A central Ohio man was a big winner last week on the popular game show Jeopardy!
Ryan Manton, of Hilliard, won four games before coming in second place on Friday's show. In total, Manton won about $86,000.
Manton, 31, a systems administrator for a nonprofit that builds affordable housing, said being on Jeopardy! is NOT like watching the show on TV.
“The shocking thing to me was just how quick everything goes,” Manton said. “I was able to be on five games and even that seemed like it was just over in the blink of an eye. And then they throw me back out on the street and it's over.”
Manton's episodes of Jeopardy! that aired last week were actually all filmed during one day in June.
The process of getting on the show began long before that and involved lots of tests, starting with the online “Anytime” test.
“They don't say what passing is, by the way,” Manton said. “You don't get to know that at any point. You might get an email from them that says you passed the test.”
Then, you take a proctored test, followed by a mock game of Jeopardy! that assesses how well people might play on TV, Manton said.
If you get through all that, you are entered into a pool of possible players and you wait to be called for up to a year, Manton said.
“I was able to be on five games and even that seemed like it was just over in the blink of an eye. And then they throw me back out on the street and it's over.”- Ryan Manton of Hilliard
When Manton did get the call, he said he had about three weeks to make travel arrangements and prepare.
Thankfully, he had a little help from his wife, Lauren, who herself was a past Jeopardy! contestant. Despite a good score, she came in third place during her appearance on the show in 2021. Manton said he actually proposed to her the night before her game, though he didn’t get to watch the taping of her show because of pandemic restrictions.
Manton and his wife got married during the pandemic and never had a proper honeymoon. He said he might use his Jeopardy! winnings to finally take a trip. He’s also a big Cleveland Guardians fan and hopes that he might get to see them play this year in the World Series.
“And I'm also trying to convince Lauren to get me a fountain machine, so I can have Coke Zero on demand,” he said.
Manton fell just short of automatic entry to Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions. He still thinks he has a good chance of being invited back.
“And if I do get there, I'll just be happy to be there,” Manton said.
In the meantime, Manton will likely keep playing trivia on Tuesdays at his favorite spot in Grandview – Endeavor Brewing. He said trivia probably helped sharpen his Jeopardy! skills.
“You learn a lot of weird factoids that might not really help you in life, but if you need to just regurgitate rote-memorized information, trivia is kind of helpful for that,” Manton said.
Manton, who grew up in Akron, holds degrees in cloud computing and computer science from Western Governors University. He said, however, he didn’t get any tech questions in any of his Jeopardy! games.
Manton encourages anyone interested in being on the show to take the test.
"It seems, you know, daunting to be up there, but really, anyone can do it,” Manton said.
Central Ohio has had plenty of other Jeopardy! contestants, including film archivist Sarah Hartzell in June and fiction writer Ellen Klages in May.
Then there’s Ohio’s biggest big winner – Amy Schneider from Dayton, who had a 40-game, $1.6 million winning streak in 2021 and 2022.
