Jeopardy! GOAT: After rough night, Brad Rutter is approaching his first loss to an actual human being

Brad Rutter has never lost a tournament to a human being, but it's not looking good in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time one.

Brad Rutter has never lost on Jeopardy! — well, to a human being at least. But he’s on his way to being defeated in a tournament by a person for the first time and has some work to do in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time series if he wants to beat James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings and be declared the Jeopardy! GOAT.

Going up against the contestant with a 74-game win streak (Jennings) and another with the top-10 single-game winnings record (Holzhauer), Rutter more than deserves to compete among his fellow GOATs because he has the record for most money won on Jeopardy! with a cool $4,688,436 — and counting because he’s guaranteed at least $250,000 from this tournament.

Now, the vast majority of his winnings came from tournaments because when Rutter first appeared on the show in 2000, contestants were limited to five game wins before having to retire undefeated. So he won his five games and walked away with $55,102 and two Chevy Camaros. So he never lost in regular-season play.

Since then, Rutter has returned to Jeopardy! for several special tournaments and won nearly all of them. He won the 2001 Tournament of Champions, the Million Dollar Masters in 2002 (he won by $1), the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005 (Jennings finished second) and the Battle of the Decades in 2014 (Jennings was second, again). In 2019 in the team-oriented All-Star Games, Team Brad came in first ahead of Team Ken.

The only time he wasn’t on top at the end of a tournament was in 2011 when he and Jennings competed in The IBM Challenge, facing off against Watson, an IBM computer. Naturally, Watson won, while Jennings finished second and Rutter third.

So again, Rutter has never lost to a human in a Jeopardy! regular-season game or tournament.

But in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament, Rutter hasn’t been off to the best start, and because of that, it’s fair to wonder how exactly he’s still never lost to a human competitor after finishing third in the first two matches (each match consists of two games with a combined score).

Despite ultimately winning the aforementioned tournaments against people, Rutter lost a game during two different tournaments, according to J! Archives, but still ended up with titles.

In the first of two final games in the 2001 Tournament of Champions, Rutter finished second. But in the last game of the final, he destroyed his competition to win the tournament championship and $100,000. Then in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, Rutter tied for second in the Round 4, Game 3 contest before eventually winning the whole thing.

So when he finished third in the opening game of the first Jeopardy! GOAT match Tuesday — and in the second game that day, plus both games Wednesday — it was not the first time he’s lost a game within a tournament.

And although it seems like he’s solidifying his position as the third-best Jeopardy! player ever, he could still win this tournament.

Ahead of the third GOAT tournament episode Thursday, Jennings and Holzhauer each have one match win. They’ve both capitalized on Daily Doubles — much like Holzhauer did during his 32-game win streak in 2019 — while Rutter’s deficits have been largely tied to doing the opposite.

(Eric McCandless/ABC via AP)

For a while during Wednesday’s match, Rutter was playing better compared with the previous episode. He hung around with Holzhauer and Jennings for a little, and when he fell behind, it still wasn’t by a totally insurmountable amount. And then came the Daily Doubles.

In the second game, Rutter got a Daily Double off the first clue of Double Jeopardy. He went all in with his 3,800 points and gave an incorrect response about DNA. Then he got multiple clues wrong and was suddenly at -5,200, and he couldn’t dig himself out of the hole fast enough to have points to wager in Final Jeopardy. That ensured he’d finish third in yet another game.

Rutter’s past game losses didn’t prevent him from winning tournaments, and neither do his defeats in the Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time tournament. But based on his performance compared with Holzhauer and Jennings, it looks like his undefeated streak is going to end.

That said, he’s going to walk away from this tournament with just shy of $5 million earned overall from the game show — at a minimum. He’s a GOAT, even if he doesn’t have the official title.