One Day, I Got a Furious Email From a Jeopardy! Star. It Only Got Weirder From There. (2025)

In just four games in January 2023, Yogesh Raut became an overnight Jeopardy! sensation. In a sign of the times for the show, his ascendance had as much to do with his bluster as it did with his knowing the clues. It was clear he was exceptionally good at quizzing from the moment he took the podium, and between his three initial victories, he totaled nearly $100,000 in winnings. But Jeopardy! fans were especially captivated by Raut’s offbeat demeanor on stage: the violence with which he smacked his buzzer, the confidence with which he taunted flashy luminaries like James Holzhauer. Most memorably, when Raut’s winning streak came to an end, he took to Facebook and wrote a lengthy, difficult-to-parse essay asserting that Jeopardy! and its fandom were a necrotic presence in the world of trivia—specifically that the show is “bad for women and POC who want to be treated with the same level of dignity as their White male counterparts.”

Jeopardy! is a “glorified reality show,” and the aura around it is “fundamentally incompatible with incentivizing the next generation of quizzers to excel,” Raut wrote. “It is fundamentally incompatible with true social justice.”

It does not take much to rankle the librarian-like dictums of Jeopardy! nation, and a former champion taking aim at the show on social media was more than enough for the community to settle on a brand-new villain. “What is ‘Sour Grapes,’ Ken?” went one response to Raut’s post. “He only holds it in such low esteem because he didn’t do as well as he was expected to do,” another fan wrote. So when Raut was invited to the annual Tournament of Champions that was held last spring, fans took note of his impending return. In February, in a story about the deluge of special tournaments that had taken over the show’s programming, I briefly mentioned in a parenthetical that Raut was set to come back to the show he had roasted: “Remember three-time champion Yogesh Raut, who trashed the show after his appearances? He’s back next week!”

That’s when things got weird.

Shortly after publishing that story, I received a very angry email from Yogesh Raut. The subject line read, “Lying in your ‘Jeopardy!’ article.” In it, Raut accused me of “rationalizing the doxxing/harassment/cyberbullying of a POC,” and asserted that I had to “make up fake facts in order to cook up a victim-blaming narrative that justifies harming POC.”

The next day, I received a second email, this time from a PR representative from a firm called Red Banyan, which, according to its website, specializes in “cancel culture.” It included a statement from Raut that the firm wished to have inserted into my story, as well as several bullet points further clarifying Raut’s criticism of Jeopardy! One sample: “Yogesh also received significant blowback regarding his contestant interviews that aired during his episode. It’s important to note that contestants do not choose the subject of their interviews in non-invitational episodes.”

In the end, Slate did not amend the story, and Raut’s Jeopardy! career continued to flourish: He won the Tournament of Champions, permanently enshrining him as a nationally regarded quizzing heavyweight. Then, last May, he appeared in the show’s elite prime-time Jeopardy! Masters series, alongside other megawatt series stars like Holzhauer and Amy Schneider. Some of those ardent Jeopardy! fans who were initially flummoxed by Raut started warming up to him, noting that he appeared to be making the effort to change during his second run on the show.

OK, I thought: Maybe I could understand where Raut was coming from. It’s a lot of pressure! And it took guts to come back on the show. So I emailed him, asking if he would be interested in an interview about that initial wave of backlash, and if his perspective on Jeopardy! had changed at all since he … well, since he trashed the show on Facebook.

That’s where things got weirder.

Raut was not amenable to this idea. Instead, he wrote back an eight-paragraph essay where he articulated the depths of his anger toward me and the quizzing ecosystem writ large. He called himself “a subject of quiz-apartheid,” banned from various pub trivias because of his skin color. He said that he suffers from PTSD from the racism he has suffered in the quizzing community. And that I was a “glorified gossip-monger dragging the reputation of a once-respectable publication through the mud” with my “racism” and “irresponsibility.”

I had only published a brief mention of Raut at that point. It didn’t seem to matter. Here’s the meat of his response:

Has it not trickled into even your thick skull that the object of my contempt was never J! the TV show, and *definitely* not the staff and contestants on that TV show.IT WAS YOU, and people like you. People who purport to be fans of a show based around factual knowledge but are utterly indifferent to facts when it gives them an excuse to look down on a POC. People who see a grown man with three masters degrees and four decades of experience living as a POC in a majority-White society analyze the injustice he faces every day and respond, “LOLOL what a whiny ranty sore loser baby.” “Journalists” who wait until someone has won eight times on a game show before the ethics that are supposed to be the bedrock of their profession even begin to kick in.

Journalists get lots of pissed-off emails from people we write about. Some have legitimate corrections we make. Some seem just to be venting. Most are not worth readers’ time. But Raut’s stood out for a couple reasons.

One is that Jeopardy! was in the process of turning him into a bona fide prime-time star. Times on Jeopardy! have changed: No longer are the contestants fleeting standouts who are really good at trivia. They are now cultivated into television celebrities, like a cross between reality stars and athletes, who viewers are encouraged to develop relationships with over time. And Raut—far from changing his tune, even as his own star was on the rise in the Jeopardy! ecosystem—seemed like a fearsome critic of the position that puts contestants like him in. He insisted his fury was not directed at the show itself, but it’s impossible to separate what he was arguing from what Jeopardy! has become.

The second reason is that Raut continued to air accusations about quiz-world racism during his appearances. He called out people by name who had faced him at various points throughout his time in trivia leagues. These leagues may seem like small potatoes, but they have large followings and winnings attached, and they’re also a potential pipeline to Jeopardy! itself. I wondered what had happened. He referenced one major organization in particular, Geeks Who Drink. So I decided to ask some of the people he’d accused about it.

That’s where things got even more weird.

The saga of Yogesh Raut is thorny and opaque. But it seems that at least one of his foundational furies was forged at a fateful pub trivia night eight years ago in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Raut keeps a blog called The Wronger Box, which he uses to tabulate all of his rivalries. (You can read the post he made about me right here.) According to that blog, in 2016, Raut suspected that his local Geeks Who Drink branch, which he did not name directly, was artificially inflating the scores of other teams, in what he believed was a surreptitious campaign to keep his team out of first place. Raut confronted the person who runs the local Geeks Who Drink outfit, who in turn accused him of asking the other teams about their quiz results, which the organizer claimed was in violation of official Geeks Who Drink rules. Raut denied the charges—and still does today—but the organizer banned him from future competition at the bar.

Raut took the ruling hard. “The weekly pub quiz wasn’t just a refuge where I could find respite from my chaotic life by demonstrating mastery,” he explained on his blog. “Fundamentally, it was one of very few places where, in an anti-intellectual culture, I could feel genuinely proud of the knowledge that I had spent my entire life accumulating.” (“I came to the inevitable conclusion that I was targeted in an unethical fashion, and I do believe that racism was an element in the decision to ban me,” Raut said in a statement to Slate through his representatives.)

Jeremy Cahnmann, another career quizzer who once partnered in a semiprofessional trivia team with Raut, told me that there might have been some legitimacy to Raut’s allegations. Cahnmann said Raut is a brilliant trivia player—one of the best he’s known—but also someone whose quizzing priorities don’t line up with the intent of a typical weeknight bar trivia session.

“I’ve been in this business long enough to have a reasonable assumption of what was going on,” Cahnmann said. “Bars hold pub trivia nights to bring in money, but Yogesh is not a drinker, and he’s not spending a ton of cash. I said to him, ‘Listen, knowing you, and knowing the way pub trivia works, I bet that either the manager, or the pub quiz host, or both, are probably not big fans of yours. Because you’re probably winning a lot, and you might be discouraging other teams from coming in, and that makes them a little resentful of you. They might be rigging it. But they might be rigging it to avoid the uncomfortable conversation of telling you not to come in.’ ”

Kit Wren routinely played against Raut at his local Geeks Who Drink outfit at an Alamo Drafthouse in El Paso back in 2017. This was long before Jeopardy! transformed Raut into a quizzing celebrity, so Wren only knew him as “this one guy who would be complaining to the scorekeeper all the time.”

“It wouldn’t matter what the score was,” he told me. “If he won by 5 points, he’d be arguing for that sixth. I was like, ‘Well, that’s one way to live a life, I guess.’ ”

Wren said his and Raut’s respective teams eventually settled into a rivalry, which culminated when Raut won a prize at Quiz Bowl, a yearly competition featuring bar-trivia collectives from all around the country and organized by Geeks Who Drink. Raut won a prize at the tournament, and according to Wren, when he returned to El Paso afterward, he was brandishing the oversized novelty check. “We always sat on the patio, and they sat inside. And they took the table where we could see them, and they stuck the check right in the window at us,” Wren said.

It seems unlikely we will ever know if the bar was, indeed, fudging Raut’s trivia scores. But Raut’s complaint was noticed by a Geeks Who Drink higher-up—a guy named Christopher Short—who was then an editor of the company’s questions. (He went on to become the CEO.) According to Raut’s blog, Geeks Who Drink promised to audit the results of those suspicious quiz results at the pub, but the investigation never got off the ground. According to an email sent by Geeks Who Drink to Raut, which was obtained by Slate, the company called the bar’s manager, who alleged that “multiple customers had complained to him about him inquiring about their scores and making them uncomfortable.”

“Unfortunately at this point our hands are tied as we cannot force a venue to allow patrons access to their establishment or activities,” the email to Raut read. “The moment that [the bar] changes their stance and allows you to quiz again we would be more than happy to have you back. And as it stands, you are not banned from quizzing with us at any other location.”

Raut was furious with Geeks Who Drink, which began his yearslong feud with Short. From Raut’s vantage point, Short and Geeks Who Drink sided with the bigoted and racially homogenous majority of the quizzing establishment—embodied by this particular bar—pushing him, a person of color, out of the community. His anger about this alleged injustice has never faded. In that same blog post where Raut outlines those initial charges of score fixing, he also accuses a person who seems to be Short of being “so eager to victim-blame me that he confabulated a false confession.” It’s a sharp barb, but nothing compared to what came next. Here is Raut six years later, writing about that same incident:

He listened only to the White man’s side, took everything the White man said as gospel without making even a token effort to verify it from an objective source, confabulated a fictitious narrative in which the dark-skinned man was really the aggressor and the god-fearin’ White folks just did what they had to do to put him in his place, and refused to back down from that racism-enabling fairy tale even once its facts were discredited, because after all the person discrediting them—the actual victim—was Just a N–er.

The strange thing is the email Geeks Who Drink sent to Raut wasn’t written by Short. It was instead written by Taylor Wynn, who was then a regional manager at the company. Both Short and Geeks Who Drink headquarters denied an interview request for this story, but in those same records reviewed by Slate, Short claimed to have “no record of Yogesh and myself ever communicating directly.”

“I can remember Yogesh going on Christopher Short’s Facebook page, where he’s posting a photo of his baby getting baptized, and him commenting something like, ‘You’re an evil human being, how can you call yourself a Christian?’ with no reference to what the offense was,” said another former teammate of both Raut and Cahnmann, who spoke on the condition they not be named. “That’s part of his genius. He never talks about what actually happened.”

Raut’s trivia-world saga seems to have hit its climax in March 2019, where he and his team—including Cahnmann, and competing under the name Shiny & Chrome—were yet again set to play in the Geek Bowl, which was taking place in Las Vegas. Given Raut’s transcendent quizzing ability, it’s not a surprise that Shiny & Chrome was a formidable group during its several years of trivia together. Cahnmann said they accrued $50,000 in winnings, and in major events, they would occasionally claim to be representing a bar in Las Cruces in solidarity with Raut.

But on this fateful day, Raut arrived in Las Vegas wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “I don’t forgive you, and you need help.” Cahnmann didn’t know what to make of it. He assumed that the shirt was some oblique movie or TV reference, of the “Han Shot First” variety. But he came to believe Raut made the shirt himself, and he was going to use it to get his revenge. (Raut says the shirt was not a reference to Short.)

Shiny & Chrome won the 2019 Geek Bowl, and when Raut got on stage, he had covered his shirt with a button-down. After receiving their grand prize—$13,000, printed on another gigantic novelty check—Cahnmann claims Raut slyly disrobed, in plain sight of Short. For some reason unknown to Cahnmann and the rest of his teammates, this slogan was interpreted by Short to be a major barb. A few minutes later, a Geeks Who Drink representative confronted Cahnmann, and all hell broke loose.

“She stares me down, and is like, ‘I can’t believe you guys brought Yogesh.’ She mentions the shirt, and how much his attacks and criticism have gotten to Christopher. I’m just like, Man, I did not realize this had become such an event. I thought he was venting on the internet where nobody was paying attention,” he said. “I immediately was like, ‘I didn’t realize this was a big deal, we’ll try and talk to him, we don’t want to ruffle any feathers.’ And that night, I talked to the team, without Yogesh, and said, ‘Hey, this is apparently a bigger deal than we realized.’ ”

What followed was a teamwide come-to-Jesus moment. Cahnmann and three other members of Shiny & Chrome sat down with Raut to understand what he was doing and, ultimately, to try to keep the team from being banned. Raut, Cahnmann remembered, was perplexed by his teammates’ unwillingness to “stick up for him.”

That was the beginning of the end for Shiny & Chrome.

“He likened himself to the women of the #MeToo movement. And said that he was the one who was being harassed, and that he did nothing wrong,” Cahnmann said. (Raut says he did not intend to compare himself to victims of sexual abuse.) “And maybe he did nothing wrong. I don’t actually know what happened in New Mexico.” Still, he said, “I basically told him that I am less sympathetic to his plight now than when this whole thing started. He hasn’t done anything to win me over to his side. That was the last time I spoke to him.”

Geeks Who Drink did not end up banning Raut from future trivia events hosted by the company. One member of the team struck an informal “gentleman’s deal” with the company ensuring that Raut could continue to play at his local Geeks Who Drink pub trivia games, so long as he stopped publicly feuding with Short on social media, and didn’t attend Geek Bowl—where he might come into contact with Short—in the future. In text messages reviewed by Slate, Raut appeared to be acquiescent to those terms, thanking a member of the team for their “intervention.” But in the years after the meeting, Cahnmann and other members of Shiny & Chrome, like Short, became characters on Raut’s blog.

“It doesn’t matter how often or how boldly I speak out. Just like in academia, I will never have the power to hold racist White abusers of power accountable,” he wrote. “Other White people do possess that power, and not only do they refuse to use it, they actively employ their privilege to bury the truth and ensure that victims of racism suffer while racists-in-power prosper. … Behind every Christopher Short is a Jeremy Cahnmann telling blatant lies to support him.”

In a statement to Slate through his representatives, Raut said he does not regret how he’s approached this. “I have encountered immense amounts of discrimination during my time competing in quizzes all over the country, and I refuse to stay silent about the way those experiences have impacted me, in hopes that others who come after me will bravely speak out about injustices they may face. I hope that we will work together to end this prejudice at every level in our quizzing community,” he said.

In trying to learn more about Raut’s perspective, I spoke to Cory Anotado, a queer Filipino American who appeared on Jeopardy! during Amy Schneider’s historic run. Anotado told me that in broad strokes, many of the things Raut asserts about the quizzing world are true. It is a hobby dominated by white men, and like in any hobby with those demographics, women and people of color can be made to feel unwelcome and unwanted in those spaces. But Anotado also believes that Raut has yet to authentically investigate himself, and his own demeanor, for why he seems to keep making enemies. “And part of me does feel bad for him in a way,” he said. “Because it’s very evident, through the hard work he has put into being so good at trivia, that he wants to be liked and appreciated for the things he is good at. But he also doesn’t want to be accountable for the personality issues that might be prickly to other people.

“I don’t like it when people throw around racism this trivially,” Anotado said. “No pun intended.”

In May, Raut ended up in second place in Jeopardy! Masters, the lucrative prime-time edition of the show. He won $250,000, on top of the $250,000 he had clinched at the Tournament of Champions. (Victoria Groce, also a star in the quiz circuit, pulled out a victory for the top spot and the “Trebek Trophy.”)

If it seemed like Raut had accepted the Jeopardy! spotlight and moved on from his grievances—as many viewers assumed—he soon made it clear that wasn’t the case. He took the moment to take aim at the man who is largely credited with the expanded Jeopardy! universe: executive producer Michael Davies. In a heated 3,000-word Facebook post shortly after the series aired, Raut claimed he was “strongly nudged” to appear on the show, and accused Davies of minimizing the criticism Raut received after his comments on the first round on the show, among other offenses.

Raut also used the moment to settle the score with me. “I’m not saying this to ‘trash’ Davies or J! as an institution. No, I’m here to trash Luke Winkie and Claire McNear,” he wrote, referring to the longtime Ringer journalist who wrote a book about Jeopardy! Raut said we and other writers who cover game shows had chosen to ignore that “one of the top-ranked J! players on the continent has been subjected to so much harassment and discrimination in the quizzing world that he was diagnosed with PTSD even *before* being doxxed and cyberbullied by J! fans.

“Did this happen because they are incompetent at their job, or are they just a-okay with White Supremacy?” Raut asked. “I don’t see a viable third option.”

A representative for Jeopardy! declined to comment on Raut’s criticism of Davies or on Raut in general. I had been reporting this story, so I recognized the pattern: Like Christopher Short and many others before me, I had become a boogeyman for Raut. But my ears did perk up at a particular objection Raut raised: that Davies had referred to him as a “character” on the show. Raut said those comments were beyond the pale, and faulted journalists for not writing about them.

But that’s not quite true. Many of us have lamented the direction Jeopardy! is heading in with its contestants. Creating “characters” is indeed the blueprint that British producer Davies—who was among those who devised the prime-time saturation of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the late 1990s—has in mind for Jeopardy! Beginning with a rule change that allowed players like current host Ken Jennings to return beyond five games if they kept winning, the show has grown amenable to elevating quiz “stars” incubated in trivia leagues around the country. And its ever-expanding footprint, culminating in Masters, leans on the stars’ personalities and quirks as much as their obvious skill at the game.

And that inevitably leads to the problems that come with all stars. Raut’s broadside on Jeopardy!’s executive producer and his history of obsessive online criticism, puts the show in an awkward position as its 41^st season launches this month.* Jeopardy! Masters seems likely to return as another high-water moment for the show next year, and as a top-three finalist, Raut would be invited, in theory. There’s little doubt Raut will have more to say if he goes back on the show, and there is approximately zero chance producers aren’t reckoning with that behind the scenes.

After his latest criticism following his prime-time appearances last year, Raut has mostly been silent on the show, except for a few interviews with the U.S. Sun, the stateside edition of the British tabloid. Despite it all, when asked if he’d return to televised quizzing, he said, “Sure, if someone gives me the opportunity to make money off the skills I’ve spent my whole life developing, then yes, I’d be receptive to that.”

Correction, Sept. 19, 2024: This article originally misstated that Jeopardy! is entering its 40^th season. It’s entering its 41^st.