Three-time “Jeopardy!” winner Yogesh Raut took to social media to criticize the game show, likening it to a “glorified reality show” and insinuating its viewers are racist.
Raut, a 38-year-old from Vancouver, Washington, first appeared on the game show on Jan. 11, going on to win three games before contestant Katie Palumbo broke his streak.
He left the show with a check for $94,403, but posted multiple, lengthy rants to Facebook knocking America’s love for “Jeopardy!”
“Jeopardy!” reps declined to comment to The Post.
Raut began his string of rants with a Jan. 12 post that started by listing his quiz-related accomplishments, including that he finished in the Top 10 of the 2022 LearnedLeague Rundle Championship and won the Quizzing World Cup.
He pivoted to discuss his experience from the game show, saying, “Yet today I’m receiving the most attention, praise, congratulations and nasty trolling from strangers (!) of my life…and for what? What did I do to get the biggest paycheck of my quizzing career? I beat two guys.”
He emphasized and clarified that this post was not meant to be an attack on Connor (Sears) and Andrew (Whatley) — the contestants he beat.
“This is also not an insult to ‘Jeopardy!’ which is a TV show designed for entertainment, and a reasonably good one,” he wrote. “It is entertaining to watch but it bears the same relationship to real quizzing that ‘Holey Moley’ does to golf.”
Raut instead targeted his criticism at the viewers of “Jeopardy!” and how the beloved game show is seen as “the Olympics of quizzing.” He questioned “what it is about ‘J!’ that causes the worst kinds of human beings to be so drawn to it and invested in it. (I honestly don’t know the answer to that; it’s not a bad show, and the people who make it seem fine.)”
The champ compared his win on the game show to a hypothetical chess grandmaster winning top tournaments but is only famous for beating low-ranked players in “a glorified reality show.”
This so-called “non-standard bughouse version of chess,” according to Raut, would merely be “a derivative game designed to introduce high levels of variance that constantly threaten to swamp out differences in skill level, on a glorified reality show.”
“‘Jeopardy!’ is not the problem; its centrality to American society is,” he claimed. “There will never be a healthy quizzing culture in this country until we learn to stop pretending that ‘Jeopardy!’ is important.”
He also noted that everyone at the show treated him “just fine” and that the rant was not about “personal spite.”
