Matthew Benjamin Amodio (born December 4, 1990) is an American game show contestant who held a 38-game winning streak on the game show Jeopardy!.
Amodio won $1,518,601 in 39 appearances on Jeopardy!, making him the third millionaire contestant on the show in regular-season play. Across all American game shows, Amodio is the 8th-highest-earning contestant of all time. His run on the show has been called the "Amodio Rodeo".
Amodio is a native of Medina County, Ohio. He has three older brothers. His mother, Bonnie (née Solowitch) is an English professor. His father, James, is an attorney. Amodio has Italian ancestry on his father's side of the family and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on his mother's side of the family.
Amodio attended Medina High School where he graduated as valedictorian of the class of 2009; he was also a National Merit Scholar. Amodio graduated from Ohio State University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science with Honors in actuarial science from the Department of Mathematics, while also earning a master's degree in statistics.
Amodio subsequently earned a Master's of Science (MS) degree in artificial intelligence from the University of WisconsinâÂÂMadison in 2017 and, during his Jeopardy! appearances, was studying computer science at Yale University from which he graduated with a PhD in the spring of 2022.
Amodio was a contestant on the quiz show Academic Challenge on WEWS in Cleveland, Ohio, while studying at Medina High School in 2009. Participating with two fellow students against two competing high schools, his Medina team finished in second place.
Amodio is the third-highest earner of all time in regular-season play, third-most successful in consecutive games won and fourth-biggest all-time winner. Amodio averaged $39,963 per victory, second highest all-time to James Holzhauer at $76,944. During season 39, Amodio qualified as the second seed in the next Tournament of Champions. He responded to 1,299 cluesâÂÂ54.6% of all of the clues givenâÂÂcorrectly over the course of his run. At the time of his Jeopardy! appearance, he was a PhD student in computer science at Yale University.
Actor Jonathan Fisher, originally from Coral Gables, Florida, who would himself amass an 11-game winning streak, defeated Amodio in his 39th and final game. The episode originally aired October 11, 2021. Both appeared in the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions that aired in November 2022 but did not play each other. Amodio lost to Sam Buttrey. In May 2023, Amodio and Buttrey (who was the Professors Tournament champion in Season 38) were invited to the Jeopardy! Masters tournament. Buttrey was eliminated in the first round, while Amodio was a finalist and finished third behind James Holzhauer and Mattea Roach. Amodio and Amy Schneider were relegated in the 2024 Jeopardy! Masters tournament, sending both into the 2025 Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament in February, which Amodio won to earn a slot in the 2025 version.
After taking the online test twice, Amodio was invited to personally audition for the show. In addition to the test results, the producers consider the personality of the prospective contestant; as an introvert, Amodio was concerned that he would not be interesting enough for the show.
Amodio's winning streak came during an interregnum in the show's hosting position after longtime host Alex Trebek died in November 2020, during which the show was helmed by guest hosts. Amodio's streak spanned episodes hosted by Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton, David Faber, and Joe Buck. Mike Richards was named permanent host on August 11, 2021, but lasted only one taping day (first week of season 38); he was replaced by interim host Mayim Bialik (who rotated the rest of season 38 with Ken Jennings, but Amodio's reign ended before Jennings' official term as host, as Jennings was the first host of the interregnum). As Jeopardy! tapes five episodes per production day, Amodio recorded his 39 episodes on nine separate days (three on his first day, one on his final day).
Amodio played with his seventh different host during the Tournament of Champions, which featured Jennings as host, and won a Jennings-hosted game in the Masters tournament, where he defeated Andrew He (Season 39 Tournament of Champions finalist) and James Holzhauer (Season 36 Tournament of Champions winner) in his second game, becoming only the third contestant in Jeopardy! history to defeat Holzhauer (Emma Boettcher, in Game 33; current host Ken Jennings, thrice in the two-legged tie of The Greatest of All Time).
Amodio is noted for his strategy of consistently prefacing his responses with "What's" instead of adjusting the interrogative pronoun to fit the response. Amodio chose this method because Jeopardy! rules allow any question containing the correct response to be used; by not having to adjust the pronoun, he has one less thing to think about when formulating a response, potentially speeding response time. Amodio has credited Wikipedia's format for allowing him to meander through various topics in a random but logical progression and learn content quickly.