Board Thread:Season 8 - Korea/@comment-4062486-20131031070805/@comment-11497002-20131101080312

Ben, you are said to be a quiet person, but you seem to have very interesting confessionals, even knowing about Secret Society before the Merge. You are also quite good in challenges. What can you say about your game as a whole, and what do you think you should've done more? Also, do you think that winning immunity once made you a target, or do you think you were already targeted before?

Coming into the game, my strategy was to remain fairly UTR. Samiah's outburst placed a huge target on people who had started playing aggressively so that also encouraged me to try to maintain a low profile. I guess my gameplay boiled down to not giving people a reason to vote me off. I was in a majority alliance on original and new Silla and while there remained people outside of that alliance to vote out, I saw no reason to deviate from my plan. I think my strategy to remain non-threatening worked well as people believed I was just following orders of the alliance figureheads. After reading confessionals; however, I realise that the drawback of that strategy is that had I made it to the final three, I may have had difficulty proving I was in control of my game and not just a follower. Winning individual immunity during the tribal stage was pretty cool but I don't think it really impacted my threat status. Once I reached merge, I was overwhelmed by the numbers of the 9-person alliance and there wasn't really anything I could have done about that. At least I drew first blood against the alliance by voting out Jake!

I think my downfall came down to naivety. I didn't realise people would be forming pre-game alliance as I think it goes against the true spirit of the game. I also didn't realise how much cross-tribal talking there would be. Never having played or watched a Survivor ORG before, I was basing my assumptions off the show where there really isn't any option for cross-tribal alliances. If I were to play again, I'd make more of an effort to form closer bonds with people and cement myself in the top few positions of an alliance because I think a lot of the game comes down to your connections with your fellow contestants.