“Survivor” alum Drew Basile returns in “Jeopardy'”s Tournament of Champions semifinals: 'I know you've missed me'

Drew Basile is ready to dominate Jeopardy again, this time on the Tournament of Champions.

"Basile is back!" he wrote on Instagram. "I’m in the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions semifinals this week. Check your local listings! I know you’ve missed me."

The Survivor 45 contestant crushed his Jeopardy debut with a seven-game winning streak in June 2024, earning a total of $129,601. While the 24-year-old master’s student ultimately didn't win his season of Survivor, he is the first alum from that show to compete on Jeopardy. His goal was to prove his onscreen declaration that he's "one of the smartest people to ever play" Survivor, and he more than accomplished that. And since he won five games in a row, he was eligible to return to compete in the Tournament of Champions.

Due to his earlier success, Basile also got to skip the first round of the ongoing all-star tournament along with Adriana Harmeyer and Isaac Hirsch, with all three players advancing straight into the semifinals. Basile's semifinals matchup will be against quarterfinals winners Drew Goins and Neilesh Vinjamuri. If he wins, he'll move on to the finals, where the first player to win three games will be crowned champion.

Related: Drew Basile reveals why he's not holding his breath for Survivor 50 invitation

"I had always thought that maybe I could do well at Jeopardy, because I'm good at history, I'm good at literature, in general I've been a great student," Basile previously told Entertainment Weekly. "I figured I had a decent chance. Trivia competing is something I love, and I really didn't have much expectation beyond that."

While he was eliminated in his eighth game, Basile "certainly" thinks his seven-game run proves that he is, indeed, one of the smartest people to have ever played Survivor despite getting blindsided before the final five.

Related: Survivor 45's Drew Basile unpacks his Jeopardy winning streak and why he lost

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"I mean, seven wins is nothing to sneeze at," he said. "I think that makes me the second-best performing contestant on this season, so that's really something. It was a great joy to read on Reddit and Twitter and social media people being like, 'Perhaps we were a little hasty on our dismissal of this wild claim.' So that was nice. I think that I was pretty good on Survivor. I think I was underestimated, but certainly Jeopardy was a match to the talents that I exemplified on Survivor."

And Basile already knew what he had to improve upon before competing in the Tournament of Champions. "I didn't really pay enough attention to the structure of Jeopardy clues, the grammar of Jeopardy, so Final Jeopardy was a weak point," he said. "Going back, I'm really going to spend a lot of time watching the show, paying attention to the way that those Final Jeopardy clues are structured. Pop culture is a weakness for me, so I'm going to tune into the new pop culture Jeopardy on Amazon, for sure."

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