Board Thread:Season 45 - Molise/@comment-33629256-20180221073309

Hello jury and viewers!! I want to start with some thanks to the hosts for casting me and hosting this season. I’ve said this in my thread already but you’ve been great for introducing me to the community and I really appreciate all the work you put in to this game.

Secondly thank you to all the players!! That includes those who didn’t get the opportunity to be on the jury and jurors too, it’s been absolutely great playing with you and getting to know you all, in a strategic sense but also in a personal sense. There are some real friendships that I’m really glad we’ve made and I hope to continue them after the game finishes.

Now onto my game. I could go through every tribal council and explain what I did in each round but I’m worried it will get too boring haha, if anyone would like me to do that then please bring it up in your speech!! (I’m coming back to this at the end and realising I wrote a massive essay haha, if anybody wants a condensed version then I’ll write it for them!!) I’m going to instead split my game into 3 stages, the pre merge, the early merge and the late merge.

The pre merge

During the pre merge, I was lucky enough to never be at risk until the final vote before the merge. This came with some great benefits but also some downsides which became apparent early in the merge. The benefits were that I was obviously never at risk of elimination, I was able to spend time creating social bonds and never had to betray anyone. But going to tribal had it benefits, when the merge began, people who had voted together had already established trust. Jordan, Elias and Jerry had voted together 3 times by the merge, their relationship was secure and stable and it meant that they voted on the same side every merge vote. I never had that with anyone, I had to work hard in the early bit of the merge to establish working relationships with people. But I’ll get to that later haha.

I’m not sure how much has changed since the jury has started talking haha, but I felt like a lot of people thought I wasn’t playing proactively. I was told by multiple people that I needed to stand on my own two feet, make moves, ya know. But I was going out of my way right from the start of the season to shape perceptions of myself, I didn’t just start playing in the late merge, I was playing the game the whole way through. I noticed right at the beginning that I would be good at challenges but I didn’t want to show that to everyone right away. I wanted to hold it back until I was ready to use it to my advantage, which I did in the late merge. So at the beginning, for Constellations, I submitted a score of 7,064,400 even though I had a score of 54,206,300.

I also did worse in the puzzle challenge and I didn’t offer to make the tribe flag and even said I was awful at photoshop. I really wanted to shape the perception that I was a weak player, I wanted to appear like a goat so I could hide my true abilities. This really came in useful later in the game, I don’t think I’d be at final tribal council if I made it clear I was a big threat from the beginning. I knew that the big threats would be huge targets later on, Nat, Elias, Trey and Jordan all were eliminated one after the other, and from the first moment I started playing I tried my hardest to make sure I wasn’t going to be seen as a big threat.

I also created a lot of strong bonds in the pre merge which gave me many options down the road. Mai and Chris were unfortunately voted out before I could play with them but we were pretty tight. I was close with Aaron, Nat, Trey, Jason and Harrison all from the pre merge, there was no established trust but there was definitely strong social bonds that I was able to use later in the game.

I also want to clarify here that I really tried to split my personal connection from my strategic loyalty to people. I absolutely loved speaking to everybody on the cast, there was not one person that I did not enjoy talking to. However, I also knew that we’d signed up to play and I didn’t want to lose without giving myself every chance of winning. So if it sounds like I used any bonds we had created for my own strategic gain, to some extent I did, but that doesn’t mean that my connections with people weren’t genuine. I’d be so upset to have lost friends over this game and I hope it doesn’t happen, but I made my bed and now I have to lie in it ya know.

The early merge

At this stage of the game I wanted to hide my abilities again. I tried to make myself seem weak at every opportunity and I tried to go with the flow so I wasn’t ever a target. My main strategy was to give myself the most choices and the most options that I could. I thought the best way to do that was to try and seem beneficial to everybody else’s game. I always left the door open on strategic relationships, particularly with people that I wasn’t working with but had strong social connections with, like Jerry and Elias. I really think this is why I made it to the end without a single vote against me. I was never brought up as a serious potential elimination target until the final 4 (as far as I know? haha correct me if I’m wrong!!) because I believe I made myself appear beneficial to everybody in the game. Why vote off someone that you could work with ya know? I really think I played every angle the entire game but never got caught out because I didn’t make it beneficial to anyone to try to sell me out.

Kinda related to that, I tried to build at least a foundation of trust with every single player in the game. I always knew where every individual vote was going apart from 1 extra Aaron vote during every tribal council I went to (and the 2 self-votes at final 5) and a lot of that is because of the trust I had built with everybody.

My control of the game really began at the final 9 with the Jerry vote. Jordan was the initial target for that but he had approached me with a potential alliance which eventually grew into (in my opinion) the major controlling alliance of the whole game. Trey wanted Jordan and Jason was ready to vote that way but I brought up the idea of voting Jerry because he was somebody who could “slip under the radar” and said that Jordan was a big target we could vote off at any point. From that point, Jordan and I really worked hard to know where every vote was headed and we worked to make sure that our target left at every elimination.

Nat was Jordan’s target at final 8 and Jordan told me Jason had flipped. I was really stuck here because I was loyal to both Nat and Jordan and I found it difficult to decide which to side with, so I really tried my hardest to side with both haha. I told Nat what was happening and tried to save her but I knew it was a lost cause and so before she was eliminated she gifted me her idol. With the protection of an idol, I was ready to enter the late merge and fully take control for myself.

The late merge

I thought when I reached final 7, I was gonna go hard for every immunity haha. I really thought that I could win each one, I knew I was good at challenges and decided to not let anyone have the chance to even target me, and so I won them all. I also wanted to eliminate physical threats to give me a better chance of winning, Trey and Jordan were people I considered to be really good at challenges which definitely played a part in my decision to vote them. However I tried to also seem weak here too, when we had the loved ones challenge I said Nick won it for me when he didn’t, I said I won the final 7 challenge because of luck when I didn’t. I won all the challenges on my own and they weren’t lucky wins, they were strategically timed at a point when I thought I could literally win my way to the end.

I wanted to eliminate other people’s options while keeping mine open. I think the late game is the most important time for options so this really kicked in here. Elias was an amazing social player and I knew he had the ability to work with absolutely anyone, he was close socially with everyone left. I was mainly worried about Jason’s options and even though Elias was voting Jason, I knew Jason and Elias could work together moving forward. So I flipped the script and saved Jordan, keeping my options open, and got the votes on Elias. At final 6 I was aligned with everybody left in the game, I really kept my options open and was never caught out doing this because I managed to appear beneficial to everybody’s games. I also deliberately caused a re-vote giving me extra time to find the idol (which came in really useful later on when I had a few guesses left to find the idol!!). This was the same at final 6, Trey was an option for me but he was more connected than Jordan was, Trey could’ve worked with anyone left I believe, so that was why I voted him.

I also think one of my best abilities in this portion of the game was appearing unaware and like a floater while secretly controlling the game behind the scenes. The only moves that I took credit for were the final 7 vote and the final 5 vote and even then, I didn’t openly say it was my move, and it was too late to vote me out. I tried to make sure all the moves seemed like other people’s. At final 6 I brought up the idea to Harrison of Trey and Jason potentially flipping at the next vote (having already told Jordan I would do this and it would get him to flip) and sure enough he voted out Trey with me. I really tried to hold my nerve when people called me a goat, I didn’t want to tell them everything I had done because I knew it would make me a target ya know. I hope the jury can see I was playing the game right from the beginning, and that I was the major controller behind every vote from final 9 onwards. Sure, at final 8 I didn’t vote with the majority, but I still knew where every single vote was headed. Throughout this game I had arguably the most information of everybody and yet, through my own social game, I made sure that I literally was never a target. I only became a target at final 4 despite controlling almost the whole merge behind the scenes, and like I’ve said, at final 4 it was four tribal councils too late to eliminate me.

The final 5 and final 4 votes were both really difficult. Jordan was a major player in the game and I thought he would’ve won on the jury no doubt. But he was a friend of mine too and that was where the difficulty lay. I really tried to separate the game from my personal connections and so I voted for him and played the two idols I had found during the game. I really thought at final 4 that Marty would not vote for me on the jury but Jason had said he would, so I voted Jason to give myself the extra edge heading into final tribal council. Jason also might have had Trey’s, Juliet’s, Aaron’s and Marty’s votes, I really wasn’t sure how the jury perceived my game because everybody leaving thought of me as a goat.

Conclusion

I realise that my game looks like I only started playing at the final 7 and it was based on immunities and idols. But I think my game was a social one that used those social bonds for strategic gain. The lack of reference to the immunity wins and idols found should really show the lack of impact they actually had on my game in the end. When looking at the brief outline of my game, I really think it becomes clear that it was good gameplay and I’m really proud of it. I hold the joint record for the longest time immune (24 days until I had to vote out Ashley), I was never a target up for elimination until it was 4 rounds too late to eliminate me, I deliberately crafted a perception that lasted all the way until the end and I reached here with 0 votes against me, with the 2 people that I personally wanted by my side.

This was an absolutely amazing experience and I made some real friends, both with jurors, pre-jurors, hosts and viewers. I hope to continue those afterwards and I’m tremendously grateful for being able to meet you all. Please vote for me, I really believe I played a game that’s worthy of winning. Thank you for reading and please don’t be too harsh in your speeches haha!! 