bad bounce in that round,” he says. “I often see sports teams playing to force overtime instead of trying to win in regulation, and it makes me shake my head.”

Holzhauer also excels at an underrated aspect of the game: a firm grasp of what he doesn’t know. During his entire run, he has given only 18 incorrect answers, according to The Jeopardy Fan, a site that has kept close track of Holzhauer's stats. When he buzzes in, he's right 97 percent of the time. Since Jeopardy! deducts money for incorrect responses, restraint is a virtue.