Amy Schneider Credits Mom With 'Jeopardy!' Success As She Wins 30th Game

Jeopardy! champ Amy Schneider took time out to thank her mother on Tuesday night's episode of the show, as she rolled on to her 30th consecutive win.

The engineering manager, who is based in Oakland, California, boosted her ever-increasing cash prize total to $1,057,800 as she edged toward breaking yet another of the long-running quiz show's records.

And in a clip shared on the show's official Twitter account, host and all-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings revealed that Schneider wanted to thank somebody, before giving her the spotlight.

"I would like to thank my mom," said the Ohio native. "You know, I was thinking about what it is that contributed to me being here and my success here. And I was thinking about when she was helping me study for the Spelling Bee.

"We wouldn't just go over the words, but we talked about the etymology, and she said like, 'Isn't it interesting that stoic comes from this architecture term?'"

"That's, I think, why... I know so much stuff," she continued, "is that I always want to associate it with something and find interest in the fact and not just the fact itself."

"This is going to warm the heart of parents out there," said Jennings. "You're still making a difference decades later. It matters what you do."

In an interview with Newsweek shortly after her Jeopardy! debut, Schneider revealed that attending the University of Dayton was a "pretty easy choice to make" as her computer programmer father worked there, allowing her to get free tuition.

Knowing that her parents wouldn't want her to study such subjects as creative writing or theater, she initially majored in civil engineering before switching to computer science.

After growing up watching Jeopardy! with her family, Schneider applied to be a contestant on the show, though it would take more than a decade for her to realize her dream.

Explaining why she was initially unsuccessful in her pursuit of a spot on the show, she told Newsweek: "When you take the first online test, no matter how good you do it's a random chance whether they look at you to go any further. So that's part of it.

"The reality is that for the first few years of that, when I was trying out, I was, as far as any of us knew, a standard white guy. And there's just more competition for those slots on Jeopardy!

"They're making a TV show, they don't want everybody to look the same, and looked a lot like many of the other contestants, and I think that definitely made it a little tougher for me at that time. I would have got on eventually—I was never gonna stop trying!"

Schneider is the first transgender woman to qualify for the show's Tournament of Champions, and is the highest-earning woman with the longest win streak.

Overall, she is in fourth place of all-time contestants, behind Jennings (74 wins), Matt Amodio (38) and James Holzhauer (32).

Should she win all of her games this week, Schneider will overtake Holzhauer to move into third place—a goal she stated early in her run that she hopes to achieve.