New Jersey ‘Jeopardy!’ champ Jamie Ding keeps beating Philly challengers

“Who is Jamie Ding?”

Anyone who’s been watching Jeopardy! over the last month knows the answer — a 33-year-old, karaoke-loving New Jersey public policy wonk who continues to break records as one of the most successful contestants in the quiz show’s history.

All while wearing varying degrees of orange clothing, some of which were not suitable for television.

“If it’s too busy of a pattern, it won’t look good on TV,” Ding said. “You also have to be emotionally prepared to learn about all the random stains or tiny holes in your clothing you never noticed before.”

Ding’s wardrobe certainly has not slowed him down. Through Tuesday, he had amassed 28 straight wins, the fifth-most in Jeopardy! history dating to 2003, when the show removed its cap on consecutive victories. He has already moved past Canadian champ Mattea Roach and South Jersey’s Cris Pannullo on the all-time wins board, and needs just a handful more victories to move past all-time Jeopardy! great James Holzhauer’s 32-win streak.

Ding has raked in $774,601 in winnings (before taxes), also fifth-most in the show’s history, not including tournaments and other specials. The only names ahead of him on that list are some of the show’s most well-known contestants — Amy Schneider ($1.38 million), Matt Amodio ($1.52 million), Holzhauer ($2.46 million), and Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings, who won $2.52 million during his 74-game winning steak in 2004.

Speaking of Jennings, Ding also tied the Jeopardy! great’s longtime record for most correct responses during a single game — 45 — during his third win.

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

Ding has beaten his fair share of locals, including Taotao Zhang, a statistician from Middlesex County, N.J., who won $225,000 on the ABC trivia show The Chase in 2022.

Tuesday night, Ding defeated Philadelphia software engineer Max Ernst, who managed to keep things close enough to make Final Jeopardy matter. Along the way he has also bested Jessica Frankenfield, an event planner at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Shannon Thomas, the manager of member engagement at Media Impact Funders, a Philly nonprofit.

Emmett Laurie, a poker player from Philly, kept things close but whiffed on the Final Jeopardy clue in the category ’90s Television: “Northwest Passage was the working title of this series that was renamed for mountains.”

“What is Twin Peaks?” Ding answered correctly. Laurie’s response was simply “Hi Zoe?”

Ironically, Laurie revealed during a postgame chat that Twin Peaks was ”the only TV show set in the 1990s I’ve ever seen in my life,” yet the answer “just didn’t occur” to him at the moment.

In most matches, Ding has quickly soared to large leads built on successful answers to Double Jeopardy clues. The one time he entered Final Jeopardy in second place was back on April 9, when he faced a clue involving a famous wrestler.

“Adopted in 1979, this name reflected size & strength as well as a promoter’s wish to appeal to Irish-American fans.”

The correct response? “Who is Hulk Hogan?”

Ding managed to survive the match through dumb luck. While he offered the wrong answer, so did his opponent, software engineer Dominex Kovacs, whose large wager allowed Ding to eke out a narrow victory.

“It didn’t feel that tense while I was up on stage,” Ding said. “But then watching it at home and seeing everybody’s reaction, I hoped no one had a heart attack.”

Even more amazing than his historic winning streak is how long it took Ding to land on the show. The Princeton grad had been trying to land a spot on Jeopardy! since high school, when he landed an in-person audition as a senior but failed to get a spot in the teen tournament.

Ding took the Jeopardy! test just about every year since to no avail until October 2024, when he was invited to take a second test over Zoom. That landed him a gameplay audition in December 2024, and a little over a year later, he got the call to be on the show.

“The luck of the timing worked out pretty well for me,” Ding said. “Twenty three-year-old me would have done much worse.”

Ding’s episodes were recorded back-to-back in February. He filmed five episodes a day at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, Calif., on Stage 10, which was appropriately named the Alex Trebek Stage in 2021, after the death of the show’s beloved host in 2020.

Oddly enough, Ding said he was never great at trivia, despite being blessed with quick recall skills. Two things work in his favor on Jeopardy!: a buzzer he mastered quickly and written clues he could read quicker than host Jennings could say them.

“So by the time Ken was done reading, I usually knew where I’m going to answer, and I had enough time to prep to hit the buzzer correctly,” Ding said.

Despite his success, there are a few misses Ding wishes he could take back. One he got some grief over was a tricky photo clue showing the carrier on the back of Lucy the Elephant, a South Jersey landmark.

Ding, who has visited the iconic elephant and owns a Lucy the Elephant shot glass, answered: “What is a palanquin?” The correct response was: “What is a howdah?”

“I knew people were going to make fun of me if I missed it, so I felt I had to buzz in,” Ding said. “Then I buzzed in and I missed it. It was a hard one and could’ve been worse.”

A native of Detroit suburb Grosse Pointe, Mich., Ding graduated from Princeton University with a biology degree (though he wished he had been a history major) and went to work with AmeriCorps VISTA for a year in Jersey City, where he still lives. He quickly fell in love with the idea of being involved in public policy.

On Jeopardy!, he proudly refers to himself as a “bureaucrat.”

Since 2021, Ding has worked for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, where his task is somehow making renting or owning a home more affordable. While he loves focusing on policy (“I don’t love dealing with the actual politics”), he has not ruled out running for office if he thinks he can make a difference.

He already gets confused for Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.) regularly.

“It’s not great,” Ding said, dryly adding, “I’m not Andy Kim.”

Ding wouldn’t be the first Jeopardy! contestant to run for office — former U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D., N.J.), who won five games during his run in the mid-1970s and famously defeated IBM’s Watson in 2011, held office for 16 years before retiring in 2014.

As of now, Ding is staying quiet about any plans to jump into politics.

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he joked.