By Diana Cooper,Editor,Russ Weakland

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Breaking into the top five ever players in Jeopardy! history, Amy Schneider can proudly point to a 40-game winning streak and more than $1.6million in prize money.

But with success has come scrutiny – and this week the 46-year-old found herself accused online of cheating her way to the top of America’s favorite quiz show.

An Ohio native, with only current host Ken Jennings’s 74 consecutive wins ranked higher, Schneider insists the claims are baseless.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, the prolific quizzer said she had no intention of letting internet trolls force her to retire the buzzer – and revealed the surprising secret to her success.

Schneider, the first openly transgender contestant to qualify for the Tournament of Champions, was keen to set the record straight after a parody account on the social media platform X this week posed the question: ‘Was Jeopardy! champ Amy Schneider given insider help to boost DEI?

‘Her 40-game streak raised eyebrows – did producers tip the scales?’

Schneider said she was shocked to realize how many people think Jeopardy! might be rigged.

‘And not even just in this case,’ she said, ‘there was the DEI factor but in general people saying, oh, I threw my last game.

‘They [the producers] told me to stop winning or something, and I mean, it’s just not true.

‘After the quiz show scandals of the ’50s, there are very serious laws about that sort of thing, and people in Jeopardy! could go to jail, literally, if that was the case.

‘They’ve got outside lawyers on set every time you’re taping that are monitoring for that sort of thing… I don’t even know how someone would cheat at Jeopardy! The games are clean.’

Schneider said producers were clearly casting contestants of equal ability, adding: ‘You don’t see wild differences in how well people perform.’

A source close to the show agreed. ‘Amy never got any special treatment, nor was Amy helped to win. The game was on the up and up, each and every time.

‘Jeopardy! producers love the impact that Amy has made with the game and the show but to do anything to give an unfair advantage, that just hasn’t happened and will never. If cheating was ever to occur, the whole show would cease to exist.’

Schneider, who lives with her wife Genevieve Davis in Oakland, California, was first introduced as a contestant in November 2021. Back then, she found it ‘hard not to take things personally’ and was ‘more rigorous’ about checking comments from fans.

But as a seasoned contestant with four years of experience, she has now finally learned to stop searching for ‘mean things’.

‘Lately, I’ve become more blasé about it because I’ve come to realize that these people who are attacking me online aren’t attacking me – they’re attacking this television character, Amy Schneider, that they’ve gotten in their head,’ she said.

‘And so if I do happen to see something that I think is particularly foolish, I’ll go ahead and respond to it if I’m feeling like it because I’ve been on Twitter [X] for a long time. The thing about Twitter is it seems very important but it actually doesn’t matter; it’s just a bunch of people yelling at each other.’

After her initial run ended in January 2022, producers brought in someone from Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to advise on online security.

‘They were definitely there to give me some tools,’ she said of production. ‘Since then, I haven’t really needed anything else from them – but they’re protective of their contestants.’

Despite the internet hate, Schneider has received ample support from the LGBTQ+ community.

‘It seems to have changed [people’s] minds or made them realize that the trans people are, in fact, not particularly weird. I’m very fortunate in that I’ve been able to bring that to people,’ she said.

Schneider last appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament in February when she competed against five-time winner Luigi de Guzman, an attorney from Virginia, and Avi Gupta, a law student from Oregon who won the 2019 Teen Tournament.

She walked away in last place with a final total of $4,200. Gupta came second with $4,367, while Guzman won the game with $18,799.

Even so, Schneider hopes to keep returning. ‘The current producer, one of his visions was to make Jeopardy! have more of a regular season in the way that a sports league does, and also to be much more focused on bringing back previous champions more often,’ she explained.

‘And so now there’s generally every year an invitational tournament in the spring that they just invite the best recent and past former champions to be on – and I’ve been invited on it the last couple of years. I hope to keep being invited because I love playing Jeopardy!’

In the meantime, Schneider plans on continuing to brush up on trivia so she can be prepared for another tournament if and when the time comes.

Her secret? ‘I’m always on Wikipedia,’ she said.

‘That’s one of my standard killing time procrastination websites – just clicking around and looking at things in history that I’m interested in and learning more about it.

‘The main background of knowledge that you have just has to come from your own personal drive and interest and learning and curiosity.

‘But beyond that… I do find myself being like, ‘I want to keep an eye on what’s top 40 on the radio’, ‘I want to keep an eye on who’s winning the Oscars this year’, ‘I want to refresh my memory on the lists of vice presidents of the United States’, or that sort of thing. That’s sharpening the edge – you can do that specific research but the main groundwork is just by reading a lot and being curious.’

The former software engineer is working on figuring out what a full time career as a Jeopardy! contestant and media personality might look like.

She said that, for the most part, her money is in investments.

‘It’s mainly just giving me a runway to be able to do what I want with my life for a few years, to not have to worry about making rent every month because I had that backstop,’ Schneider said.

‘And so I was a theater kid, and I love performing and I love writing. So I’ve written a book and I’m working on writing another book. I’m doing a stand-up set at a comedy festival in San Francisco next Sunday, just trying to do different things like that.’

Her memoir, Who Is Amy Schneider?: Questions on Growing Up, Being Curious, and Winning It Big on Jeopardy! was released in March.