Entertainment

Meet the woman who took down ‘Jeopardy!’s last big champ

Emma Boettcher and Nancy Zerg don’t know each other, but they share something in common — they each defeated iconic “Jeopardy!” contestants 14 years apart.

A video clip leaked Sunday appears to show Boettcher ending reigning “Jeopardy!” champ James Holzhauer’s remarkable 32-game winning streak that netted him nearly $2.5 million.

In December 2004, Zerg, a real estate agent from Ventura, Calif., made headlines when she beat all-time “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings, ending his still-standing 74-game winning streak — before losing her very next game.

“I was completely unprepared for that event happening,” says Zerg by phone from Seattle, where she now lives. “I never thought beyond just trying to stay in the game, then once Ken lost I was completely unprepared for the tumult, the attitude of the other players. When you’re in the [‘Jeopardy!] contestant pool they keep you all together … and I wasn’t prepared for the way the energy completely changed. It went from all these people going, ‘Oh God, I have to play Ken Jennings’ to ‘He’s gone! He’s gone! Now I can win!’ and it was chaos — just people having a party. It was really bizarre.





“It was wild, it was craziness,” she says.

Zerg says that soon after she beat Jennings and all hell broke loose, the show broke for lunch — and then it was right back to taping her next game, which she promptly lost. “My head was not in the game at all — I couldn’t concentrate and I was a mess,” she says. “I really was just completely at sea. It was an overwhelming experience and if it had been a normal situation I think I would have been OK. But I just simply lost concentration and couldn’t pull it together.





“When you watch that second show, it’s like my eyes are practically going around in circles,” she says. “You can tell I’m not there. Everything went off the rails — it was not at all what I was expecting or could have predicted.”

Zerg, who still watches “Jeopardy!” — “ ‘Jeopardy!’ fans are nuts for ‘Jeopardy!’ We’re lifelong fans,” she says — has seen Holzhauer several times during his winning streak.

“He has a really good poker face. He’s very cool under pressure and he’s got a good strategy,” she says. “He’s very knowledgeable, obviously, and he knocks out all those expensive, higher-dollar-amount questions first. He builds up the lead real fast before anyone else gets a chance to get a rhythm going and start ringing in.





“He’s scary, you can quote me on that, and he’s a beast,” she says. “He doesn’t quite have the charm that Ken [Jennings] had, so I think in some ways he’s even more intimidating.”

Zerg says she wonders if Holzhauer has been getting the same treatment from his fellow contestants as Jennings did during his 74-game streak in 2004.

“I would watch the other players in the contestant room; when you’ve got someone who is that intimidating, a lot of the other players won’t talk to them or interact with them,” she says. “I was watching Ken sitting there by himself and everyone else was in a knot on the other side of the room. No one wanted to talk to him, and I thought, ‘This is silly.’

“I wonder if [Holzhauer] has been getting the same treatment.”





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