How do Top Chef alumni fare on Tournament of Champions?

And is it as good as we think it will be?

Mar 06, 2025

As a Top Chef fan, I tend to think of the alumni as the best competition chefs in the business. It’s an endurance challenge on top of testing skills and creativity! I love it so much. Each season, though, is different and it can be hard to compare chefs across seasons - though I’ll be doing just that as the Top Chef season gets going this month!

Tournament of Champions offers an interesting opportunity to test my theory that Top Chef contestants are the cream of the crop. I did a simple analysis of this last year and this year, I wanted to go deeper than just the average score.

Top Chef alumni had higher total scores than non-alumni on average across the first five seasons of Tournament of Champions.

In Tournament of Champions, scores are out of a total 100 possible points, split across taste, presentation, and use of the randomizer (i.e., how strong their game play is). In the most recent seasons, taste is out of a possible 50 points, presentation is out of 10 points, and use of the randomizer is out of 40 points.

Dot chart. One dot for Top Chef Alumni (average total score of 84.5) and another for all other chefs (average total score of 82.6). Scores are out of 100

This held true even though Top Chef alumni had basically the same average seed as non-alumni:

Dot chart. One dot for Top Chef Alumni (average seed of 4.45) and another for all other chefs (average seed of 4.54). (Lower seeds are better)

Did Top Chef alumni win more than non-alumni? Nope.

I looked at the relationship between Top Chef alumni status and winning: Top Chef alumni won 50.8% of their battles and non-alumni won 49.3% of their battles. Then I thought, what about confounding factors? Even taking into account seasonal trends, seed, and round, the odds of a Top Chef alum winning was 1.01 compared to non-Top Chef alums, which is not at all meaningful. Additionally, Top Chef alum had the same average number of rounds they made it through past the Sweet 16 (1.7 rounds). (As a reminder, seasons 1 and 2 of Tournament of Champions didn’t have a Round of 32.)

So they didn’t win more - but it turns out that battles with Top Chef alumni had higher scores.

Holding constant season, seed, round, and winner status, total scores were higher for Top Chef alumni than non-alumni by about 2 points. And winners’ scores were higher by 3 points for Top Chef alumni than non-alumni when taking into account all those previously mentioned variables.

Looking at raw total scores (which are out of 100), there have only been three people who have scored a 94 or higher: Antonia Lofaso (Top Chef Seasons 4 and 8), Michael Voltaggio (Top Chef Season 6), and Brooke Williamson (Top Chef Seasons 10 and 14), who did it twice. There have been scores of 93 eight times, five of which were accomplished by Top Chef alumni.

Not only were Top Chef alumni’s scores higher, they won by a larger margin than non-alumni who won their battles.

Bar chart. One bar for the average winner's margin for Top Chef alumni (4) and for all other chefs (3.1)

The largest differential between a winner and a loser in these five seasons was a spread of 11 in Season 1. This happened twice, and both times, it was a Top Chef alumni vs. a non-alumni. In the quarter-finals of Season 1, two winners beat their opponent by 11 points:

Antonia Lofaso (Top Chef Seasons 4 and 8) beat Beau MacMillan 96 to 85
Brooke Williamson (Top Chef Seasons 10 and 14) beat Jet Tila 94 to 83

So what?

My interpretation of all of this is that Top Chef alumni bring up the level of competition in Tournament of Champions. But let’s be real… we knew that from the beginning. 😉 Only a week to go until Top Chef Season 22!!