Amy Schneider Can Finally Celebrate Her Jeopardy Win

OAKLAND, Calif. — When Amy Schneider’s 40-day “Jeopardy!” winning streak ended, she said she handed out thank you notes to the crew, briefly chatted with other contestants, then excused herself.

“I went in the bathroom, cried for about 30 or 40 seconds, pulled myself together and headed out,” Ms. Schneider said from her sunny apartment in Oakland on Friday.

The way she recounted her defeat mirrored the way she played on “Jeopardy!”: quickly, efficiently and with matter-of-fact 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 once her episodes started taping at the end of September, she was competing in five games a day, twice a week for several consecutive weeks, commuting from Oakland to Los Angeles.

By the time she filmed her last episode on Nov. 9, she had taken a demotion at work, used all her paid time off and taken several unpaid days in order to keep her job as a software engineer.

She left the show having won $1,382,800. But as of this week, her check hadn’t arrived yet and Ms. Schneider was still working full time.

“It started airing when I knew that I had done this kind of historic thing and nobody else knew anything about it,” she said.

Now, people know. Ms. Schneider surpassed Matt Amodio’s 38-day streak, leaving her behind only Ken Jennings, who won 74 consecutive games in 2004.

She was a virtuoso in terms of accuracy and speed, but unlike Mr. Amodio, her style of play was traditional. Ms. Schneider favored playing a single category vertically from the lowest to highest score rather than playing across the lucrative bottom row, 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 previous contestants like Chuck Forrest and Arthur Chu. And her wagers tended to be conservative.

Her strategy paid off. Ms. Schneider left the show as the highest-winning woman in the show’s history. She’s already a legend among both “Jeopardy!” fans and former contestants.

“The depth and breadth of her knowledge are remarkable,” said Terry Wolfisch Cole, one of the 82 contestants who competed against Ms. Schneider during her run on the show.

‘I’ll Give Anything a Shot Now’

On the day I met Ms. Schneider, she had already given three interviews. If she was tired of speaking to reporters, she didn’t let it show.

She greeted me wearing an oxblood dress with big 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 special significance for Ms. Schneider. “When she was an infant, she was kidnapped and enchanted by an evil sorceress and raised as a boy,” she said.

“And then the enchantment was lifted and she was revealed to be the beautiful princess she was all along,” Ms. Schneider said.

In lieu of her signature pearls, she wore a necklace that depicted the Star, one…