Board Thread:Season 50 - Kingdoms Collide/@comment-25624731-20181221230157

Hello everyone, I’d like to say thanks for making my last online game a spectacular one. It was truly refreshing to be in a cast of people who respect strategy and don’t take things too personally. This was my favourite season of the ORG I have played!

Since I love movies, and this season was quite iconic for women, I figured I’d have my speech include some references to my favourite silver screen heroines :~)

Starting out, I was at a disadvantage. Like Tracy in Hairspray, I had very few friends, everyone thought I was kind of weird (I mean, I was on the fools tribe), and it felt like the popular kids were all together with no room for me to move into their group. It’s no secret that we had some ORG legends in this cast and I felt out of place. It wasn’t that I didn’t know people myself, I recognized a handful of people from games I’d played years ago, but I didn’t know everyone’s backstories, who was friends with who, how everyone played. Like Tracy, I knew I had the potential to work my way in and shine, and I figured the best thing was for me to stand out as someone who wanted to be everyone’s friend. My strategy was focused on one core goal: always be an option. The most valuable thing you can have in this game isn’t immunity and it isn’t advantages: it’s friends. To me, it didn’t matter if I never found an idol or won immunity, because if I made the right alliances, no one would vote for me anyways. People will always fight to keep you around if they think they can work with you and I wanted it to be known that no matter what, I was down to talk about the game with anybody. My hope was that this openness, this potential, would cause others to protect me if my name came up. Considering I only ever had 2 votes against myself and 0 advantages or immunity wins to stop people from voting for me, I think it’s fair to say I was successful in this regard. I never wanted to lock myself into just one alliance because that meant I would be totally relying on one person/one group in order to get to the end.

Once we hit merge, my strategy morphed. I was on a tribe with a lot of people who said they were interested in working together, but there was a lot of uneasiness as to who could be trusted. Navigating the copious amount of existing friendships, reputations, and alliances was tough, and I did not want to stick out as a strategic mastermind who was well connected. I wanted to downplay what relationships I had as best as I could. So I played dumb in order to be underestimated -- not unlike Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. Elle was actually incredibly smart, but no one knew it due to first impressions, an image I worked hard to convey as the merge got rolling. I let other people take the lead in strategic conversations, let them approach me with their plans while I gathered information. The first words out of my mouth were usually “what do you want to do” rather than telling people to vote a certain way. Voting Bryce and Tyler weren’t moves I exactly wanted to make but they made others feel they were in control and hid my real allegiances which was more important to me than being the driving force behind votes. It seemed like many people saw me as an option to make a move down the line and that was the image I wanted. I wanted people to think I’d wait to be told what to do. It made flipping to try and move against Sydney that much easier, a move that completely changed the course of this game.

I had deals with a lot of people at the start of merge (shoutout to Chelsea/Audrey, my original final 3!) but one of the most important alliances I had was with Jake. Knowing he had the Galamis idol, knowing about Jenna’s vote steal, and knowing what Jamie/Sydney were telling the minority alliance made it easy to fact check those who were supposed to be aligned with me. For the first few rounds, we were on different sides. Cali, Jenna, Jamie, and Tyler told Jake a lot of information, and as a result I knew what almost everyone in the game was thinking. Being in such a position, with so much information available to me, made the choice to flip on my big alliance easy: I knew other people (mainly Jamie and Sydney) were getting outside information about advantages, idol clues, and which way the vote was steering, and I knew they weren’t sharing it with me which meant they didn’t see me as a serious option in their plans. I wasn’t the only one working with those in the minority and I wanted to cut whoever was trying to play a similar middle position. I also wanted the game to feel open and not for it to turn into one side voting out another, as rigid alliance lines made it more difficult for me to continue the fluid cross-alliance relationships I was working to build. Unfortunately, the round Jake left we miscalculated what kind of advantages were in the game (I’ve never heard of a double idol in my life!!). It put me in a terrible position, having lost a close ally, his idol, and the trust of multiple people. So once again, my game had to change.

I’d outed myself as someone who was willing to make a move, so the Elle Woods motive was dead and from the ashes rose Cady Heron. In Mean Girls, Cady gets the Plastics to turn on each other by befriending them individually and slowly convincing them that Regina isn’t to be trusted. If you replace Karen, Regina, and Gretchen with the different clusters of voting groups in the game, you have my strategy: convince everyone that they couldn’t trust each other but that hey, you can trust me. I tried to make myself essential to everyone’s plans and I was successful: Jamie, Jared, Cali, Chelsea, and Dani all thought I was going to the end with them. My strongest alliances were with Cali and Chelsea, two people on complete opposite sides who would never get together to unite against me. Obviously, like Cady, I felt incredibly guilty about lying to people, but I would rather have everyone think they need me and have to cut some people along the way than be entirely dependent on winning challenges or on other people choosing to side with me. Although everyone suspected Chelsea and I were unlikely to turn on each other, Cali and I worked very hard to hide our alliance so we could gather information from all sides and make decisions that benefitted us as a unit. I don’t think anyone really knew how close we were, and it became my goal not only to keep myself safe but to make F5 with Cali and Chelsea there so I would have guaranteed protection in case someone tried to do something shady against me. I made sure that I wasn’t only looking out for myself, but looking out for my allies as I knew I couldn’t rely on winning challenges to have a guaranteed path to the end.

I by no means think I played a flawless game, and I don’t mean to imply I was the sole deciding factor every vote. Obviously everyone had the potential to shake the game up, but as people became comfortable in their alliances, it became less and less likely someone new would want to make a major change in the game’s structure, making me the ideal and at times only candidate people could approach if they wanted to try something. After the failed assassination on Sydney at F11, I built myself up so that either myself or my close allies were needed to carry out any form of plan, minimizing the risk I'd be voted out. There was rarely a vote that didn’t go the way I expected because I built the relationships that got me information, relationships that I knew would look out for me if I needed them to. I was identified by many as someone who had a good chance of winning around F7, yet here I am at the end with not a single vote cast against me in that time. I had the foresight to plan rounds in advance, to make sure that no matter what happened, no one would be able to go against me or move ahead without me knowing about it.

I’d like to also comment on a couple of things Jamie mentioned in her statement, namely that winning immunities wasn’t lucky. Obviously, we all rely on luck in Survivor. You’re lucky if you find an idol, you’re lucky that challenges happen to work in your favour, there are always going to be elements that you can’t control. But I feel like if Survivor is a lottery, then making alliances are like buying tickets. Every time you form a bond with someone, it reduces the amount you need luck to be safe. I was unlucky that Jamie won challenges from the F7 - F4, for despite what she believes I would have absolutely voted her out during that time. I find it odd that a strategy that relied so heavily on winning challenges kept me in the game this long, considering I was a close second to win 5 of the merge immunities. I increased my chances of being safe because I worked with everybody, not just one or two people, and made it so they all knew I was available to make a move if the time was right. I’d also like to comment on the F5 vote because there were a couple inaccurate comments in Jamie’s speech regarding that -- she did not get me to “string Cali and Dani along” and in fact had almost no influence on how I voted that round. I had gone to Cali/Dani on my own, having already promised to go to the end with both of them, and told them, before Jamie had even spoken to me that day, that we needed to vote Chelsea to prevent one of us leaving. I intentionally how I was voting unclear to Chelsea and Jamie, so they would pitch to me why I needed to vote Cali rather than trying to turn things on me. Ultimately I voted Cali as I knew Chelsea would 100% vote Dani out at the F4, whereas I had doubts about whether or not Cali/Dani would vote for each other in the event Jamie won the final challenge, despite what they’d promised me.

The point of Survivor is to use relationships to get you to the end. To get in alliances and knowingly cast votes so that you’re always in the loop, and that every vote you cast is a beneficial one for your game. I truly think I am the person who best fits this description, and I hope more than anything that you agree. 