‘Jeopardy!’ Champs Comment on Fatigue Toward End of Winning Streaks: ‘I Remember Yawning Uncontrollably’
Mattea Roach is one of many Jeopardy! contestants who earned a place in the record books during season 38. Following Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, and Jonathan Fisher in double-digit consecutive wins, the Canadian native was finally defeated on May 6 after 23 victories. Roach and some of her predecessors have commented on the toll an extended run can take at the game show podium.
Mattea Roach ranks 5th for consecutive ‘Jeopardy!’ wins
Roach walked away from Jeopardy! with $560,983 in winnings and a spot in the upcoming Tournament of Champions. The Toronto resident is now in fifth place for consecutive wins, surpassed only by Jeopardy! GOAT Ken Jennings, Schneider, Amodio, and James Holzhauer.
“It feels still kind of like a dream,” Roach said in a press release following the loss, according to People. “I really came down here hoping to maybe win one game and so I still can’t believe it. It’s strange, obviously I didn’t come through in the last one, but I still feel so happy and so lucky to have had this experience.”
The 23-year-old admitted that filming episodes back-to-back and the constant requirement to belt out correct responses became quite taxing.
“I do think that my last two games, I was maybe just out of it,” Roach remarked, according to Yahoo. “I was really, really tired. I remember yawning uncontrollably before playing my second-to-last game. From what I recall, I believe I was slower on the buzzer, I was not able to come up with responses.”
Amy Schneider noted ‘mental fatigue’
Schneider reached second place for most consecutive wins on Jeopardy! earlier this year. Earning a jackpot of over one million dollars, Schneider revealed on social media that she could tell she was running out of steam.
“[I] had a feeling all day that it was my last day,” Schneider tweeted on Jan. 28, two days after her streak ended. “I can’t explain it, and it wasn’t really justified by my recent results, but I could just feel that something was missing. … There were a few reasons for that. The biggest was simply mental fatigue; flying from Oakland to LA, long, mentally draining taping days, all while trying to keep the rest of my life running, really added up. The game itself was always fun, but everything else was wearing thin.”
The Oakland resident shared in an interview that she was beginning to lose her competitive edge as time went on, which played a part in her performance.
“It may seem odd looking at my recent scores, but yes, for some reason, I had a feeling [the loss] was coming,” Schneider told Allure. “Between the grind of taping and the fact that my next milestone (beating Ken Jennings’s streak) was still so far away, I could feel that I just didn’t quite have the same motivation I’d had up until that point. “
Matt Amodio felt ‘a little off’ in final ‘Jeopardy!’ game
Jeopardy! viewers speculated that Amodio may have thrown the game when he lost to Fisher on Oct. 11. The Ph.D. student revealed he could sense a change going into his final match.
“The day I lost, I went in feeling a little ‘off’ physically,” he wrote in an article for Newsweek. “Then, I gradually saw that I wasn’t remembering things that I really should have been able to remember, and I was misreading clues in front of me.”
The Ohio native denied rumors of deliberately losing and pointed out that he was just off his game.
“I wasn’t being fed the answers when I was winning and I didn’t throw the game when I lost,” Amodio said. “It’s just a competition, I was doing well and then I lost. There’s nothing more to it. My buzzer was working fine. My buzzer was working fine. The only thing that wasn’t working was my brain at full capacity.”
Roach, Schneider, and Amodio are all scheduled to compete in Jeopardy!‘s 2022 Tournament of Champions.
