Utahn is king of TV show winners

Ken Jennings has been addicted to game shows pretty much his entire life. When he was 3, he'd call up family members with the latest results of "Wheel of Fortune" or "Family Feud."

Jennings started watching "Jeopardy!" at age 10, and he says he's been watching it religiously ever since.

Still, he never imagined he would become the show's record-breaking champion, winning $341,158 over 10 days. That's more money won and more days on the show than any "Jeopardy!" contestant has ever achieved in the program's 20-year history.

In Tuesday's show Jennings won $50,000, and host Alex Trebek said the most won on a single show was $52,000, which gives Jennings something to shoot for.

He continues his championship run tonight (the show airs at 7:30 p.m. on KJZZ-Ch. 14), making his 11th appearance.

For the first 19 years, "Jeopardy!" contestants had a five-day win limit. Jennings, a Salt Lake software engineer, was able to take advantage of a 2003 rule change that allows contestants to amass winnings as long as they remain victorious.

And victorious Jennings has been. It's as much about timing as knowledge. Each night he has faced trivia in 12 categories, hit the button quicker than his opponents and supplied the correct responses on a myriad of topics, from random history or geography facts to movie titles to breeds of cats.

"You never know where you're going to learn stuff," Jennings said about his process of absorbing trivia. "I guess, innately, I have a pretty good memory — where I tend to remember things I hear. Also, like everybody else, I tend to remember the things I am interested in."

Besides years of watching game shows and participating in academic trivia tournaments in college, Jennings said he learns things from everywhere — reading, watching movies and TV, reading comic books as a kid. For some reason, he said, he just keeps up on things.

Jennings did more than keep up when "Jeopardy!" called him at work in January to notify him that he had a month to prepare for his taping in February. He had gone to Los Angeles in May 2003 to audition for the show, and now, eight months later, he had a month to get ready.

"You pretty much know what you know, and you're not going to turn yourself into Albert Einstein overnight," Jennings said. "But I figured that there's some small list of things I can probably learn."