More than six years after winning a Danger! Teen tournament in dramatic fashion, contestant Sharath Narayan picked up another victory in a clutch game show on Thursday The hunt on ABC.
The hunt features three contestants facing off against a designated hunter whose goal is to eliminate the challengers by answering the most questions as quickly as possible, which often happens. This time around, however, Narayan and one of his teammates made it to the end where they managed to outsmart fighter Brad Rutter to win $110,000 in prize money.
But more on that in a minute, because it should be noted that Narayan, at the time of this recording, was a student on a full scholarship at Vanderbilt University where he was about to earn a degree in biology and plans to earn his doctorate to become a biology teacher.
And it’s clear that the smarts have been there for quite some time as Narayan also won the 2016 Danger! Teen Tournament, hosted by Alex Trebek. And he did it, in part, by studying the betting strategy leading up to the event, then placing a winning bet at the end of two games that would see him beat competitor Alec Fischthal by a mere $1. – and win $100,000 for the win. You can see how the moment unfolded below.
Of course, there was one person on Thursday who wasn’t too impressed with Narayan’s resume: hunter Rutter. After Narayan spoke about his Danger! win, Rutter mockingly responded, saying, “Teen Tournament? Oh !”
Rutter earned the most money in The hunt story and denied contestants more than $1.2 million, so if anyone has room to scoff, it’s him. Also, it’s his job to put players down, which he continued to do with young Narayan, throwing lines like “I have older connections than you.”
Not that they landed with any effect. Narayan was impressive in both his knowledge and his ability to guess the correct answer in multiple-choice questions. In the final pursuit, he and his teammate answered 18 questions correctly, with Narayan getting most of them right.
They eventually fended off Rutter’s latest takedown attempt using pushbacks in which contestants are given the opportunity to correctly answer questions the fighters got wrong. And ironically, given Rutter’s criticisms of Narayan’s youth, his missed pushback questions involved younger pop culture topics like the bacheloretteVenmo and Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s music group, Silk Sonic.
In the end, the youth prevailed and Narayan was humble in victory, just as he was after winning the Danger! Teen Tournament in 2016, and he received praise not only from Rutter, but also from other fighters on the show watching on monitors.
Narayan has also received a lot of love from viewers on Twitter, including one user who pointed out that the future biology teacher may well have a future in game shows.
The hunt airs Thursdays on ABC.