Board Thread:Season 51 - The Caribbean/@comment-37911756-20190225200030/@comment-30289320-20190226002843

Hi Natalia! I definitely got your humour - you actually reminded me a lot of someone I went to high school with, and we'd CONSTANTLY roast each other. It's cool to hear that you did really like me because I felt like it was either on one end or the other LOL. It would have been kind of embarrassing if a theme of this season was Jake liking people who didn't really care for him that much, hahah. I mean, there's this whole thing about how people tend to seek friends who see them the way they see themselves, etc etc. It would be quite the arc.

I really liked what you said about getting information without giving much back in exchange, because I think that's key to a strong under the radar game. To have a lot of information while people think they're the only one or one of the only ones you're relying on. I think one of the cards I did play, though, was pretending to be more annoyed about some things than I really was. For example with Karsten, I thought it would be beneficial if I made sure everyone knew I would want him out, so they might keep me around as a vote against him further into the merge. In truth, for most of the merge I didn't really mind having Karsten in the game, and by the second half I began trying to keep him around. For example, throwing my vote on Andrea not just in case someone threw a vote or two on me (why I nullified Elmo's vote, who I'd heard said he thought I was being too sketchy to work with), but I also did this to protect Karsten in case someone threw a vote on him, and Elmo and Yousef had both played their idols.

Let's get to the questions.

'A- During the jury roundtable, it was brought up how you would leave people on read a lot and wouldn’t communicate with some people for days. I understand you deciding to put in the effort only with people you were working with but I think at some point you have to start thinking jury management and if you want votes at the end you need to build relationships with everyone. I’m your speech you mentioned you wanted to purposely downplay your social game but I don’t really buy this as a justifiable excuse. You could have made moves to make certain people not see you as a very social threat while STILL fostering close relationships.'

Yeah, I honestly hate the way Facebook tells people when you've seen a message. Like we discussed a while back, I will almost always check my Messenger app if I get a message even if I'm out or busy, because you never know when something is an emergency. But from the point of view of other people, I can definitely understand when you just see "Jake saw your shit" but get no reply for a few hours. The thing about me is that when I DO reply, I don't like to half ass a conversation. That just feels wrong to me. And no doubt all of my conversations haven't been great, but when someone wanted to speak to me I did put effort into the convo except for when I HAD to reply back when I was in those situations mentioned before, being busy or not home. It's also a pet peeve of mine when people give a bad reply, so when I see like a "lol yeah" I usually assume they don't want to talk anymore and dip LOL. It's a weakness of mine, but one I fully admit to. The timing of the merge itself was kind of crappy because the whole first half went on while I was working on my midterms. I'm not sure if everyone knows this, but I'm in my last year of working on my degree, and so when it comes to the game vs grades, some sacrifices were made at the expense of social game. This plus working on an ORG board for a friend, and doing some freelance work made it difficult to be as social as others this season.

The best thing I thought I could do was to kind of prioritize my free time to both get close with people I thought were key to keeping me alive despite the dynamics changing, and also if I could make people I planned on taking to the end think I was garbage socially in the process, why not? But I will say that downplaying my game or social game took form in a lot more ways than just not messaging someone. For example, I also wanted to make myself look like I get angry easily or get into fights often because I think that makes it look like you won't do well at all at FTC (though most fights with hosts were real, unfortunately). It's also a big thing to just be telling people straight up you don't talk to many people. I remember I would sometimes be asked if I talk to X often, and I'd look over at the conversation I had going with X and be like "Oh no, we haven't spoken in like a day" lool. I want to emphasize that I never thought of it as me only speaking to people that I'm working with, though. If someone came to me to chat, and I was able to, I'd give them as much as I could at the time. Doesn't matter who it is. The prioritization of my social game might be backfiring here, though, after seeing people bringing up my social game a lot, and honestly I get it completely. This was far from my best social game, but it's not because I simply chose not to put in a tonne of effort and went to play videogames instead or something. Real life is just a bitch in ORGs sometimes, especially when you're elderly like me.

I'll have some more to say on this in Karsten's thread, as well.

'B - In my opinion, you wasted your powers. You had two crazy powers that could have turned the game on its head if used properly and you decided to use them instead as a failsafe. You gotta do what’s right for you but I think you could have made some BIG moves with those advantages and if you had done that, I think you would have set yourself up to win undoubtedly at FTC. Please address this.'

Nah, I actually agree with you mostly on this. I'm kind of disappointed I didn't get to do anything crazy with my double vote and the Mask. Together they were essentially a Vote Stealer, where you take away someone's parchment and use it as your own. I was so ready to use them in some elaborate play, but the need to do so just never came up aside from as, yeah, extra insurance making sure I would stay alive in case of double idol plays, or that one of my allies or crucial FTC people could stay alive. With the Double Vote, I played it for more than just making sure to lock in Ethan's trust, but also to make sure the votes from our chat would stay strong even if one of them started saying they were using a vote stealer or something (which seemed likely as a Yin and Yang thing to my Double Vote auction item). I had been thinking of using the Mask in some way during the Elmo vote, both before and after my initial plan went to shit. The thing about this, however, is that it would mostly need to be done in a way where people involved don't really start seeing me as a jury threat. Like mentioned before, so much of my game hung on people like Su or Karsten thinking I wasn't doing too much, because if they started to see that I tricked everyone into thinking Katie had taken the mask, or that Hunter left with it, or whatever else then it not only hurts my chance of them wanting me at the end, but it also increases the chance of someone trying to throw the game for Ethan or Yousef if they think they won't win against anyone. I wanted to be that person people like Andrea or Su thought they'd win against.

I'm still lowkey annoyed I didn't do anything crazy with them, but there truly just never was a need to. If I were in serious danger or one of the people crucial to my endgame, of course I'd pull them out and get to work. But I was never of the mindset that I'd rely on them over my normal social/strategic game, and I think that while it's like blueballs to have them and not need them, it was my own game and of course some luck that led to them being unnecessary. It seems that the biggest thorn in my side as far as the game goes is Ethan being here, and my powers wouldn't have made much of a difference in that unless I targeted him before he went on his immunity streak, but I had no idea he was THAT good at challenges. I think the only better way I could have used them realistically would be to make it to the end without ever having used them at all, but would anyone believe me if I just went like "Oh yeah, and I also had a double vote and that Mask everyone was paranoid about, pls take my word for it lol"

'C - Your opening speech style was my personal favourite. I would like to hear more from you though about how you outwit and outplayed your opponents.'

Thank you for the compliment! Look at me knowing how to take positive statements from you - how far we've come.

I think the whole Elmo Idol bluff stuff is just beating a dead horse already at this point, so I'll mention that for this question but move on to focus on other parts of the game instead for your thread. I also don't want to go on forever here and leave myself repeating everything in each thread, so we'll narrow down a bit to a few specific things if that's cool.

First, I've got to say that I don't fully understand the difference between Outwit and Outplay. Even when they do that in the new Final Tribal Councils on the show I have no idea what they're talking about LOL - they seem to be the same thing. The show doesn't even seem to know. I will say that to Outwit/Outplay, in my mind, does not mean pulling off huge moves. It doesn't matter how much you've outwitted or outplayed unless you outlasted also. This is essentially the theme of my game. The way I outwitted or outplayed people generally took place over many rounds. For example to mention something briefly mentioned before, making sure Yousef wouldn't come after me when I was probably the most vulnerable I've been all game. At Final 6, I made sure Yousef knew that I was somebody considering keeping him around at 5, and that even if Ethan won immunity at 5, it would be difficult to keep Yousef but I would be open to it because if I were going to lose, I would want it to be against Yousef instead of Ethan. I also told Ethan that if I were to lose, I would want it to be against him LOL. In truth, I was FULLY committed to voting whichever lost immunity at 5, but I wanted to make sure that I did anything and everything to even make it there with a shot to still win. Telling them both this, to my knowledge, helped a lot in making sure I could even get here. Yousef may not have fully believed it, but if the options are Su vs Me vs Karsten, it means he at least some chance of getting me to vote with him at 5, and thus I'm necessary to keep. I guess it can be seen as kind of dirty, but I didn't come here to be the hero of the season. I never begged either of them to play their idols for me. Either my strategy would keep my ass in the game or it wouldn't.

Another Outwit/Outplay situation was during the Elmo vote. I know you consider the power wasted this round, but I want you to consider what would have happened if Elmo had the merge idol and played it here, or if someone like Yousef who had an extra idol played one for Elmo. The vote would have been 1-1, between my Andrea vote and Karsten's Yousef vote. The original plan that round was to vote Yousef with 4, and as everyone started swapping their votes around last minute I encouraged Karsten to stay with that. If Elmo was idoled himself, it probably would have been Yousef going. If Yousef was working with Elmo last minute and idoled him, it's likely they vote together, and so that's why I chose to use the Mask on Elmo. It doesn't just take away a vote initially, but it works through a tiebreaker as well. In this way if they worked together AND Elmo was idoled by Yousef or himself, the vote would have still tied between Yousef, Andrea, and whoever Yousef would have voted for - and the numbers would likely have been good to still vote Yousef out, or Andrea out if Yousef also idoled. Ultimately nothing was played on Elmo, but I think it was kind of a mistake for people like Ethan and Yousef to take him out there and an idol probably should have been played for him (leaves another big threat in the game to use as a shield in the endgame). Of course it would have backfired anyway because of my plan, but this is just meant to show how I was trying hard to think of all possibilities and prepare for them.

Another way I'd like to mention was back when I took the Mask. I knew we were going to lose, and decided to put myself to offline on FB, and watch the messages go by in the sidebar so it wouldn't show I was following along. I sat there for like 20 minutes waiting so people would see I wasn't around, and as soon as I saw someone new appear, I waited another minute or so and went for the mask. I saw the tribe explode with people talking about the mask being taken, and then shortly after Liam (I think) took the double vote. I chose to leave this item because I felt that if I could last long enough for someone to be targeted and need to use the double vote to save themselves, they would then be accused of also having the Mask and be targeted harder because of it. The Mask also nullifies both votes if a double vote is used, so I figured it was a good choice. Throughout the season I think I was on the bottom of most lists of who people suspected of having the Mask the most, and it became kind of a meme to me when people would come to me worried about it, lol. It was actually interesting as well, because due to Liam not playing the Double Vote, I felt that if I lasted long enough to play the Mask one round before the Idol Deadline, it could potentially help me if people start thinking I had another Double Vote in my pocket as well or that the other Double Vote was the one I took, and I had some other power nobody knew about lol. I wonder if people did end up thinking about that.

There'll be a lot more Outwit/Outplay stuff as the questioning goes on, such as the rivalry with Karsten thing I mentioned at the start of this post. I'm just trying to save some stuff for other threads to not be repeating myself 9 times lol. But thank you a lot for the questions and the statement! I thought your view was pretty fair, it's hard to see value in powers played that didn't end up having some huge dramatic ramifications. I'm again a bit disappointed they didn't really end up needing to be used for anything huge, but I hope you can see that there's still value in what I did use them for, and also value in having done enough to not need them for anything but ~insurance~. It would have been quite a flashy move if said insurance got Yousef voted out after idoling Elmo, and I definitely could have played it off as an accident as I planned to, but c'est la vie. One of the biggest problems with setting your game up well is that it ends up looking like your path was too easy. And again, my ideal path wasn't sitting next to Ethan, but hey - maybe this is where I prove myself. Can I still play my Mask on the first juror to call me a dick?