Board Thread:Season 56 - Mongolia/@comment-5064044-20191228065214/@comment-43356541-20191228115642

Hi Kyle! I find it very entertaining when people make videos instead of just writing so thank you for that 😂 for the nice words ❤️ You asked a bunch of questions so sorry if my answer is kinda long lmao.

Q1: You said you wanted to stay loyal to your allies but voted Logan at F5.

Like I told Evan, my initial plan was to stay loyal to Logan until the end because a lot of people seemed pissed at him and I could’ve swayed their votes easily since we played a similar game, so it was about loyalty but it was also a strategic choice.

Even when I went to Megan or other people before F5 to plan a Logan vote, it was never a real plan and I only did it to get people’s trust and to also get the target off my back.

Me voting for Logan at F5 was something I did out of getting in my head for the anxiety of the endgame and the perception that the jury may have had of me.

Jerome is definitely right when he says the jury is ultimately the one that decides how the game ends, but I wouldn’t be able to explain my game to the jury and convince you guys I played the best game I could had I not felt that myself.

Q2: You and Logan hid behind idols.

You said a couple things during this questions but I do believe this was the focal point of it… correct me if I’m wrong 😂

So the first thing I want to address is that I knew about all of Logan’s idols besides the one he used at F5 (which was the one he found in pre-swap) because we would always idol hunt together after merge and we were willing to play idols for one another. Like when Megan told Logan the final number we needed, he came straight to tell me (but I messed up writing the combination like an idiot so Logan ended up getting it later).

I can definitely see how always using idols can be seen as an easy way to escape a vote-off, but it’s not as easy as it looks: Overall, this season was very crazy idols-wise (we had 2 tribals with 2 idols plays and 4 idols being given straight out of the gate) so I think we did a good job at using the idols correctly when, like you said, you guys could have easily changed the target to someone else and make us flush it.
 * 1) You need to find the idols
 * 2) None of us EVER won immunity, so we always had to be careful of our surroundings to see which one of us would be the target, it’s not like one of us was safe and the other would just play the idol blindly having a free ride to the next cycle
 * 3) Even when we didn’t have an idol, we had managed to create solid alliances (me/Logan/Jerome/Ty/Tal at F8 - me/Logan/Jerome at F6) that made sure we would stay in the game without any outside advantage
 * 4) When you have an idol, you want to play it. You want to make that great flashy move of correctly negating votes and sending someone out, so I feel like if you know people may be targeting you, you don’t go the extra mile to make them not target you, which is maybe what you’re getting at. I know this may be seen as cheap, but idol plays are impressive, they are a huge part of the game even if they’re not always loved by everyone, so I do believe this is a legitimate strategy to use.

Q3: Why should you win over Megan and Jerome?

I believe Megan and Jerome’s games were more likable than mine because they were more ‘underdogs’ and I was more in power. However, they made some fatal mistakes: Something that relates to both of them is that they lost major allies during the game and couldn’t organize a successful plan to avoid that (Megan with Ruth and Jerome with Bradley) whereas, aside from Logan at F4, I only lost my allies (like Ty) when I voted for them.
 * Megan was the reason why her allies were voted out. Had she not totally given away that I was the target in her TC answer at F9, I may have not played my idol for myself, so I would have been voted out instead of Jacob. She also needed immunity to save herself at F5, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and also we don’t know how things would have gone down, but I never needed it to get to this point.
 * The problem with Jerome’s gameplay is that yes, maybe he had his options open and always had a bunch of plans to choose from, but that meant he was never seen as a focal part of a move, which makes it difficult for him to claim it. One other reason why at times working with Jerome was a little frustrating (this is mostly a personal reason) was that he was often not online, which made me and other people not want to rely on him for something very important. I’ll make an example: at the F7 tribal, I wanted to tell Jerome about voting for Tal, but he just went offline 2 hours before TC and never came back, which was the reason why he was left out of the move. I know everyone has their own reasons not to be online, and you Kyle definitely had yours, but I just love to give my 100% in the things I do, and to me that meant staying up till 2am every day and going to college when I couldn’t use the wifi at home to check results, so I feel like the dedication and effort I put into this game is bigger than the one Jerome put.

In fact, in the merge votes before F5, I voted correctly 6/7 times, whereas Megan voted correctly 3/7 times and Jerome only 2/7 times.