who was the longest running contestant on jeopardy
Ken Jennings Kenneth Wayne Jennings III (born May 23, 1974) is an American game show contestant and author. Jennings holds the record for the longest winning streak on the U.S. syndicated game show Jeopardy! and as being the second highest-earning contestant in game show history. In 2004, Jennings won 74 Jeopardy! games (in a row) before he was defeated by challenger Nancy Zerg on his 75th appearance. His total earnings on Jeopardy! are $3,196,300, consisting of $2,520,700 over his 74 wins, a $2,000 second-place prize in his 75th appearance, a $500,000 second-place prize in the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions, a $100,000 win for second-place prize in the Jeopardy Battle of the Decades, as well as half of a $300,000 prize in the IBM Challenge, when he competed against Watson.
American game show winnings records Since the genre began, many shows have offered prizes of large sums of money to contestants; Teddy Nadler set the original monetary winnings record of $264,000 during his appearance on The $64,000 Challenge in 1957. Nadler was not surpassed until 1980, when Thom McKee won $312,700 on Tic-Tac-Dough. In 1999, John Carpenter won $1,000,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, becoming the first person to win a seven-figure prize on an American game show. Since then, many players have gone on to win that amount and even surpassed it. As of 2015, Brad Rutter is the highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, having accumulated a total of $4,555,102. He succeeded Ken Jennings as the highest-earning contestant by virtue of his victory on May 16, 2014, in the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades tournament.