Where Is 'Jeopardy!' Winner Nancy Zerg Now? What We Know About the Player Who Took Ken Down

There was a time when Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings had captivated the world. He just couldn't stop winning, racking up W after W on the quiz bowl-style game show.

Enter: Nancy Zerg.

The unassuming real estate agent from Venture, Calif., roared to victory against Ken in December 2004, ending his long-running stretch of wins.

But where is Nancy Zerg now? Here's what we know about where her life took her after that impressive win against Ken.

To set the stage: It was December 2004, and Ken was on the top of his game, quite literally. He had won a jaw-dropping 74 games in a row, making him among the winningest Jeopardy! contestants of all time.

But after he failed to answer the Final Jeopardy clue correctly ("What is H&R block?"), Nancy took the win. A smiling Ken hugged her and passed the torch.

Yet one game later, Nancy lost and ended her run before it began. So where is she now?

In a 2019 interview with the New York Post, Nancy reminisced on her win.

She shared, "I was completely unprepared for that event happening. I never thought beyond just trying to stay in the game, then once Ken lost I was completely unprepared for the tumult, the attitude of the other players. When you’re in the contestant pool, they keep you all together … and I wasn’t prepared for the way the energy completely changed. It went from all these people going, ‘Oh God, I have to play Ken Jennings’ to ‘He’s gone! He’s gone! Now I can win!’ and it was chaos — just people having a party. It was really bizarre."

By 2019, she was living in Seattle, Wash., and had left the real estate game.

Although it's unclear where she is in 2025, we know that she's still watching Jeopardy!. While speaking with the New York Post in 2019, Nancy joked, "Jeopardy! fans are nuts for Jeopardy! We’re lifelong fans."

With the fact that Nancy lost her very next game after defeating Ken, many fans have wondered over the years if he intentionally "threw" the game in order to end his winning streak.

But it seems unlikely.

While it's clear that something knocked Ken off his game in that Final Jeopardy clue, there were other factors at play.

For one, when Nancy went on to play the next game, she likely lost as a result of nerves and a loss of focus. She admitted in the New York Post interview that her head wasn't in the next game, sharing, “I really was just completely at sea. It was an overwhelming experience, and if it had been a normal situation, I think I would have been OK. But I just simply lost concentration and couldn’t pull it together."

On his website KenJennings.com, Ken later reflected on the "everyone should have known it" answer to the clue that lost him the big game.

He mused, "Quite honestly, I could have thought about this question all day and not come up with the right answer. For some reason, tax season never even occurred to me. I assumed the answer would have something to do with summer or the holiday season. That’s what I get for always doing my own taxes, I guess.”

Ken also shared that playing under pressure is quite different from watching from the couch.

"I also suspect that many of the people who gave me a hard time for missing this answer (I lamely guessed ‘Who is FedEx?’) wouldn’t have gotten the right answer either. They read the answer in news articles and thought, in hindsight, ‘H&R Block? I’ve heard of that. That’s not so hard.’ Which is a little different than actually producing the right answer under the gun.”

Regardless of why Ken lost, Nancy will always have the honor of being the one to unseat the champ. And Ken, for his part, has always been a class act about it.