WA’s Yogesh Raut wins 2024 ‘Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions’

Yogesh Raut, of Vancouver, Wash., questioned his way through six finals rounds to be crowned the 2024 “Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions” winner in an episode that aired Tuesday.

In the semifinals, Raut beat Walla Walla contestant David Sibley and then powered on through six finals episodes. (A winner is crowned after winning three games in the finals round.)

“‘Jeopardy!’ is inherently a challenging game to play,” Raut said in an interview Wednesday morning after he won $250,000 in the “ToC.” “There’s a lot of luck involved, and over and over again I benefited from the bad luck of other contestants.”

Raut says contestants are always searching for Daily Doubles and in his early games he didn’t find many.

“Other people did and they bet big and [answered wrong] and sort of cleared a lane for me,” Raut says. “Even though so much of [the game] requires skill, to win, you also need luck on your side. It’s impossible to win without both of those things.”

Going into Final Jeopardy! in Tuesday’s episode, Raut was in second place ($16,600) behind music executive Troy Meyer ($19,800) with philosophy professor Ben Chan in a distant third place ($3,200). The category for Final Jeopardy! was “the human body.”

“My mother is a doctor — and she definitely wanted me to be one, too — so from a young age I had learned a lot of basic knowledge about the human body,” Raut says. “But ultimately in that situation, you have to think strategically. There’s a whole thing about wagering theory on the internet and of the three of us, Ben is probably the most expert at it because he’s a real student of the game, but I’m somewhat familiar with it.”

Raut says when the first-place player has enough of a lead to force the second-place player to get the question right in order to win, that’s called “a crush game.”

“Even though I was in second place going into Final Jeopardy!, I was close enough that Troy did not have a crush game,” Raut notes. “I didn’t necessarily have to get Final Jeopardy! right to stay ahead. I could also stay ahead of him with a small wager, even if I got it wrong. That’s a strong position to be in because essentially the first-place player has to get Final Jeopardy! right in order to win.”

Only Chan came up with the correct question (“What is the thymus?”) to the clue, “This glandular organ that starts to shrink at puberty is known for being where the cells key to adaptive immunity develop.” Raut guessed “the spleen.”

“It definitely triggered a memory that I had come across that information before, but I couldn’t remember exactly where,” Raut says. “Later, after the game, I confirmed that I have written specifically about what’s called ‘involution of the thymus’ on my blog in October 2018. … I thought the spleen is definitely related to the immune system. And I did write a question about [the spleen] fairly recently, so maybe that’s it. But I wasn’t confident and also the pressure was off because ultimately if Troy got it right, he wins. If he gets it wrong, I win.”

In addition to winning the $250,000, Raut also earned a spot in the “Jeopardy! Masters” prime-time tournament that will air in May on ABC. Raut expects to travel back to Sony Studios in Culver City, Calif., in April to tape “Jeopardy!” again.

In the meantime, some of his “ToC” competitors have volunteered to help him train via online practice games. And he’ll continue to update his blog and write questions for other online quizzes.

In a post at Jeopardy.com, Raut reflects on his “ToC” experience, writing that he’s noticed “many top quizzers are from underprivileged minority groups. When one is caught between cultures and unsure of one’s place in the world, the search for meaning gets kicked into overdrive. This leads to the absorption of facts, because facts are key to assembling new frameworks of meaning.”

He says it’s not coincidental that his first quizzing knowledge demonstrations involved knowing U.S. states, capitals and presidents.

“Growing up as the child of immigrants, with a foreign-sounding name in the heart of Central Illinois, I had to prove every day that I was an American,” Raut writes. “Negotiating exclusion is fundamentally intertwined with my drive for learning. In my struggle to not be a perpetual outsider, I quickly became attuned to listening to others, finding out what they cared about and developing ways of having conversations about those things despite living in a household where most of Americana was unfamiliar and most contemporary pop culture was shunned. ‘Trivia’ sticks with us precisely because it is not trivial. Not only is it inherently interesting, but for less privileged members of society, sometimes it’s a matter of survival.”