‘Jeopardy!’ champ with 16-game streak addresses theory he deliberately lost final match

Scott Riccardi is addressing his “Jeopardy!” loss.Jeopardy!

Somerville, New Jersey, native Scott Riccardi had such an impressive run on “Jeopardy!” that some fans have conspiracy theories about his eventual loss.

Riccardi’s 16-day winning streak came to an end on Friday, July 25, when he lost to Baltimore’s Jonathan Hugendubler. He is now tied with Ryan Long for tenth place on the most consecutive “Jeopardy!” wins leaderboard.

Some viewers speculated that Riccardi deliberately guessed wrong during Friday’s Final Jeopardy. From the category 20th Century Names, the clue read: “According to one obituary, in 1935 he owned 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies and $56 million in real estate.”

 

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The answer was William Randolph Hearst, who inspired the iconic 1941 film “Citizen Kane,” but Riccardi guessed aerospace engineer and film producer Howard Hughes. He took to Reddit over the weekend to provide some insight into his mistake.

“My mind unfortunately went straight to Howard Hughes mostly due to overestimating the importance of the movie companies part of the clue; any previous FJs that had come to mind immediately had worked out, so I trusted my initial response on this,” Riccardi commented on a “Jeopardy!” discussion thread.

“Truthfully, I was just especially unprepared to respond correctly to a clue about Hearst,” he continued. “Before I started my prep for the show in earnest, I had found that I was having a hard time properly retaining info on what I found to be a confusing amount of three-named Williams in publishing (William Randolph Hearst, William Lloyd Garrison, and William F. Buckley, to name a few), never circling back to that thought after I got the call to be on the show.”

Before Riccardi shared his explanation, some fans were convinced that he threw the match on purpose.

“I have a hard time believing that Riccardi didn’t know Final Jeopardy. Even I knew it, for heaven’s sake,” one viewer commented on TVInsider’s recap of the episode. “Maybe he just didn’t want to come back for the next season.”

“I think that he did it deliberately,” another person chimed in. “My thought is that he was happy with what he had accomplished and there was no need to wait through for another season. He had established his reputation, ability and eligibility and now someone else will have a chance.”

A third fan was even more convinced, writing, “He lost on purpose. There is no way you can convince me otherwise.”

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