Walla Walla priest advances to ‘Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions’ semifinals

Two Washingtonians — an Episcopal priest and a returning player whose remarks some viewers found controversial — made it to the “Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions,” advanced through the quarterfinals and will compete against one another (and a third contestant, of course) in a semifinal episode airing March 8.

David Sibley, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Walla Walla, and Yogesh Raut, of Vancouver, bonded during breaks while filming the first week of February — but not about their shared backgrounds as Washington residents.

“We talked about our lives; we had a very meaningful conversation about what it was to be people of faith,” Sibley recalls. Raut was raised Hindu. “Yogesh has an incredible knowledge base and with that comes a clever and dry wit. He’s a brilliant and a really kind man.”

After his first appearance in January 2023, Raut posted reflections about his “Jeopardy!” experience, writing, “‘Jeopardy!’ is not the problem; its centrality to American society is. There will never be a healthy quizzing culture in this country until we learn to stop pretending that ‘Jeopardy!’ is important (And FWIW, everyone there treated me just fine. Don’t try to make this about personal spite.)”

Raut wrote about racism and misogyny he encountered in the fringe subculture of quizzing. He wrote that “Jeopardy!” is a fun TV show, “but putting it on a pedestal is an objectively bad thing. It’s bad for the future of quizzing. It’s bad for women and [people of color] who want to be treated with the same levels of dignity as their white male counterparts. It is fundamentally incompatible with incentivizing the next generation of quizzers to excel, and it is fundamentally incompatible with true social justice.”

Raut says in retrospect, he shouldn’t have been surprised by the negative reactions from some “Jeopardy!” fans.

“I think the very first sentence of the very first post was, ‘Please don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say,’ so it was a little surprising how many people proceeded to misunderstand it about as much as it’s possible to misunderstand something,” Raut says.

As for being called a “‘Jeopardy!’ villain,” Raut notes there was a woman in his first game who finished in the red, which meant she couldn’t play the final “Jeopardy!” round. Coming out of the studio, he could tell she was dispirited and needed someone to talk to, so he tried his best to encourage her.

“Before the ‘Tournament of Champions,’ she reached out to me to thank me for that,” Raut says. “I know who I am when the cameras aren’t around. If people want to label someone who behaves like that a villain, maybe that demonstrates they don’t understand the concept of villainy.”

Raut, 40, is a self-employed research psychologist, writer, blogger and podcaster, who hosts the trivia game show “Recreational Thinking.”

Raut took home $98,000 in his January 2023 appearance on the show, winning three of four games. For “ToC,” players receive set amounts for each stage they advance to in the tournament, with the winner earning $250,000.

In his late teens, Raut auditioned at least twice for the “Jeopardy!” college tournament and took the test annually after that. He eventually made his way onto the show where he found the biggest challenge was working the buzzer.

“The ‘Jeopardy!’ buzzer is different,” Raut says. “In most [quiz] competitions, the key is to be as fast as possible. ‘Jeopardy!’ is the only one where you have to finesse your timing. You can’t be too fast; you can’t be too slow. You can’t really replicate the ‘Jeopardy!’ buzzer anywhere.”

After a day of taping during his “ToC” stint on the show, Raut visited a friend for a Lunar New Year dinner and when he went to use chopsticks his hand seized up.

“I had to look at my friend and his wife and say, ‘I’ve been using a buzzer,’ ” Raut says, labeling the temporary injury “‘Jeopardy!’ sprain.”

Sibley’s path to “Jeopardy!” began in childhood in South Carolina where the show aired on two different TV stations, one at 7 and the other at 7:30 p.m.

“I’d watch at 7 and then pretend to be very smart at 7:30 because I’d already watched it,” Sibley recalls. He competed in quiz bowl in high school and auditioned for “Jeopardy!” in person in college.

“I’m quite certain I was dull as builder’s beige paint,” he says.

He picked up the “Jeopardy!”-watching habit again in the pandemic and his wife noted Sibley was pretty good at it. Sibley took the online test and later got invited for a second-round audition and landed in the show’s contestant pool. He was at a national church convention in July 2022 when he got the invitation to be on the show.

“I was actually talking with my bishop when I got a call from ‘Culver City Sony Pictures’ and I was in the awkward position of telling my bishop, ‘I can’t talk to you right now, I think this is an important call,’ ” Sibley, 38, says.

When Sibley went to tape his first appearance, it was again awkward because he couldn’t tell his Walla Walla congregation why he’d be absent on a Sunday.

“I had to tell folks I’d be away for a week,” he says, “and it was a bit unexpected and everything is fine, give it a few weeks and it’s all gonna make sense, I promise.”

In September 2022, Sibley played five games and won four, netting $78,000.

“The parish treasurer was really excited because I tithed my winnings, so that was a nice plus for the bottom line of the parish,” Sibley says.

Sibley says he was less nervous for “Tournament of Champions.”

“I had a great run already and I’d done really well,” he says. “Every other person who is in this tournament is just as good or better than me. We could play the same game out three times and come out with three different winners just because the knowledge base is so high, the game play skill is so high.”

Regarding his competitor’s reputation, Sibley says he was aware of the controversy around Raut’s statements, but he didn’t pay much attention to it.

“The reality of any person that appears on a national stage like both Yogesh and I have through ‘Jeopardy!’ is a lot of people say a lot of things and interpret a lot of things but it’s very different on the other side of the camera,” Sibley says.

“There’s a special bond that’s formed among people who have actually been on the stage and had their comments scrutinized to the nth degree and then people project their own selves into it. All I knew going in is Yogesh is an extremely gifted player, a very knowledgeable and talented player in the trivia world and that he deserved to be there because he played well and he is as knowledgeable as they come, so I was glad to be able to share a stage with him.”