Philly chess player ends New Jersey ‘Jeopardy!’ champ Jamie Ding’s historic run

It seems appropriate Jamie Ding’s historic Jeopardy! run was ended by a challenger from Philadelphia.

During his 31-game winning streak, Ding cast off numerous competitors from Philadelphia — software engineer Max Ernst, event planner Jessica Frankenfield, Penn graduate student Max Genecov, nonprofit manager Shannon Thomas, poker player Emmett Laurie.

It was Greg Shahade, a Philly chess master, who finally ended Ding’s run Monday night, just one win short of tying James Holzhauer’s 32-game streak.

After picking all three Daily Doubles, Shahade held a large lead on Ding heading into Final Jeopardy, where they faced the following clue under the “World Languages” category:

Of South Africa’s 12 official languages, these 2 are alphabetically first & last

Both answered correctly — “What are Afrikaans and Zulu” — but Ding could not overcome Shahade’s lead. The Philly challenger ended the game with a final score of $33,000. Ding came in second with $19,010, while Ohio teacher Katrina Puckett placed a distant third with $4,990.

Ding ends his Jeopardy! run with the fifth-most consecutive wins in the show’s history, dating back to 2003, when a five-game cap was lifted. Overall, he will take home $885,605 before taxes — $882,605 in winnings, and $3,000 for finishing second on Monday. Only four players in Jeopardy! history have won more outside of specials or tournaments.

A native of Grosse Pointe, Mich., Ding graduated from Princeton University and ended up in Jersey City, N.J., where he fell in love with public policy. He now lives in Lawrenceville and works for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, proudly describing himself as a “bureaucrat.”

“I don’t know if it’s entirely sunk in,” Ding told The Inquirer last week. “I really love history, and it’s cool to be making some history myself.”

Despite the loss, Ding’s run on Jeopardy! is not over quite yet. He will return next year for the show’s Tournament of Champions, though we’re far enough away that we do not yet know many of the contestants. One will be Harrison Whitaker, a researcher from Indiana who won 14 games in November, earning $373,999.

Shahade, 47, is kind of a big deal in the chess world. The Rittenhouse Square resident and Masterman alum is an international master, the second-highest ranking in chess, just below grandmaster.

Despite his strong performance in Monday’s game, Shahade is a relative newcomer to trivia. As he outlined on his blog, Shahade joined LearnedLeague, a trivia league, in 2021 and did poorly his first season — getting just 44 of 150 answers correct. But he kept at it, using old Jeopardy! questions to train and studying everything he didn’t know the answer to.

“I just keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I find it interesting,” Shahade wrote. “I assume that I’ll just keep getting better as long as I do that.”

Chess also runs in the family. His younger sister, Jennifer Shahade, is a semiprofessional poker player and two-time U.S. women’s chess champion. She is also the author of a few books, including the recently published Thinking Sideways: How to Think Like a Chess Player and Win at Life.

Jennifer Shahade has also appeared on Jeopardy!, but not as a contestant. She hosted the “Chess” category during 2023’s Jeopardy! Masters, which featured champs Mattea Roach, Matt Amodio, and Amy Schneider, reading the clues in pretaped segments.

“The episodes still air on Hulu, so I continue to get tiny royalty checks, which make me smile every time,” Jennifer Shahade wrote in her Substack newsletter last week, noting ”the last one was for six dollars and seventy cents."

Jeopardy! began its 42nd season Sept. 8, hosted by Ken Jennings — a former champion who won a record 74 straight games in 2004. It remains the second-most watched show in Philadelphia, trailing only ABC World News Tonight on 6abc.