Jeopardy super champion Scott Riccardi addresses theories he deliberately lost after 16-game streak

Scott Riccardi’s weeks-long victory lap came to an end when he incorrectly answered a Final Jeopardy question about newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Scott Riccardi on ‘Jeopardy’.Credit: Jeopardy!

What is: self sabotage?

Scott Riccardi, the true star of Jeopardy season 41 is addressing mounting fan speculation that he deliberately threw Friday’s Final Jeopardy question, bringing his 16-game victory streak to an end.

From the category “20th Century names,” host Ken Jennings read the clue: “According to one obituary, in 1935 he owned 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies and $56 million in real estate.”

Any cinema fan could have doubled their money on the spot with the answer: William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate and inspiration for Orson Welles’ towering classic Citizen Kane. But Riccardi’s mind went to a different 20th-century cinema icon: aerospace entrepreneur and RKO Pictures founder Howard Hughes.

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Capping his earnings at a stunning $455,000, Riccardi lost to Jonathan Hugendubler, an adjunct professor from Baltimore. But the fact that the man who correctly answered dozens of complicated questions on subjects ranging from robotics to world languages to ancient architecture missed a question about one of the more prominent figures in American history isn’t sitting well with some viewers.

Fortunately, the 26-year-old mechanical engineer and New Jersey native took to Reddit on Friday to explain what led to his loss.

“My mind unfortunately went straight to Howard Hughes mostly due to overestimating the importance of the movie companies part of the clue,” he wrote.

While Hearst did establish two movie studios throughout his prolific career — International Film Service, an early animation studio, and Cosmpolitan Productions, co-founded with Paramount’s Adolph Zukor — Hughes’ RKO was and remains the much better-known studio.

“Any previous [Final Jeopardies] that had come to mind immediately had worked out, so I trusted my initial response on this,” Riccardi continued. “Hearst wasn’t on my mind at all until the moment [competitor Charlotte Cooper’s] answer was revealed, and even then it didn’t immediately strike me as correct until Ken confirmed it.”

He also admitted he was “especially unprepared to respond correctly to a clue about Hearst” despite making a previous mental note to keep the magnate in mind due to his appearance in “archived practice clues.” He was also bewildered by “a confusing amount of three-named Williams in publishing (William Randolph Hearst, William Lloyd Garrison, and William F. Buckley, to name a few).”

Ultimately, Riccardi chalked it up to “several information near-misses and a poor understanding of the timeline in the clue [that] really piled up to prevent me from getting what I now understand to be a very gettable clue.”

Still, the champ wrote that he’s “glad to have had the chance to be a meaningful part of this season” and extended a hearty “congratulations to Jonathan for the amazing win!”

Riccardi reflected on the brighter side of his Jeopardy wins with the series’ executive producer, Sarah Whitcomb-Foss, on a short episode of the Jeopardy “Winner’s Circle” on Saturday.

“It’s hard to believe I even came this far. I feel like I barely won a lot of my first few games, and then I had a pretty tough week where I kind of ramped up,” Riccardi said. When Whitcomb-Foss mentioned he’d officially entered the show’s Leaderboard of Legends, or the series’ top 10 performers (Riccardi’s 16-game streak left him tied for 10th place with Ryan Long, but he’s the series’ 8th highest-earning player), Riccardi admitted he originally believed, “There’s no way I’m hitting any of those. That’s just not going to happen, like how could it?”

Fans who loved Riccardi’s gameplay don’t have to say goodbye just yet. He’s set to become his season’s frontrunner in the annual Tournament of Champions parallel program, which pits each season’s top winners against one another.