To make it as far as he did, Mr. Rogers watched old episodes and meticulously pored over a catalog of past questions and answers on the website j-archive.com. He said he saw patterns in the questions and discovered that the daily double, for example, is typically in one of only five locations on the board.

“But I didn’t hack the show,” he said, responding to some news coverage and online chatter. “I still had to know everything.”

His veritable vault of history tidbits and arcane facts has been bolstered by a lifestyle of watching movies, he said.

“I’m a bartender, so when I wake up during the day — if I wake up — my inner monologue is, ‘What do I want to learn about today?’” he said. “Maybe I don’t know anything about the Han dynasty. So then I’ll watch a documentary on YouTube about the Han dynasty.”

Mr. Rogers, who said he’ll continue to bartend and host trivia nights around the city, doesn’t know exactly what to do with the $411,000 he won on the show. Maybe invest it, he said.