OAKLAND, California – When Amy Schneider’s 40-Day “Jeopardy!” the winning streak ended, she said she handed out thank-you notes to the crew, chatted briefly with other contestants, and then apologized.
“I went to the bathroom, cried for about 30 or 40 seconds, pulled myself together and went outside,” Ms. Schneider said Friday from her sunny Oakland apartment.
The way she told her defeat reflected the way she played on “Jeopardy!”: fast, efficiently and with down-to-earth warmth.
“It wasn’t just a feeling of sadness, there was a sense of relief,” she added. “It was so exhausting.”
Ms. Schneider’s continued success on the show meant that when her episodes began shooting in late September, she was doing five games a day, twice a week for several consecutive weeks, commuting from Oakland to Los Angeles.
By the time she filmed her final episode on November 9, she had been demoted at work, had used all of her paid time off, and taken several unpaid days to keep her job as a software engineer.
She left the show after winning $1,382,800. But as of this week, her check hadn’t arrived and Ms. Schneider was still working full-time.
“It started broadcasting when I knew I’d done historical stuff like this and nobody else knew about it,” she said.
Now, people know. Ms. Schneider surpassed Matt Amodio’s 38-day streak, leaving only Ken Jennings, who won 74 games in a row in 2004.
She was a virtuoso in terms of accuracy and speed, but unlike Mr. Amodio, her playing style was traditional. Ms. Schneider preferred playing a single category vertically from lowest to highest score rather than playing across the lucrative bottom lane, a style popularized by James Holzhauer, who won $2,464,216 during his 32 game streak in 2019. Ms. Schneider didn’t bounce around the board looking for Daily Doubles in the style of past contestants like Chuck Forrest and Arthur Chu. And her bets were mostly conservative.
Her strategy paid off. Ms. Schneider left the show as the winningest woman in the show’s history. She is already a legend under both “Jeopardy!” fans and former participants.
“The depth and breadth of her knowledge is remarkable,” said Terry Wolfisch Cole, one of 82 contestants who competed against Ms. Schneider during her run on the show.
‘I’m giving everything a chance now’
By the day I met Ms. Schneider, she had already given three interviews. When she got tired of talking to reporters, she didn’t show it.
She greeted me in an oxblood dress with large white polka dots from Anthropologie that revealed a large tattoo on her left arm of the titular character from L. Frank Baum’s novel “The Ozma of Oz.” Ozma has a special meaning for Mrs. Schneider. “When she was a baby, she was kidnapped and bewitched by an evil sorceress and raised as a boy,” she said.
“And then the spell was lifted and it was revealed that she was the beautiful princess she always was,” said Ms. Schneider.
Instead of her signature pearls, she wore a necklace with the star, one of her favorite tarot cards. The necklace was a gift from her friend, Genevieve Davis, 25, who is from Oakland and works as a nanny. The night they met, Mrs. Schneider gave Mrs. Davis a tarot reading. Ms. Schneider describes herself as an atheist who doesn’t believe in the occult or the supernatural, but, as she said, “It’s not queer meet cute if there’s no tarot.”
Ms. Schneider learned tarot through her ex-wife, who introduced her to Rachel Pollack’s book ’78 Degrees of Wisdom’. Tarot is said to have been ruled out growing up in Dayton, Ohio. Catholicism was very important to her family and Mrs. Schneider struggled with her faith when she was younger.
She recounted a moment in 2002 when she drove to Toronto with her brother and two cousins to see Pope John Paul II for World Youth Day. Ms. Schneider partially agreed to the trip so as not to tell her mother that she no longer considered herself a Catholic.
They waited in a field the night before to secure their spot, but had neglected to bring tents or camping gear. While they were trying to sleep, it started to rain. Then liturgical music started blaring through the sound system.
This time became a benchmark for Ms. Schneider. “When it gets bad, I think, ‘I’m not lying in a field in the rain,'” she said.
Since her transition in 2017, Ms. Schneider said she has made it a point to say yes to new experiences. “Because there was so much that I denied myself for so long, I’m now giving everything a chance.”
That included dabbling in stand-up comedy, piercing her nose and entering into a new relationship, her first since divorcing her wife in 2016.
Now 42, Mrs. Schneider is in love with her new girlfriend. The two women openly gushed about each other, sharing inside jokes and adoring their long-haired black cat, Meep, whose toys were scattered across their living room floor. (Just in case you need any more proof that Ms. Schneider is a cat person, she scrubs her plates with cat-shaped sponges and cuts her vegetables on a cat-shaped cutting board.)
“I’ve had two serious relationships in my life and this is the second,” said Ms. Schneider. “When I met the woman who became my wife, I had never kissed anyone before and I was 25.”
What is public?
There is an unfortunate pattern of “Jeopardy!” alums – especially women – who are targeted online after their performances. Former participants have recounted incidents involving insults, creepy messages and outright threats.
To prepare for this, Ms. Schneider followed the guidelines offered to all new entrants by the show’s producers, including shutting down her social media accounts. She also created the @Jeopardamy public Instagram and Twitter accounts. Still, these precautions have not prevented online harassment.
Until now, she has mostly ignored the vitriol aimed at her, or responded with sarcasm, as she did in a “thanks” tweet she posted on New Years Eve.
A few weeks ago, Mrs. Schneider was robbed at gunpoint in the lobby of her apartment building. She was not physically injured and emphasized that she does not think the incident was related to her appearance in “Jeopardy!” Still, it’s not her favorite thing to talk about.
“I tweeted about it, so it was public, and that’s up to me,” she said. “But to let people in my life know what happened to me by seeing a news article was a somewhat disturbing event.”
As she got ready for the competition, Mrs. Schneider had to decide what she wanted to look like. She took a favorite pink blazer and made a few trips to Target and Nordstrom Rack. She said she “wrapped too much” jewelry, but after winning a few games in the pearls, she thought the public might like it if she continued with a signature accessory.
She also thought about how she wanted to sound.
“I have a more feminine voice if I really want to, and I was actually planning on using that voice on TV,” she said. But in the end she decided that consciously changing her voice could affect her gameplay and chose to speak in her usual register. She is proud of that decision.
“Trans women who watch can see me with my voice as it is and see that I’m okay with it,” she said.
Her voice was once a source of dysphoria for Ms. Schneider, but now she’s considering turning it into a career. She recently signed with the talent agency CAA and said she is interested in voice acting.
She is also considering a return to podcasting. She and her ex-wife co-hosted a podcast called ‘Downton Abbey’, and she hosted a show about ‘Moby-Dick’ and a tarot podcast called ‘These Are Just Cards’.
“Danger!” bans contestants from appearing on other game shows six months after their participation, but after that, Ms. Schneider is also open to more game show appearances, which could fit in well with her supernatural reaction time.
She practiced for “Jeopardy!” using clicker pens and said she didn’t know she had a knack for zooming in until she was on the show. This fact will no doubt frustrate many participants, some of whom train with special buzzers designed to mimic the buzzers used in the “Jeopardy!” studios, to shave milliseconds off their buzz.
On Friday, Ms. Schneider went to the Heart and Dagger Saloon in Oakland to watch herself play. She sat on a bar stool to order a sauvignon blanc and a pack of Parliament Lights.
Another customer asked a bartender if the TV would be tuned to the Warriors game. “No, we’re watching ‘Jeopardy!'” the bartender replied, nodding at Mrs. Schneider. The man lit up when he recognized the champion next to him. “Incredible! Cheers!” he said, toasting her. Moments later, a bearded man sitting next to him leaned over and asked, “Have you been robbed?”
Mrs. Schneider smiled and nodded. “Yes, I was robbed.”
Over the course of the show’s 30 minutes, two customers sent free drinks, which Ms. Schneider happily accepted.
After watching her win $25,000 in Final Jeopardy, Ms. Schneider went to the bar patio with Ms. Davis and their friend Hilary Hays.
Ms. Hays manages the @Jeopardamy Instagram account. “I was like, ‘Let’s put you on Instagram and get you some free stuff!'” Mrs. Hays said in an expletive.
The Instagram account features a collection of portraits courtesy of the show that are remarkably similar. Mrs. Schneider is almost always framed identically, smiling in front of the blue set of the show, head tilted, pearls around her neck. Her attire is conservative and the captions are direct: “Day 32: I’ve worn this blouse a few times now and who doesn’t enjoy a good find from @target?”
“I wouldn’t be interested if someone else did it, but apparently people like it,” Ms Schneider said of the account, which has more than 25,000 followers. Ms Hays said celebrities including Kelly Osbourne, Molly Shannon, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Amy Schumer have sent her DMs.
If the goal was to get free stuff, it seemed to work. The next day, Mrs. Schneider went to Nordstrom in San Francisco to shop for clothes with a stylist from the store. She was looking for something to wear to the GLAAD Media Awards in April, where she would be honored.
After settling on a navy Alex Evenings dress, a blue-brown floral-print dress from Maggy London, Marc Fisher chunky heeled pumps and some jewelry, Ms. Schneider’s tab exceeded the $2,000 she’d been awarded.
But when the cashier used her credit card, her bank flagged the transaction as potentially fraudulent. The irony of having a credit card problem after winning over a million dollars had not escaped Ms. Schneider, but there was little time to dwell on the matter.
She was already late for a free hair coloring appointment in town.
In an earlier version of this article, Ms. Schneider’s age was misreported. She is 42 and not 43.