Jeopardy! Champ Breaks $1M Mark in Record Time

Professional gambler James Holzhauer's amazing Jeopardy! run continued Tuesday when he broke through the $1 million mark, closing in on the $2.52 million regular-season record set by Ken Jennings in 2004. Holzhauer won $118,816 after correctly answering the Final Jeopardy clue "On May 1, 1869, these two men met at the White House, four years and three weeks after a more historic meeting between them" with "Who are Grant and Lee," CBS reports. No contestant ever won more than $100,000 in a single game before Holzhauer, who now holds the top seven spots on the show's list of biggest single-game winners.

Holzhauer, 34, is still a long way from beating Jennings' record, but he is winning at a much faster rate, the New York Times reports. Jennings took 33 games to break the $1 million mark, while Tuesday was Holzhauer's 14th game. "I don’t feel I get enough credit for making small, sensible Jeopardy wagers, which helped the show with its prize budget," Jennings, whose highest one-day win during his 74-game run was $75,000, joked in a tweet Monday. Former Game Show Network exec Bob Boden tells the Atlantic that the big wins are likely "causing grief for an accountant somewhere," though he adds that prize budgets aren't usually a game show's biggest expense, and the extra viewers drawn in by Holzhauer's run will more than outweigh the "lopsided results." (More Jeopardy stories.)