'Jeopardy!' Champ Amy Schneider Shares Her Tournament of Champions Pre-Final Thoughts

"Jeopardy!" champion Amy Schneider is getting ready to face her competition in the final round of the 2022 Tournament of Champions.

On Election Day, a special exhibition match was held that featured Amy, who won 40 games in January, going up against her other top two competitors from the season: Matt Amodio (who won 38 games) and Mattea Roach (who won 23 games).

Although Mattea won that friendly match, she failed to secure a spot in the finals. Instead, of those three, only Amy will move on to the tournament finals, where she will face off against season 38 contestant Andrew He (who won 5 games) and Professor's Tournament winner Sam Buttrey.

In a lengthy Twitter thread posted late Sunday night, Amy gave her thoughts on the 2022 Tournament of Champions finale. Amy admitted that she “subconsciously resisted” watching the other Tournament of Champions games when they were taping. “I was certainly keeping an eye on them, but I kept finding excuses to, like, go to the bathroom or whatever,” she explained.

She had a few reasons for doing this. The first was that she had started to become friends with all of the contestants, so watching them go through “a stressful experience” was, in her words, “kind of uncomfortable.”

“The other was that whoever won, by definition, would have had a really good game, and watching my competition excel immediately before going up against them might not be great for my confidence,” Amy confessed.

It seemed that Amy had a few confessions to make, admitting that she was only “kinda” rooting for Matt Amodio. “He scared me, but I wanted the chance to test myself against him,” Amy told her Twitter followers. “But, as you all have now seen, while Matt played a great game, Sam played slightly better, though Matt could certainly have won with a couple of breaks.”

It seems that Amy is just as nervous to go up against Sam, who she said “had already been a wild card in my mind going in.” She also revealed that she was “rooting for Mattea in the last game.” Mattea now uses they/them pronouns.

“I was rooting for Mattea in the last game, for a variety of reasons,” Amy explained. “I just like them, for one thing, and also my whole life I've had a default tendency to root for diversity, as a Jeopardy viewer. I liked the idea that, if Mattea won, the matchup for the finals would include he, she, and they pronouns.”

She has also previously stated that she was worried about Andrew He as her competition. “Andrew was the one person in the tournament who had proved that he could beat me,” Amy shared. “I mean, certainly any of them were *capable* of beating me, I didn't take any of them lightly. But he was the only person that I had the firsthand experience of struggling against.”

Amy admitted that she “realized that, somehow, I'd always known I'd be going up against Andrew in this tournament. That feeling of destiny made it easier to face the daunting reality of it. In a weird sense, I hadn't prepared for the finals, despite the fact that I came with the intention of winning, and thought I had a decent chance of doing so. But psychologically, I think I felt like preparing for the finals would have undercut my preparation for the semis.”

The final rounds of the 2022 "Jeopardy!" Tournament of Champions will play out a bit differently than the 2021 tournament. Amy, Andrew, and Sam will each play until someone wins three matches,  just like the 2019 Greatest of All Time tournament between host Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and James Holzhauer.

Ken won that Tournament, but it means that the 2022 Tournament of Champions could take as little as 3 days or stretch for 7 days, depending on how well each of the contestants plays.

It seems like it's anyone's game to win or lose, but "Jeopardy!" fans can all agree that the 2022 Tournament of Champions has been one of the greatest tournaments in "Jeopardy!" history!