Board Thread:Season 51 - The Caribbean/@comment-35624472-20190225211204/@comment-30289320-20190226211756

Okay, I've slept.

What was one bit of good/bad luck you had this game, and how did you recover from that?

This one is an easy answer for me, the biggest good luck moment of this game was choosing to try really hard to connect with Andrea and Natalia. I just felt that I needed to step my social game up at that point having come out of nearly being discluded from the Hunter vote. But this answer is not about me being left out of the loop. Later this same round we had the Bradley drama blindside my ass last minute, and the vote switched over to me. If I had waited one more round to try stepping my social game up, I don't know if I'd have made it through this round. To stay, I needed Andrea and Natalia's votes, and I ended up having them. The timing was incredibly lucky, and with one hour left I don't know what I'd have done if they were like "Nah you're leaving, bye bitch"

A bad luck moment was, yeah, Ethan winning those last two immunities. All of you, me, and Yousef tried hard over these last two rounds. The song challenge was kind of bullshitty because there were two songs on there where you could only get them if you knew them. I was recording the samples, changing their pitch, speed, tempo, and checking the altered samples through Midomi for hours. Nothing. I don't really listen to pop music, so yeah, that was kind of unlucky. Don't really like luck stuff at Final 5. Then at FIC, I feel like you and I tried hard. We even coordinated our scores, but nope, we lost again. Bad luck on those flag scores, Matt. I think I was able to recover by first seeing you leave instead of me - I'd been putting those seeds out for a bit now to Andrea that our best shot would be against each other, and with Ethan we kept talking about how you were an underdog, and if the jury was bitter an underdog on the outside of the Penguins alliance would scoop up the votes. You left, and my second recovery was trying to have a strong FTC. I don't know if the recovery will get me the win - it sounds like this could really go either way - but I think I've come in harder than some people expected and Ethan hasn't really been able to criticize my game all that much outside of "he played UTR" or "He didn't win FIC". Leading me into the next question.

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Why should the others not win?

ETHAN shouldn't win for a couple reasons. There's already been a lot of talk about the positives and negatives of winning out. Winning immunities like that is impressive, but it robs you of the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of your social and strategic games. If you take away the immunity wins, Ethan essentially did next to nothing past Final 6. And even at 6, all he did was play an idol on Andrea, who received 0 votes. I think in Survivor you need to have that round where you either step up or shut up. For me I had this round the most at 6 when I was only one of 2 people not immune, and I was confident enough with that not to beg anyone to idol me. And again during the Bradley vote. And if you want to go back, again during that first round where you and Liam were going to take me out pre-merge. Ethan does not have a round like this where he was in a hole and worked his way out of it because he just kept winning immunities. I got 7 votes this season, and every one of them was meant to get my ass out of here, but here I am. I think I've proved the effectiveness of my game multiple times. But another reason about Ethan is that he keeps trying to take credit for things that weren't just him (including my own moves lool). Ethan keeps writing that "every vote was the person he preferred besides Hunter", but is that necessarily impressive? Every vote was someone I wanted, too, except for Ethan. Every vote was someone Andrea wanted, except for Yousef. And if Ethan had as much power over who left as he claims, it's not the best look to still have put himself in a position where he needed to win out. Maybe he really just was super confident in his skillz, but to me winning out, while a valid way to win, is one of the least impressive ways to win. If Ethan had a strong social game, an idol, and as much strategic power and control as he claims, he could have played a much more impressive game that didn't need to rely exclusively on challenges. But he didn't. I know it's Final Tribal Council and you conventionally want to claim you had as much power as possible, but when you look past the fluff Ethan is writing it really boils down to "I thought I could win challenges, I voted out the best challenge people, I would have left if I fucked up any of those final challenges, but I won out so here I am". And the thing about this is that he keeps speaking like it all worked and he's already won, but we don't know if that's the case. He seems to be having a much harder time against me than he expected, so there's a chance he nailed the execution, broke his leg on the landing. Probably should have taken Su instead. If I was going to be at the end with a fair shot regardless of who won the FIC, I don't think Ethan being here is much of a strong criticism against my game. My personal opinion on it.

Andrea...not nearly as much needs to be said about Andrea. She wanted to lose to Yousef and tried actively throwing the game for him. If she didn't want to win then, she shouldn't win now. Andrea was essentially what I was pretending to be to you, Su, and herself -- someone who has done 0 things to deserve to win. That sounds really harsh, but it is what it is.

Which juror is the biggest reason you reached FTC?

The juror who had the largest impact in me making it here was Yousef. Right from Chang 3 I knew Yousef was going to be playing really hard this season, and I could tell he wanted to do well. Like, really wanted to do well. What I saw in Yousef was the opportunity to sway others through him. When you can't put in a lot of time early merge due to work, school, whatever, it pays off a lot to have an ally that is talking to everyone. For you that may have been Elmo for a while. For me this was Yousef. While I know Yousef was also dangerous because he'd throw me under the bus at times, he was the type of player I felt like I could "control" easier because I understood his goals and motivations. Let me be clear and say that I never controlled the game through Yousef or controlled Yousef, but through Yousef I enhanced the control over my own game.

This would go two ways, the first is that Yousef might tell me if a secret plan was happening against me. Ex, when Natalia was saying it may be a good idea to take me out. But also when Yousef would throw me under the bus, often he didn't know who I was or was not connected to, and so I would be able to tell who I could trust and who I couldn't by who ratted Yousef out. For example, when Yousef was pushing for me to leave at 5, Ethan told me, Andrea did not. To me this confirmed what I suspected about Andrea potentially throwing the game. There were other times this worked as well, both ways. While Yousef would throw me under the bus, I felt that I could control him insofar that he wouldn't actually try to pull the trigger on me until it was too late (5 or 4). This was shown during the Final 6 when he chose not to idol me out. As he left we both saw him say he considered it and that he should have done it. But he thought I was going to be pulling an Andrea if Ethan won immunity, so I got through 6, Ethan won immunity, and I told Yousef straight up I was taking him out.

In this game Yousef was an invaluable source of information for me, both on purpose and accidentally. If I didn't have him around it would have been harder to tell the true dynamics of the game as they changed round by round, and especially who I should be trusting and who I shouldn't be.

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Thanks for the questions, Karsten! I wish we could have worked together more in this game. I always really liked and understood your frustration about nobody caring about taking idols out, and the larger frustrations regarding the game and challenges. That early Liam vote just crippled the chance of it for the longest time, but I do think we benefited from our "rivalry" people knew about, and I'm glad we were able to finally work together near the end. It didn't work out, but it was nice to know there was someone else the hosts didn't like LOL.