Board Thread:Season 51 - The Caribbean/@comment-30289320-20190225181832

 (Sorry this is a couple minutes late, Wikia deleted the whole thing when I went to post lol)

 Hi all! Before I get into the bulk of my opening statement, I wanted to say a quick thank you to the hosts for taking time out of their days to run this game for us and dealing with my sass all season, lol. I would also like to thank the players for keeping things interesting. Outside of a few votes, I felt that many were pretty dynamic and fun, and honestly that’s the main thing I play for, even if it’s me going out in the last-minute chaos. Win or lose, I’ve had a time this season and I’m glad to have had a chance to meet some more people in this community.

Now we’ll get into it.

Let me start off by explaining some points I feel are the most important to get across early before people burn out and start skimming, lol.

ON CONTROL AND DOMINANCE

 First, I know my visibility hasn’t been as high as a Hunter, an Elmo, a Yousef, or even an Ethan. I can freely admit that I did not play a controlling, aggressive game this season. Instead, I want to talk about how I had control over MY OWN game, and I would argue to a much greater extent than Ethan or Andrea. I’ll explain this further, but to set the framework I first need to say that I always meant to play this way. From very early on in the merge it became obvious to me that the only way I’d be able to make it to the end with a chance to win would be to position myself squarely in the middle of both the larger threats, and the smaller threats. I was constantly working each round to make sure people like Yousef and Ethan liked me enough or had some logical reason to keep me around vs others. In the same way, I would go to the smaller threats like Karsten, Su, and Andrea and make sure they felt that they needed me at the end with them. In some cases I would make sure to downgrade my social game on purpose so they’d assume I wasn’t talking much to anyone whatsoever. While this is dangerous if they end up on the jury, I always figured two would be at the end with me. It didn’t work out in the most ideal way, ultimately, but I hope y’all can see what I was trying to do there making sure all angles were covered. An example of this paying off is during the Final 6 round where I was only one of two people available to be voted for after all the idols were played. It would have been easy for Yousef to idol my ass out of the game there, but I’d thought about this and got to work on preventing that a day or so before it would have become an issue. I was confident enough in this that I told Ethan to idol Andrea instead of me.

BUT WHY JAKE?

 So, I planned ahead and made sure I could still make it to the end even if literally everything went to shit. But let’s address the elephant in the room – I’m not sitting here against Karsten and Andrea, as was the plan. I’m sitting here against Ethan and Andrea. I definitely expect to have my work cut out for me because Ethan was almost my polar opposite. He was highly visible, won a metric shit tonne of challenges, snatched an idol, and was an all-around nice dude whereas I feel like my personality can be sort of messy. These differences in the way we play the game will ultimately, I believe, decide the outcome of this final tribal council because it will depend on each juror’s preference of what they respect more from a player. Ethan had an idol and destroyed challenges, but this also means Ethan had to rely on said idol and challenges to make it here. I had powers as well serving as an ace up my sleeve if things got really bad, but I never really needed to use them as anything more than a little extra insurance in case of a double idol play, or to just build a lot of loyalty with an ally.

I’m not saying Ethan’s streak isn’t impressive or a valid way to play the game, but what I am saying is that the way I got myself to the end was so different from the way he got himself here. I survived the Bradley vote, Idol-Geddon, made sure I was part of every big move this season even if I had to force myself in, and found myself in the endgame over other smaller threats such as Su because I was constantly working hard every round both socially and strategically to put myself in the best position I thought that I could with the cards I had. I never once had to rely on an immunity or idol, and I feel that I was still able to build a solid under the radar resume despite that.

A big theme of my game was keeping my low visibility status for as long as I possibly could. Right before the Bradley vote drama happened, I had a working relationship or alliance with literally every person on the tribe aside from Karsten, and I was constantly trying to keep my closeness to other people from others I was aligned with. In the same way, I would always downplay my game despite being part of or having direct influence in every big move that happened at merge. For example, coming up with the plan to cause Elmo to burn his idol during the Natalia vote.

ALL IN ALL

 Circling back to the idea of having control over your own game versus the game, I do feel that I had the most control over my own fate in this game in comparison to my opponents. If Ethan didn’t have that idol, or if he lost any of the final two immunity challenges, he would have been gone. Ethan did not have much control over his own game outside of maybe knowing that he had a better shot to win the challenges than most people. Andrea, and my perception could be warped here, but I feel that many of the smaller targets including myself felt that we could beat her legitimately and were more worried about each other, instead of just being tricked into thinking that. While she still participated in moves, to my knowledge she never had a direct hand in any of them. As far as controlling the game itself goes, I don’t think anyone one person really had control over the game, it would be kind of an embellishment to say so. At some points players like Yousef or Elmo or Natalia might have been in the best positions of power, but the game played out in such a way where those in power tended not to be for very long.

I wanted to keep this opening statement more general vs a 10,000 word round by round summary because, well, let’s be honest…nobody reads those novels outside of skimming LOL. I’m not out here trying to assign textbook readings. But I do want to say that if there’s anything at all you want clarification on, more details, whether or not it was in my opening statement – please ask! I’m really eager to discuss the highs and lows of my game with y’all. Once again, I do realize this may be an uphill battle for me since high vis usually slaps low vis at the end, but sometimes you don’t get to pick your battles. And I don’t plan on backing down from this one.

Even if you don’t plan on voting for me, I would really appreciate the opportunity to answer questions and go more in-depth about my game this season. Honestly, whether Ethan, myself, or Andrea wins here I’m just happy to take part in my first Final Tribal Council in this community and take in the experience. It’s a nice cap off to the season. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this far!

To my fellow finalists, Ethan and Andrea; best of luck! Let’s make this a good one.  