Board Thread:Season 3 - Cuba/@comment-4190137-20130423064154

Hello Jastine, Yaniv, Jeremy, Taylor, Max, Brian, Zac and Noah.

First of all I'd like to thank you guys for producing a great start to the season, although I must agree, the end was mainly one-way traffic and could be perceived as 'boring'.

But do we play Survivor with our eyes set on making the game entertaining? Definitely not, the game is about trying to get to the end and win.

From the start I made it clear to myself that I wanted to take Zachary with me to the end, regardless of whether if it was a final 2 or 3. There were a number of reasons but it's obvious that it's mainly because I feel my game-play would probably not be respected by the jury unless it was compared to someone who would take the game with a coat-tail riding approach, that being Zachary. Another reason was because I could trust him and that I would control his vote at all times.

At the start of the game, I knew I needed to take out the big fish in the small pond in-order to take control, it was either going to be Sole, Yaniv, Cesar or DB. I also had the idol in my possession as I solved the clue that was released not so long after the game started. With the idol I felt I was confident enough to make a very big and bold move, by aligning with the outsiders (Noah, Brian, Zachary) to take out Sole. However I knew 5 wouldn't be enough to take him out, so I sabotaged the rest of the votes by making them split the vote between Kait and Zachary. We then were successful and Sole was successfully eliminated.

Meanwhile, on the other tribe I was in a cross-tribal alliance with Zac, so I needed to stir up heaps of conflict there in order to take his head off the chopping block at least until the merge.

Secondly, I was planning on taking out Yaniv however I was led to believe that he was (temporarily) at my mercy, so I decided to keep him and opt to keep the tribe strong by voting out probably the most inactive person in the history of the game, Kait. But when I saw that Zachary received a vote, I knew that someone was ready to flip. At the time I thought it was DB, though it now turns out it was actually Cesar.

Thirdly, I then had my eyes feasted on DB. Five reasons, 1) (like I said earlier) I thought he had voted for Zachary at Kait's boot, he was very poor at challenges with lazy efforts, I knew from Season 2 that he was wishy-washy and too unpredictable to trust, he was taking with the other tribe (Luke had told me about how annoying he was which implied that they were working together) and lastly, I knew he was very close with my other allies Brian and Adam and I thought that they'd choose him over me going down the track. So DB was then voted off unanimously.

Afterwards, the tribes switched! But I had to make sure I was the 'Most Valuable Player'. So I told everyone to vote for me first, and they did. I then chose whom I thought were the three biggest threats in the other tribe: Jastine, Duy and Kesh. But the original Cardenas had plans of dispatching as many Havanas as we could, so we all agreed on throwing the challenges and voting Jastine, Duy and Kesh out.

First it was Kesh, then it was Duy, which left Jastine. I knew there could be an idol in our midst with that disputable rule change. I assumed after when Luke confirmed to me that Jeremy had the idol, that Jeremy indeed had the idol and hoped on giving it to Jastine to take me out. So I had a plan in store. I convinced Jastine that he was not being voted out so he'd keep his idol and vote for my second preference of boot, Adam. He would have kept his idol and have been voted out if Ian hadn't have signified to him that he would be voted off if he didn't play his idol, so at the last minute, he decided to keep it and save himself. But this wasn't too concerning for me, Adam went out who I assumed was secretly working against me. At the following Tribal Council, Jastine went out like he should have in the previous one.

Then came the merge, I knew my main alliance wouldn't have been enough to take out the newly formed JCTY alliance. So we used fear of the alliance being in existence to draw Max to us, so Max flipped with us and voted out Yaniv 6-4.

After this I knew that my work isn't over yet, keeping the alliance together would be almost as hard as putting it together in the first place. Max and Brian were on the verge of flipping, but they ended up voting for Jeremy instead of Zac - if I hadn't have won immunity it might have been a different case.

Once Jeremy was gone, we were at the Final 8. With Taylor and Cesar left to vote out. Then came the confounding challenge which definitely shook up our alliance of six once and for all. So at Tribal Council, I knew that four wouldn't be enough to take out Cesar, and I truthfully didn't want to play my idol, so I knew my only option was to confuse the enemies into accidentally voting for two different people, which worked out very well and Cesar went home without my idol leaving my pocket.

Then one by one, the people who voted against the alliance at Cesar's boot went home: Taylor, Max and Brian.

This left us with a final 4! I decided to then take out Zac; 1) He was the only original Havana left, 2) He was a jury vote threat, and 3, he was the only one who could have beaten me at the challenge. So that left me no choice but to vote out my friend Zac.

At the final 3 I knew making the end wouldn't be so hard. I won the immunity challenge and voted out Noah.

That's my story in the game. ~

Anyhow, I think controlling how you decide to determine your vote is out of my power, but I'd definitely like to tell you why I think I deserve your vote more than Zachary.

I played more of a controlling game, it might have been aggressive, however whether if it's aggressive or not, control is control and I feel I was in control from the start.

I won 6 out of 8 individual immunity challenges, that surely proves I outplayed in that aspect, and since I was in control almost 100% of the time, that would definitely prove that I outwitted, and I definitely outlasted as I survived all 39 days.

If you want to get angry at me for beating you, fine, I guess you could do that. But if you want to get angry at me for anything I've done during the game, feel free to do so, I'm not stopping you.

But at the end of the day, if you think about it logically, you'd know who deserves your jury vote. Thank you. 