Indian-American Dhruv Gaur wins Jeopardy! 2018 College Championship

Dhruv awarded grand prize of 100,000 dollars, spot in next edition of Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions

By Geeta Goindi

Culver City, California, April 25, 2018 — Indian-American teen Dhruv Gaur has won the Jeopardy! 2018 College Championship clinching the grand prize of 100,000 dollars and earning a spot in the next edition of the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.

Gaur, a freshman at Ivy League Brown University in Providence, was both elated and humbled by his victory in the television quiz show which is focused more on academic questions. “Nobody can really walk into a competition like this with fourteen other incredibly talented and brilliant students and immediately expect to win it all. I know I certainly didn’t”, he said after being crowned the champion.

“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”, he revealed.

At 18 years of age, Gaur, who is originally from Gainesville, Georgia, and is studying public health and economics at Brown, was unsure how he would spend the prize money. “It’s kind of boring, but since I’m not entirely sure what the future holds, I’m just going to save it until I need it for grad school or to pursue an opportunity I might really want in the future”, he said.

“My little brother is really interested in investing, so I’ll give him some so he can give the stock market a go, and I promised my friends I’d take them out to dinner, but the vast majority is being saved for later”, added the teen.

Interestingly, he faced off against another Indian-American, Rishab Jain, 18, in the semi-finals. Jain, a first-year student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, took home 10,000 dollars from the competition. In second place was William Scott, a freshman at Tufts University, who earned 50,000 dollars, and securing third place was Hannah Sage, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, who collected 25,000 dollars.

Regarding the highlight of the tournament, for Gaur it was the personal relationships he forged during the classic game show now in its thirtieth year.  “I really loved spending time with the other contestants. It was probably the best part of this entire experience”, he said. “William and Hannah are both great competitors and were a real challenge to play against, but, more importantly, (they are) really friendly, wonderful people”.

“Jeopardy! somehow manages to select a group of some of the most kind, funny, intelligent, and interesting people I’ve ever met”, Scott said. “As for Dhruv and Hannah, we of course had some healthy competition during the finals, but Hannah and I were both really happy for Dhruv after his win”.

“Kudos to Indian-American Dhruv Gaur on winning the Jeopardy College Championship. All the best for a bright future”, US Ambassador to India Ken Juster said in a tweet.

With 23 million viewers each week, Jeopardy is America’s top-rated quiz show on television, hosted by Alex Trebek. It holds a Guinness World Record for bagging the most Emmy Awards (34) won by a TV game show.