Board Thread:Season 51 - The Caribbean/@comment-34920529-20190225191710/@comment-30289320-20190225204200

Hi Edgelord Neda! First, I want to thank your for kind, fair statement. I was honestly half expecting you to come in here roasting me over voting you out and then still losing to Ethan at FIC, but I hope you knew at the time or do now that you probably would have kicked my ass at the end harder than Ethan could. Whereas I have some arguments against Ethan, I would have very little to critique about your game if you made it to the end with me.

I definitely hear you about that we didn't speak a crazy amount. You're right that I'm not really the type of player who needs a lot of reassurance, but I also have struggled with social anxiety for over a decade now, and even though it's gotten a lot better in recent years I do still find it difficult to initiate the conversations sometimes or do small talk. It's a me problem. I do think that my social game had its highs, though. At every swap I ended up with literally all of my alllies on a different tribe. Three times pre-merge I was alone but managed to put myself near the top of the tribes connection-wise. You said it yourself way back when that despite starting on different tribes, I was your favourite on Chang 3.0. And you were one of my favourite conversationalists in this game.

I think the above can be used to start to answer your first question though, "What would you have done if I didn’t tell you about the vote? Bradley and Elmo had plans to not tell you about it, so what would your plan of action be if everyone lied to you?". For this question, I imagine we're assuming that nobody else would tell me. It's actually hard for me to know if someone else would - people like Su came to me and said things along the lines of "Yay someone told you" or "Oh I was going to tell you this morning" etc etc. Before you told me that night, I knew there was hooliganism in there air. Something was not right about the vote and the way people were talking game to me. This is why I started asking around harder about the vote. Of course you were the one to tell me, and I think there's something to be said about the way I didn't get mad then about being left out of the vote, but instead found a way to force myself to be included in it, and have people trust me enough not to tell Hunter to idol if he had anything, or tell Ethan. If I were left out of the vote, I would have done much of the same. I would have asked around to figure out why I was not included in on the vote, and it wouldn't be long before Ethan and I connected the dots still on why we were the only two left out of the vote and not Bradley. I think I would have ended up playing a little more aggressively which may have hurt me down the road, but I think I still would have played things calmly like I did in those pre-merge rounds where I was basically alone, and just worked on gathering information and figuring out how to put myself into a strong position again after being left out of the vote. It's likely things wouldn't have changed, aside from me being in the minority that vote alongside Ethan and feeling a little more suspicious of you.

"Do you think you should’ve done stuff differently F8 when Natalia left?" First, thank you for acknowledging the Elmo Idol plan. With the way both other finalists so weirdly left me out of that section of their opening statements but praised the plan itself, you'd think I had nothing to do with it! Rude. I'm so glad you asked this question though, because I really wanted to expand on this round.

At one part of this round I expressed to Elmo that it's likely there were at least one duo across the two sides of the tribe trying to control both. I joked with him that a way to figure out who is to just throw out random names and see which gets the strongest "NO WE CANNOT TARGET X EVER HOW DARE YOU" response. I then took my own advice and did this exact strategy on Natalia LOL. When I mentioned potentially targeting Elmo to get rid of his potential idol, she seemed to be immediately against it. I also don't know if this was just coincidence, but Elmo's tone in our conversation changed shortly after I told Natalia I wanted to vote Elmo. This led me to believe Elmo and Natalia were tight and working together. I still wanted to vote Elmo over Natalia, but this option just wasn't on the table without it being very likely to leak and get someone I didn't want gone to be idoled out. An option I did see, however, was to use one of the newer alliances I was included in (Grasshopper Gang) to at least flush Elmo's idol while splitting their potential partnership up. This not only takes Elmo's idol out of the picture, but makes it so that I could potentially work with Elmo moving forward if need be.

The next round, Elmo didn't seem to trust me when I wanted to work with him, Karsten, and Su to make up a new majority at 7. Fair enough. My plan B then was get enough votes against you that you'd either leave with an idol, play your idol and Elmo would leave, or you both would play your idols and Andrea would leave, who didn't speak to me much and I suspected of being too close with you. Leaving me a very solid path to to the end with Karsten and Su. This plan fell through last minute as everyone just started throwing all of their votes on Elmo, but I think it shows how much I was considering the game and its dynamics. Reading Andrea's statement, I was really glad to see my caution was warranted, especially in her literally writing that she was actively trying to go to the end with you despite knowing she'd lose.

As far as Ethan goes, in hindsight it would have been great to vote for him there, but I honestly had no idea he was as good at challenges as he was. I discussed this with Karsten a bit, and I think as someone who isn't super connected or active in the community I played the game the best I could with my limited knowledge. If I'd known Ethan was a monster at challenges in past seasons I would have definitely not let him get so close to the end. I'm surprised nobody else brought it up for the longest time.

"What made you play a lowkey game compared to others, and did you think while doing it it would win you the game at the end when the jury had to vote?" For the first half of your final question, I think playing a lowkey game was super necessary for me because by merge we knew three idols were floating around, there'd be another hidden for the merge tribe, and the auction could have literally anything in it, and I left that shit with 2/3 useless items LOL. If I played more aggressively, there's such a high chance of me either leaving in a blindside like Natalia was, or just straight up idoled out of the game. When 7/6 comes around, you do not want to be the guy who seems like he can win but is also pretty likely to not have an idol.

I think an under the radar game can sometimes...go under the radar at the end, but if you put in the time and jurors are willing to listen to you, I think it's about as good as any other type of game short someone like a Tony Vlachos who has huge visibility makes it to the end despite being available to leave in the endgame. A risk I took is keeping what I was doing very under wraps. A big part of the jury is in talking over moves X person made, and when you keep your game out of view there isn't that element of days of talking about X did this or that leading up to the final vote. I planned to be here against other lower visibility people, but I still think I have some arguments up my sleeve to make this FTC competitive. Keeping things under wraps can also be an advantage, for example Ethan talking a lot about the Idol Fake Out plan and forgetting who actually told him to go do that, lol.

Thank you so much for the questions, Yousef! I can understand if you want to vote Ethan or Andrea over me, but all I ask is that you consider what I have to say at this final tribal council and keep an open mind. Hope we can stay in touch after this is all over :)