Jeopardy! This Week (Sept. 14–18, 2026): Every Final Jeopardy!, All Five Winners and Who Returns Monday

Five games, three champions, two triple stumpers. Season 43 opened with a week that kept ending on the last clue.

Winners took home $74,303 across the five nights, an average of $14,861 a game by our count of the one-day totals above. Mark Ramirez is the one still standing, and he goes for a third win on Monday.

👉 The week in one number: 7 correct responses out of 15 attempts at Final Jeopardy!, and not one of the five games was decided before the last clue was read.

What were the five Final Jeopardy! clues about?

Monday was Transportation, and the correct response was What is the Vespa? — the postwar Italian scooter named after a wasp. Nobody had it; three different wrong vehicles went on the cards.

Tuesday's Landmarks clue pointed at a West Coast structure built for a world's fair. What is the Space Needle? All three wrote it, the first clean sweep of the season.

Wednesday ran Names In Tech News and produced the week's only split: Who is Amodei? One of three. Thursday's TV Anniversaries clue was another sweep — What is The Golden Girls?

Friday went back to zero. Fictional Characters, and the answer was Who is Grendel?, the monster from Beowulf. Every wager that night was a guess at what the other two would do. The full clue-by-clue accounting for each night sits in the nightly results archive.

How did Matthew Riggle's run end?

It ended on Wednesday, and it ended close to a round number. Riggle came into the week as a returning champion, won Monday's premiere on wagering alone, then took Tuesday for $23,201.

That put him at four wins and $95,602 — $4,398 short of six figures, by our subtraction. Then Wednesday happened: a $7,000 Daily Double miss in Double Jeopardy! left him behind, and Jen Spinoglio was the only player who knew the Anthropic co-founder's name. She won $10,801 on a $201 cover bet.

Four wins is a good run and a short one. For scale, the longest streaks in the show's history are measured in dozens.

Ken Jennings hosted all five nights, as he has every game of the season.

Who is Mark Ramirez?

An executive communications lead from Northglenn, Colorado. He beat Spinoglio on Thursday with a runaway — $20,800 on a board that was locked before Final — and wagered nothing.

Friday was the opposite. He led $15,400 to $9,600 going into Final, which sounds safe and was not: a lock needs twice the runner-up plus a dollar, or $19,201 in that spot. He bet $3,900, missed Grendel, and won anyway at $11,500 because Michael Mott missed too.

Two wins, $32,300, and one very lucky Friday. Saturday's card on the Jeopardy! tonight page carries his numbers into next week.

Where did the money go?

Riggle's four-game total is the headline number of the week, but it was built in two very different halves. His first two wins came the previous week; the two in this one went $8,001 and $23,201.

He finished $4,398 under $100,000, and his last act as champion was a $5,201 wager on a clue he answered "Amadeus" — leaving him $199 for the night, the smallest non-zero score of the week.

The two new champions were cheaper. Spinoglio's single win and Ramirez's two add up to $43,101 between them, against Riggle's $31,202 in the same five days.

Was every episode new?

Yes. Monday, Sept. 14 was the Season 43 premiere and the first new syndicated game since July 24, so all five were originals rather than summer reruns.

Why did every game come down to a dollar?

Because four of the five did, more or less literally. Monday, Riggle wagered $3,999 and landed exactly one dollar above the best score Emily Mayo could have reached.

Tuesday, Wesley Jalipa bet to clear Abby Mullen's ceiling by a single dollar and took second by $101. Wednesday, Spinoglio's $201 was a standard cover bet over a rival who then missed anyway.

Thursday was the exception: Ramirez had a locked board and wagered nothing, which is the correct play and a dull one. Friday he was $3,801 short of a lock, bet $3,900 into that gap, and survived only because the clue beat everyone.

Contestants have gotten very good at this arithmetic, and it shows. Four nights out of five, the margin between first and second was smaller than the smallest clue on the board.

What is on next week?

Five more Season 43 games, Monday through Friday, with Ramirez starting at the champion's lectern. Contestants get posted show by show, and our week-ahead page fills them in as they appear.

If you are not sure what channel carries it where you live, the how-to-watch guide has the market list, and the Wheel of Fortune page covers the half hour after.

A few quick answers

Who won Jeopardy! this week? Riggle on Monday and Tuesday, Spinoglio on Wednesday, Ramirez on Thursday and Friday.

Who is the current Jeopardy! champion? Mark Ramirez, a two-day champion with $32,300.

Did anyone get Final Jeopardy! on Friday? No. All three missed Grendel, which is why the leader's total fell and he still won.

Last week's wrap, covering the Masters semifinals, is here.

Sources · The Jeopardy! Fan — nightly box scores and Coryat · Fikkle Fame — Final Jeopardy by date · Jeopardy.com — contestants and air dates

By the Game Show On Air desk · Updated Sept. 19, 7:21 a.m. ET