South Jersey ‘Jeopardy!’ super champ Cris Pannullo out in Tournament of Champions upset

Cris Pannullo, the South Jersey Jeopardy! super champ whose 21-win run ranks as one of the best in the game show’s history, won’t be moving on in the Tournament of Champions.

During his quarterfinal match that aired Monday, Pannullo was defeated by Jared Watson, a quality-control specialist from Greenville, Texas, who was one of 12 contestants who qualified for the tournament after having won just three games during their Jeopardy! run. (The previous cutoff had been four, but the Hollywood strikes during the summer caused production issues.)

“What is evening happing?” a shocked Watson said after pulling off the surprise victory.

Despite being tied after the first round, the game ended up becoming a runaway win for Watson, who got all of the Daily Doubles and was the only contestant to answer the Final Jeopardy clue correctly: The Royal Academy of Arts has this man’s “La Fornarina” and in the 1800s the RAA’s love for him made some artists retreat to an early style. (Who is Raphael?)

Watson easily won the quarterfinal with $32,000, while five-game winner Ben Goldstein finished a distant second with $100. Pannullo — who wagered everything during Final Jeopardy — ended the match with $0.

“Upsets like that are going to happen,” Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings said following the match.

While Pannullo’s early exit is surprising, it’s not the first time the biggest winner of the previous season didn’t make it out of the Tournament of Champions quarterfinals. Brian Chang, who won seven games during the show’s 37th season, lost in the first round of 2022′s tournament. The same happened to Seth Wilson, who topped all Jeopardy! contestants during the 33rd season with 12 wins before being eliminated in the tournament quarterfinals in 2017.

Pannullo will still earn $5,000 for competing in the tournament. That will increase his career Jeopardy! earnings to $754,268 before taxes, not a terrible haul for the self-described customer-success operations manager.

Melissa Klapper, a historian at Rowan University who lives in Merion Station, will hope to do better than Pannullo. Like Watson, Klapper qualified for the Tournament of Champions despite only having won three games in March, a streak that earned her $60,100.

One of Klapper’s competitors will likely be familiar to viewers — Ike Barinholtz, probably best known for his roles in The Mindy Project and HBO’s Eastbound & Down. Barinholtz won Celebrity Jeopardy! in its first season as its own show, defeating comedian Patton Oswalt and Star Trek: The Next Generation star Wil Wheaton.

Klapper’s episode will air on Monday, March 4.

Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions began Friday, and airs in Philadelphia on 6abc in its normal time slot at 7 p.m.

So far, two contestants have qualified for the semifinals — Watson and Emily Sands, who won Friday’s quarterfinal match.

The nine quarterfinal matches run though March 6. The winners will compete in the semifinals, with three players moving on to the finals, which begin March 12.

The finals are a best-of-seven format, so the first player to win three games will be crowned the tournament’s new champ. If it goes seven games, that would extent the tournament through March 20.