NRI Dhruv Gaur wins $100,000 in Jeopardy college quiz contest
Dhruv Gaur, a Brown University freshman and a Lakeview Academy alumnus

Los Angeles, April 21, 2018
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Daily Double Domination was the key to the game for Dhruv Gaur by the time he got to the finals, scoring eight out of nine over the course of his four games.

On Friday, April 20, 2018, NRI student Dhruv Gaur, a freshman at Brown University, won the “Jeopardy! College Championship” claiming the $100,000 grand prize and earning a berth in the next edition of the game show’s Tournament of Champions.

William Scott of Los Altos, major in computer science and quantitative economics,a freshman at Tufts University in Massachusetts, finished in second place and captured $50,000, while Hannah Sage, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, came in third and collected $25,000.

“Nobody can really walk into a competition like this with 14 other incredibly talented and brilliant students and immediately expect to win it all. I know I certainly didn’t,” Gaur said after his win. “The idea of winning the whole tournament didn’t even cross my mind until somewhere during the first game of the finals. I was really just trying to take it one step at a time.”

“Meeting all of the contestants right before the competition, I was really impressed and somewhat intimidated, so I definitely didn’t expect to do that well,” Scott said. “Looking back, the other contestants probably felt the same way as I did. And, as anyone who has competed on or watched ‘Jeopardy!’ will likely tell you, the right categories make a huge difference.”

he Final Jeopardy question concerned classic literary characters: He declares that one of the people he is trying to emulate is a medieval knight known as Amadis of Gaul.

The correct answer was Don Quixote. Gaur wrote “That’s all folks.”

In his semifinal game, Gaur was unsure on a Latin Vulgate Bible question while in second place.

Gaur said he has particularly grown close to his fellow semifinal competitor, Rishab Jain, who attends Georgia Tech. 

“In the game that we both played, we kind of tag-teamed on some of the tweets that came at us. If they were kind of negative toward Rishab, then I would comment on it and vice versa.”

Gaur said the experience has been “inspiring and humbling” to meet more than a dozen other intelligent, fun college students through the 15-person tournament.

Gaur had scored a perfect score of 1,600 in the national-wide college entrance exam, Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Jeopardy:

Jeopardy! is Los Angeles/an American television quiz show created by Merv Griffin, in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in the form of a question.

• Jeopardy!'s audition process involves passing a difficult test of knowledge on a diversity of subjects, approximating the breadth of material encountered by contestants on the show.
• An online screener test is conducted annually.
• As with all television game shows, there are rules in place for who is allowed to appear as a contestant on Jeopardy
• Competitors in the regular episodes must be 18 years of age or older; contestants in the College Championship must be full-time undergraduates without any previous bachelor's degree

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