Roger Craig

Early life and career

Craig, who was 33 years old at the time of his initial Jeopardy! appearance in 2010, is a native of Ferndale, Pennsylvania. He grew up there and later in Virginia, where he graduated from Annandale High School in 1995.

Craig holds a first degree in biology and biochemistry from Virginia Tech, and a master's degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Delaware. He was working on his doctorate at the time of his first appearance on Jeopardy!, and completed the degree later in 2010.

In his scholarly career, Craig has published eight papers in the field of bioinformatics, specifically on topics of combinatorial protein synthesis and protein-protein prediction.

In November 2011, Craig was living in Newark, Delaware, and working as a computer scientist. He is the founder of Cotinga, a company which performs data analyses and creates learning applications for smartphones. Craig was a guest on KFC Radio of Barstool Sports on August 23, 2012.

When the Battle of the Decades tournament aired in 2014, Craig was living in Brooklyn, New York, and working as a data scientist.

In 2025, he revealed that he is married to Julia Collins, a fellow Jeopardy! champion.

Jeopardy!

Preparation

Craig prepared for Jeopardy! by studying the online archive of past questions maintained on the J! Archive website. Using data-mining and text-clustering, he identified the topics most likely to occur in game questions, then used the spaced repetition program Anki for memorization and tested himself using his own program.

Craig played quiz bowl as a student at both Virginia Tech and the University of Delaware. Before his Jeopardy! appearances, he played numerous Jeopardy scrimmage matches against his friends with quiz bowl experience.

Craig believes his attendance at the two universities helped the most in his success:Let's face it, for Jeopardy!, the name of the game is breadth not depth. I think the main reason both universities helped so much is that they cover just about all spheres of learning in extraordinary depth.

Appearances

Craig set his record of $77,000 on the second day of the 2010–2011 Jeopardy! season on the episode airing September 14, 2010. In his record-setting appearance, he had a score of $47,000 after the game's first two rounds, then wagered and won $30,000 in the Final Jeopardy! round. Prior to Craig, the single-day record of $75,000 was held by Ken Jennings. Craig lost to North Carolina sportswriter Jelisa Castrodale in his seventh appearance. He had the lead going into the Final Jeopardy! round, in the category "Sports and the Media". Castrodale won when she gave the correct response to the Final Jeopardy question about the winner of Super Bowl XLIV, while Craig gave an incorrect response, finishing third behind Castrodale and police officer Matt Martin. The record, however, was short of the overall $3,900 set by Robert H. Smith, Jr., in 1973, which would be the equivalent of $78,000 in scoring since November 26, 2001.

In his seven-day run, Craig earned $231,200, all but $1,000 of which was from winning episodes.

On April 9, 2019, professional sports gambler James Holzhauer broke Craig's single-day record, surpassing it 15 more times during his own run; the record now stands at $131,127 as of April 17, 2019. Holzhauer, like Craig, relied on aggressive Daily Double and Final Jeopardy! wagers to amass his totals. Holzhauer also surpassed Craig's records for most earnings won in a player's first five games and the largest successful bet on a Daily Double.

In 2011, Craig returned for the Tournament of Champions, which aired in November. In the quarter-final match, he had $200 shy of $40,000 going into Final Jeopardy! and won despite losing $20,200 after getting Final Jeopardy! wrong. In the semi-final match, described as "a bloody, epic, inter-planetary death match... the Jeopardy! equivalent of a title-unification fight", Craig beat college physics professor Joon Pahk and student and waiter Mark Runsvold, the sixth and tenth regular-play all-time money winners on the show at the time. On the first night of the two-day finals, Craig became the first player in the history of the show to uncover two Daily Double items in succession, wager all of his money on both, and win both times.

When Craig hit the first of his back-to-back Daily Doubles, he wagered his entire pot of $9,000, and won when he correctly identified Anne Brontë as the author who wrote the 1847 book Agnes Grey under the pseudonym 'Acton Bell'. After switching categories and uncovering the second Daily Double, Craig wagered his entire pot of $18,000, winning when he correctly answered, "What is Suriname?" after being given the clue "Although Dutch is the official language, Sranan Tongo is spoken by most people in this South American country." At the time, his $18,000 win was the largest successful Daily Double wager in the show's history.