'Jeopardy!' Champ Yogesh Raut Goes Viral for Rant Critiquing Game Show

The three-time winner took to social media to share criticism for the show's popularity and respectability.

Jeopardy! fans met Yogesh Raut when he first appeared on a Jan. 11 episode. He went on to win three games before fellow contestant Katie Palumbo won, ending his streak.

After taking home a check for $96,403 in prize money, Raut took to social media to voice criticism for the popular game show, describing it as a detriment to "the future of quizzing."

On Facebook on Jan. 12, Raut began his message with, "Please don't misunderstand what I'm about to say." He then went on to list all of his quizzing accomplishments, such as finishing in the top 10 of the 2022 LearnedLeague Rundle Championship and winning the Quizzing World Cup.

Raut then changed directions, 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 paused to say, "DON'T YOU DARE twist my words into an attack on Connor [Sears] and Andrew [Whatley]...Nothing in this post is meant to slight them in any way."

Instead, the criticism is targeted at how people supposedly perceive Jeopardy! as "the Olympics of quizzing," while he calls it "a glorified reality show."

In one comment, he says that Jeopardy! "is entertaining to watch but it bears the same relationship to real quizzing that Holey Moley does to golf," claiming that the popular game show just isn't a good measure of the best of the best in the quizzing world.

Raut further criticized the public's love for Jeopardy! and blamed it for "actual quizzing" not being super popular or well-known: "The fact that actual quizzing continues to be a fringe subculture in the shadows is what allowed racists, misogynists, and outright sexual harassers to thrive in collegiate quizbowl for so long."

He ended his rant with the statement, "Jeopardy! is a fun show but putting it on a pedestal is an objectively bad thing. It's bad for the future of quizzing. It's bad for women and POC who want to be treated with the same level of dignity as their White male counterparts. It is fundamentally incompatible with incentivizing the next generation of quizzers to excel, and it is fundamentally incompatible with true social justice."

Two days later, Raut made another post thanking people for their support throughout his time on the show, while also stating that Jeopardy! "will never top the list of my quizzing accomplishments -- not even my quizzing accomplishments of 2022."

The rant gained further attention when journalist Megan Greenwell tweeted about it, saying, "I don’t watch Jeopardy, but I am extremely invested in the guy who won three times but was apparently bad on the buzzer, then began a multi-week Facebook meltdown about how Jeopardy is not the REAL quizzing world and compared himself to Muhammad Ali."

The responses of Jeopardy! fans and others in the comments were mixed, and a few people even shared anecdotes of supposed personal interactions with Raut in the past.

Some people were confused, with one saying, "He's upset that people are congratulating him for winning a tv show he agreed to be on?"

Another person replied to them, writing, "He's upset that the most popular/mainstream form of American trivia culture rewards buzzer speed (coincidentally a skill he does not have) as much as, if not more than, actual trivia knowledge."

"Jeopardy is meant to be entertainment, a concept he couldn’t grasp," said a different fan in their take on the situation.

On Jan. 23, Raut uploaded another post about Jeopardy!, discussing the response to his rant, while also condemning the racism he faced during his time on the show.

At the end of the post, he wrote, "Anyway, time to wrap things up. My 15 minutes are just about over. So I'll just say that I haven't always been the best at listening to those less privileged than me, or at calling out those who judge and punish others without listening to them. Join me in trying to be better."