Posted by da_goat on 12/2/2013 9:46:00 AM (view original):

Posted by dublinuf on 12/2/2013 8:26:00 AM (view original):
So, this has had a long build up to this epic Final showdown between the two longest standing hosts of Survivor. I have been reading texts all week to that effect from polabonez that neither of us can beat redraider in the Final Two, as well.

Here's the thing, though. At the Final 4 vote, Tyson voted for me to leave not once, but twice, and raiders is the sole reason that I was allowed to do a fire challenge for the chance to compete for my life against hookemhorns7.

Therefore, I vote to eliminate polabonez

I am taking redraider68 to the Final Two with me.

BOOOOO!  was hoping for the epic showdown with dubs and pola.....would have been some interesting speeches and questions and a close vote, I think, and my vote was undecided. As it now stands I am about 75% committed to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX......good luck to both of you!

I 100% agree with this statement da goat!

Can we ask questions now or do we need to wait until Wed.?

Posted by Arfy on 12/2/2013 3:58:00 PM (view original):

Posted by da_goat on 12/2/2013 9:46:00 AM (view original):

Posted by dublinuf on 12/2/2013 8:26:00 AM (view original):
So, this has had a long build up to this epic Final showdown between the two longest standing hosts of Survivor. I have been reading texts all week to that effect from polabonez that neither of us can beat redraider in the Final Two, as well.

Here's the thing, though. At the Final 4 vote, Tyson voted for me to leave not once, but twice, and raiders is the sole reason that I was allowed to do a fire challenge for the chance to compete for my life against hookemhorns7.

Therefore, I vote to eliminate polabonez

I am taking redraider68 to the Final Two with me.

BOOOOO!  was hoping for the epic showdown with dubs and pola.....would have been some interesting speeches and questions and a close vote, I think, and my vote was undecided. As it now stands I am about 75% committed to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX......good luck to both of you!

I 100% agree with this statement da goat!

Personally, I think this is a fantastic final!

Actually...the more I think about it.  The more I think my final vote is up for grabs.  It's going to take some convincing for my vote.

Posted by da_goat on 12/2/2013 3:59:00 PM (view original):
Can we ask questions now or do we need to wait until Wed.?

I think you at least have to wait until after dub's opening statement. Casey or Steve can correct me if I'm wrong.

So, I will go ahead and make my speech.

This is the best that I am capable of playing Survivor. I had my best season, and my best finish. Even if that ends up being second, it is hell of a lot better than fifth, which was my best before this.

I play Survivor with two contrasting basic rules.

1) Don't try to win for you. Choose a group of friends early, and be willing to risk losing to help them win. As long as one of us wins, it's fine.

Basically this is how I play every Survivor. Don't turn on your closest allies, and it is okay to mislead people to protect those allies. I typically won't vote against someone who I have allied with unless it is down to them and someone else I have been allied with longer, or if that person has already betrayed my alliance.

2) The second basic concept comes from the greatest of all real life Survivor players Sandra Diaz-Twine: "As long as it isn't me."

In the end, I want to stay in a position that I have the numbers, even if all of my key players aren't in those numbers, so I have a position to push toward keeping my people.

So, what were my alliances in this game in order of increasing importance.

PRIMARY ALLIANCE: tsut30
I made a Seahawks based alliance with Tony before the game even started. My goal, as stated above, was for one of us to win. I would not have ever voted to eliminate tsut. There is no way I would ever waver from this position unless he had stabbed me in the back at some point, which he didn't.

SECONDARY ALLIANCE #1: polabonez, stalagna and ahrens
Now if I made a mistake, this was it. Not because I can't trust these guys, but because I suggested a five person alliance with them not knowing that in the last Survivor stalagna and polabonez had built up some animosity, especially on stalagna's side.

I also set up a tacit arrangement with psap around this point. Remember, this was all before the tribes were announced.

HEROES TRIBE: When the tribes were announced, I found myself in Heroes with stalagna and tsut, which gave us three out of the nine. We only needed to get two more to fulfill Rule #2, as long as it isn't me.

I approached redraider68 at this point, as well as shlog. Dan and I instantly bonded, but shlog was stand offish. It didn't take long to figure out that the five that weren't me, tsut, redraider and stalagna were in the minority, especially since I learned that shlog chose the other side through polabonez.

This is the turning point in the game for me. caesari approached me, and I offered to make an alliance with him, stronger than what he had been offered to that point. The only problem, his biggest target was tsut. He also wanted to protect katz. So, I made a deal that as long as I could protect redraider (not wanting him to know that I was more aligned with tsut and stalagna than redraider), the we could work it that the final 4 Heroes left would be me, redraider, katz and caesari.

The deal was that we would vote onside, shlog and mb out and then tsut and stalagna. Of course, since redraider was 100 percent with me on this move, we would have never had to vote against stalagna and tsut. This is the point where redraider became one of my primary five at the expense of ahrens probably if I had ever been in a tribe with ahrens, because this is the type of trust that you build in game.

Secondary alliance #2: polabonez, redraider68, stalagna (the primary with tsut never changes)
Tertiary alliance: ahrens; caesari

Now, the game changed suddenly in between the shlog vote and what would have been the mb vote. Basically, caesari disappeared for 3-4 days, opened no sitemails and didn't send in his part of the challenge, which is one of the reasons we lost it. We weren't sure if he was ever coming back so redraider, tsut, stalagna and I decided to vote for him.

At this point, I sitemailed mb625 to let him know that the vote would have been for him, but that it was now going to caesari. He asked why it was going to be him, and I told him that caesari and katz had been working with the rest of us, so he was the only odd-man out left. This actually led to a really long, interesting conversation where I realized just how loyal mb is. I made a commitment to him and to myself to try and keep him in the game as long as possible. That turned out to be the last vote in the original tribes and we were separated into Autobots and Decepticons

Exit of stage one
Primary: tsut30
Secondary: polabonez, redraider, stalagna
Tertiary: mb625; ahrens

So, the Autobots was tsut, me and mb from heroes
polabonez, arfy, horvie and phily from the villains
chuckc and hookem from the newbies

I was approached immediately by horvie to set up a five person alliance between me, him, arfy, tsut and polabonez
Five out of nine fulfills rule #2, so obviously I agreed.
That said, there were a couple of things at play here. horvie is one of if not the best Survivor players there is (being the only one to win both Big Brother and Survivor).

He also betrayed my trust the last time I aligned with him when I had a main alliance with him, ghutton and polabonez. In addition, I wanted to protect mb.

It was also at this point that stalagna told psap about our alliance of five, which was only semi in play at that point anyway. I found out instantly because mb told me. This thrust him up immensely in my eyes. I felt I could trust him, so I wanted to protect as part of my core alliance.

So, I made the plan to vote off two people (phily and one of the newbies which turned out to be chuck) and then use me, pola, mb and tsut as four out of seven votes to get rid of horvie. Everyone agreed with this until it came time to vote. At which point, Tyson decided to not vote for horvie and to vote for hookem instead. This forced a 3-3 tie because hookem voted for pola. On the revote, horvie and hookem didn't vote, so tsut, mb and I had the votes to eliminate horvie.

At was at this point I changed my position on polabonez being my main secondary (the one to go into the final 3 with me and tsut), largely because I believed that his side deal that he clearly had with arfy and horvie was strong enough to get him to do what he could to protect arfy over tsut and mb. We won out from there and exited the tribal stage with 6 autobots to 4 decepticons

At this point
Primary alliance: tsut30
Secondary alliance: mb625, polabonez, redraider68
Tertiary alliance: arfy, hookemhorns7

There were only 10 people left at this point and my goal was to get me, tsut, mb, pola and raiders into the Final Five. The trick to this was that pola had two idols and I believed he intended to use them to protect Arfy.

The first thing to deal with was that katz was putting together an alliance to try and get power from the autobots. I knew this because mb told me immediately and raiders confirmed it when I asked (which by the way only solidified the faith I had in mb). I wanted to make sure I got invited to that alliance so that katz didn't approach someone else to get to six. I did, and I told him about Tyson's idol, but I did not tell him the true power of the idol. Tyson altered the e-mail before I sent it to him.

Because I didn't know if katz had that basketball idol, I didn't even tell redraider about the vote. The autobots all voted for katz, and the decepticons all voted for arfy.

Now we were at 9, and I knew that Tyson would play an idol on Arfy eventually to eliminate mb or tsut. Therefore, I played the same move as in heroes. I let Tyson finish of stalagna with the next vote and then made sure the vote was for da_goat so that raiders would be safe (nice play on fake idol to scare the crap out of us).

At seven, raiders, tsut, mb and I voted out arfy because I was sure that arfy was in the plan for tyson and I wanted my main alliance in the Final five. Unfortunately, Tyson reacted by turning to hookem and using his idols.

Thus, he eliminated tsut and mb forgot to vote a second time, so suddenly my dream five was crashed and we were left with a Final Four without tsut and mb.

That gets us to here. I chose redraider over tyson because redraider chose me over the best path to his victory which I still believe would have been to play hookem in the final. I have been aligned with redraider since day 1 of heroes.


That was probably too long, but I broke everything down. Will answer any questions I can.

Posted by redraider68 on 12/2/2013 3:08:00 PM (view original):

I know this isn't due until tomorrow but lets go ahead and put it out here anyway.

Someone always asks about the strategy so I will lay mine out. I think the most important part of Survivor is finding an alliance you trust and can take all the way. My initial alliance was with psap. However we ended up in different tribes to begin with. On Heroes, dubs and I connected. We worked together through the first tribe shake-up (Transformers). At that point I began working with psap as we ended up together. Dubs and I continued working together as we exchanged info about our tribes. My long term goal at this point was to bring dubs and psap together to make a final three. Once psap was eliminated I continued using his alliance on Decepticons to make it to the final merge. Dubs and I continued working together to get to the final two.

I expect the question to come up about why I took dubs to the final three. He publically stated if he didn't win immunity then it would be in my best interest to vote him off. I felt it would be screwing him over to vote him out. At least he would have the fire building competition to try to stay in the game.

I think I played a fairly honest game. I feel I only stabbed one person in the back (Sorry, ahrens). Obviously, you have to break alliances at some point since there are only two spots in the final two. Feel free to ask if you would like more detail on my actions.

I assume that since the Final 2 have spoken that the Q&A session may begin.
Red, you said you only stabbed ahrens in the back, but that is not true as you voted with dubs in the voting out of katz.....you could say you stabbed stalagna, katz, and I in the back with that one vote....a very nice blindside by the way....however I must give the credit to dubs for that one.
So besides the alliance with dubs, why did you feel you needed to eliminate katz instead of pola that vote?......that one vote changed everything for me.

Dublinuf: we really haven't played together on same tribe or an alliance in Survivor that I can recall...correct me if wrong...but I do think you played one heck of a game. I really would have liked to see you take pola to the Final 2 with you. That said, I do think you may have an easier time winning since you can tell everyone that you led this game with red as your sidekick and you handled the decisions.
So what do think the vote would have been IF you had taken Tyson to the final 2? how many votes each as well

So I never talked to Redraider the entire game, and I don't see from my perspective, how he did anything to get my vote for a win.  So my questioning will be for Dubs.   The answer I receive will probably either win or lose my vote, depending on the answer I receive.   I aligned myself with Horvie and Polabonez(just like you had figured).  I was shocked when I found out that you were blindsiding Horvie.  when supposively we were working together.  I specifically remember getting a speech from you one of the previous Survivor games about how you play honestly.   First off, who's idea was it to get rid of Horvie?  And wouldn't  you say that you were backstabbing Horvie to further yourself  and your allies in the game?

Posted by da_goat on 12/2/2013 6:50:00 PM (view original):
Dublinuf: we really haven't played together on same tribe or an alliance in Survivor that I can recall...correct me if wrong...but I do think you played one heck of a game. I really would have liked to see you take pola to the Final 2 with you. That said, I do think you may have an easier time winning since you can tell everyone that you led this game with red as your sidekick and you handled the decisions.
So what do think the vote would have been IF you had taken Tyson to the final 2? how many votes each as well

I honestly am not sure who would vote where in either scenario, because it really depends on how people vote. I mean, if people vote on who screwed them over more, I had more control over those situations than raiders, so I could have far more votes against me taking raiders because of that.

On the other hand, if people are rewarding you for driving the action, that could be a positive for me against raiders and a negative against Tyson.

I believed if I took pola that Arfy would vote for Tyson and tsut would vote for me. With mb not having a vote, I am not 100 percent sure of anyone that would vote for me in either scenario. I especially was not sure about you and thebish's vote. I considered them complete wild cards.

So basically I felt that katz was potentially against me either way, because I basically leaked a fake e-mail directly to him. I thought that I had a chance at stalagna's vote either way but it was stronger if I was against tyson. I thought that arfy and likely hookem were likely for pola if it were me and him. I liked my chance with tsut either way, and I thought I had at least a 60 percent chance with whichever finalist I didn't take.

So by my projects of the 8 people voting, I liked my odds at three votes (tsut, finalist I didn't take stalagna, though third was stronger against pola). I thought it would be tough to get katz and hookem's vote against either and arfy's near impossible against pola.

Which means I would have to take a complete guess on what you and thebish value. So, I stopped trying to figure that out. It seemed like enough of a wash, that I should base my vote on who had been more consistently loyal to me. So, I chose redraider.

Again, not to say that I blame pola for playing his idol with hookem. I would have done the same in his position. However, without redraider's decision at four, I come in fourth, and in the end, I owed him the return favor. Since honestly, I don't ever get near here without pola, but I don't get out of heroes without redraider.

Posted by Arfy on 12/2/2013 7:29:00 PM (view original):


So I never talked to Redraider the entire game, and I don't see from my perspective, how he did anything to get my vote for a win.  So my questioning will be for Dubs.   The answer I receive will probably either win or lose my vote, depending on the answer I receive.   I aligned myself with Horvie and Polabonez(just like you had figured).  I was shocked when I found out that you were blindsiding Horvie.  when supposively we were working together.  I specifically remember getting a speech from you one of the previous Survivor games about how you play honestly.   First off, who's idea was it to get rid of Horvie?  And wouldn't  you say that you were backstabbing Horvie to further yourself  and your allies in the game?

It was certainly my idea. My alliance was with pola, tsut and mb coming in. Horvie came to me with the five person deal at the start of Autobots. I only had four without you and horvie, but I had reservations about being blindsided by horvie in bigbrother. Tyson assured me that you were both playing straight up, yet my primary concern was making sure that the four of us were safe, which meant brokering the deal with horvie, but I always intended to get to 7 and vote out horvie. I wanted to keep mb safe, and I honestly didn't completely trust horvie after last game.

As I said in my opening salvo, I will do anything to protect my main alliance, that included mb.

Posted by da_goat on 12/2/2013 6:36:00 PM (view original):

Posted by redraider68 on 12/2/2013 3:08:00 PM (view original):

I know this isn't due until tomorrow but lets go ahead and put it out here anyway.

Someone always asks about the strategy so I will lay mine out. I think the most important part of Survivor is finding an alliance you trust and can take all the way. My initial alliance was with psap. However we ended up in different tribes to begin with. On Heroes, dubs and I connected. We worked together through the first tribe shake-up (Transformers). At that point I began working with psap as we ended up together. Dubs and I continued working together as we exchanged info about our tribes. My long term goal at this point was to bring dubs and psap together to make a final three. Once psap was eliminated I continued using his alliance on Decepticons to make it to the final merge. Dubs and I continued working together to get to the final two.

I expect the question to come up about why I took dubs to the final three. He publically stated if he didn't win immunity then it would be in my best interest to vote him off. I felt it would be screwing him over to vote him out. At least he would have the fire building competition to try to stay in the game.

I think I played a fairly honest game. I feel I only stabbed one person in the back (Sorry, ahrens). Obviously, you have to break alliances at some point since there are only two spots in the final two. Feel free to ask if you would like more detail on my actions.

I assume that since the Final 2 have spoken that the Q&A session may begin.
Red, you said you only stabbed ahrens in the back, but that is not true as you voted with dubs in the voting out of katz.....you could say you stabbed stalagna, katz, and I in the back with that one vote....a very nice blindside by the way....however I must give the credit to dubs for that one.
So besides the alliance with dubs, why did you feel you needed to eliminate katz instead of pola that vote?......that one vote changed everything for me.

Actually I didn't participate in katz's elimination. I didn't know anything about it until the votes were read. Per your instructions I voted for pola. Steve and Casey can confirm once survivor is over if you would like.

The plan at that time was dubs and I would vote with you guys until tsut was the target. Dubs "went rogue" and orchestrated katz vote without telling me. He even mentions this in his statement.

Posted by dublinuf on 12/2/2013 8:03:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Arfy on 12/2/2013 7:29:00 PM (view original):


So I never talked to Redraider the entire game, and I don't see from my perspective, how he did anything to get my vote for a win.  So my questioning will be for Dubs.   The answer I receive will probably either win or lose my vote, depending on the answer I receive.   I aligned myself with Horvie and Polabonez(just like you had figured).  I was shocked when I found out that you were blindsiding Horvie.  when supposively we were working together.  I specifically remember getting a speech from you one of the previous Survivor games about how you play honestly.   First off, who's idea was it to get rid of Horvie?  And wouldn't  you say that you were backstabbing Horvie to further yourself  and your allies in the game?

It was certainly my idea. My alliance was with pola, tsut and mb coming in. Horvie came to me with the five person deal at the start of Autobots. I only had four without you and horvie, but I had reservations about being blindsided by horvie in bigbrother. Tyson assured me that you were both playing straight up, yet my primary concern was making sure that the four of us were safe, which meant brokering the deal with horvie, but I always intended to get to 7 and vote out horvie. I wanted to keep mb safe, and I honestly didn't completely trust horvie after last game.

As I said in my opening salvo, I will do anything to protect my main alliance, that included mb.

So you are saying that you stabbed Horvie in the back, is that correct?  (I'm just looking for a yes or no, not an explanation)

I will confirm that, by the by, goat. The six votes for katz were all Heroes. mb and I both voted for katz, but I never told raiders on that vote.