This Week in BS: Finales

This Week in Bold Strategy #12

Welcome back to This Week in BS, where I break down highlights of Bold Strategy from Survivor, Big Brother Canada, and whatever the hell I want.

Survivor 44

🏆 How to Make It To the End in the New Era

Between Survivor 44 and 42, we’ve got a pretty decent blueprint of how to get to FTC with the new format of the game. The Tika three made it to the F4 and the Taku four (Maryanne+Omar+Jonathan+Lindsay) all made the F6. It’s clear to me, in a game with three tribes and no swaps, you do the following:

1) Lock in with your original tribe. Make sure they know that you’re all riding it out until the end.

2) Don’t let a soul outside of the original tribe know that’s happening. Let the others see discord and misalignment between you and your original tribemates.

3) At the merge, pit the other two tribes against each other while you keep your secret tribe alliance separate and diminish all of your threat levels.

4) Let them realize too late, control the endgame with your numbers.

5) Make sure someone on your tribe gets medically evacuated (this one is optional).

But seriously, Maryanne and Yam Yam both did this (in quite different ways) and ended up in favourable late game scenarios. The reason this is titled “How to make it to the end” and not “How to win” is because in both cases a very strong final tribal played a role in their wins. I am more and more convinced that doing whatever you can to get to the end in these games is optimal strategy and then you just have to give it your all in your final pitch - and study what kind of pitches juries tend to reward and know yourself and how they perceive you and make your arguments based on that but that’s a different story.

💜 Tika Three

When the two biggest characters of the season end up in the final three, it’s a good season. Part of the success of Yam Yam and Carolyn is how they played off of each other. The editors kept us guessing as to whether these two would stick together or split up. Ultimately, they stayed together and they were absolutely better together.

One thing about Yam Yam: he’s fun to play with. That makes a difference out there. His innocent, “We’re going to party tomorrow,” as he walked out of the F4 fire-making, perfectly captured how good he was at having fun and making people laugh. We’re emotional beings. If someone makes us laugh, we’ll find a logical way to explain why we gave them our jury vote, and he was a master comedian who made the jury cackle throughout the merge phase.

Carolyn is an all time character and a heck of a game player. Carson levelled up the meta for the prep required to play this game. Currently waiting on him to get a 3D printer promo code.

🪵 HLG

Put some respect on the name Heidi Lagares-Greenblatt. In a mostly character-driven season, Heidi had the most memorable strategic move. She put herself in the firemaking, took out the perceived biggest threat, and yet still lost.

Now before unpacking this a little bit, let’s go through her game. She starts in a couple with Danny where he’s the bigger so-called threat. They unite with Frannie and Matt in the premerge and all end up making it there. Then at the merge she integrates herself with the Tikas running the game - which she knows about from Frannie - and uses Danny as her shield until she, intentionally in my opinion, becomes a number for the Tika folks. She’s solid as hell and played a great game.

I think she saw how far behind she was in the eyes of the jury and took the opportunity to try and make up ground. It was too late though. There is a little bit of showmanship involved (ask Yam Yam, he’s a pro), and she should have surprised them a bit more when she threw herself into fire. Heidi said herself that she was back and forth about it; showing that lack of conviction to the jury was a mistake. You have to decide and follow through on your plan.

Could she have won the game? I think, like many, that if she takes out Yam Yam at the six spot by playing her idol on Jaime, she’s in a position where she likely still sits at the final three and maybe it’s a different case. Her and Jaime never got on the same page strategically, so that’s just fan fiction. Heidi remains a really solid runner up who is a social threat on any season. She had good reads and on thinking about it further, I love her throwing herself into fire. She knew she was far behind in the eyes of the jury, something really hard to read in the first place, and exhausted all options. She left it all out there and did the best you can do without winning. Putting yourself into fire-making is generally dumb; in this case I agree with the move.

💭 Final Thoughts

Not a particularly strategically complicated season, albeit a really fun one because of the people. The post-merge was kind of an old school battle of tribes, where the folks who could keep their loyalties a secret ended up winning. There were too many twists in the pre-merge; Maddy’s boot with one vote in the first episode still irks me a bit. Probably my second favourite New Era season behind 42 for the characters alone. The Tika 3’s social/strategic game was top tier and they made this a fun journey.

Big Brother Canada 11

🏀 Ball Game

Claudia took Ty to the final two, with eight wins to his name, so if you want to say he doesn’t have a social game, well, ya can’t. You can dislike him, or the version of him you saw on TV, but you lost that critique when he lost the final HOH and got taken. I actually think he comes out looking better in this case than if he comped out. His relationship brought him to the end, not his historically good competition prowess.

For Claudia, she was in a lose-lose situation so you can’t be mad at her for not taking Daniel. There were times throughout the season where it seemed like she might win (e.g. before her noms at the double) and she would be a big threat on a returnee season. She lost the game at the double when she didn’t nominate Ty, not at the finale. It’s easy to point to the last move someone makes as their game-defining move and it’s rarely accurate.

⚖️ The Jury

It was a treat and quite humbling to be invited to host the jury round table. When Anika came in firing, I was ecstatic, as you might have been able to tell. I love chaos.

Both Ty and Claudia made very solid pitches to the jury in the F2, although I think Claudia’s arguments (about taking herself there) might have worked better against Daniel. Kuzie was the most influential person in the jury and Ty had her vying for him, so, again, don’t say he didn’t have a social game. Messages change depending on who delivers them and she was the right person to be delivering your message in the jury.

💭 Final Thoughts

We should know this week if BBCAN12 is happening and I hope it does + I think it will. I hope feeds come back so that the fans who care the most can see the inner workings of the players’ games. I think Daniel and Anika may be the players who will get the least credit because we were never able to see the subtle ways they navigated conversation after conversation with barely any comp wins. This might not even be true and I could be painting my own narrative between the lines that we got. That’s what you have to do. We’re all delusional after the season and for those of us who do take this way too seriously, the feeds provide some truth and humility.

Now the episodes were very good and keep in mind that feed-watchers, me included, are not the majority of the audience. While social engagement was down and post-season analysis is virtually non-existent (shoutout to Silent Podcasts and The Reality Kingdom doing good work post-season), Canadian TV is a weird puzzle to solve and I suspect that the season was an overall success. Having a Disney-sponsored comp is no small deal.

BBCAN11 felt like old school Big Brother, with a lot of fighting and messy gameplay. Ty was able to rise above the chaos and use a focused strategy of comp wins and directness to win the game. I’m interested to see the fan reaction as more folks discover this year and the great characters (shout out Kassting).

🕊 Tweets of the Week

This is how you win when you don’t win. Maddy was the first person voted out of Survivor 44 and if you followed her social media this season, she was a star. She owned every minute, she went to watch parties with fans, she was hilarious on Twitter and Instagram, and she rocked it. It would have been easy to back away from the experience, but she didn’t. She ain’t a nobody, she’s someone who took a tough bounce and made it into something awesome in a way that few would have the character to do.

Some of us went to a bar on the Tuesday before the RHAP live shows in Toronto. Maddy walks in, with probably 25 strangers there, and introduces herself to every single person. This wasn’t a performance or a bit, it was just a genuinely nice person being super cool. Go follow Maddy, she’s funny as hell.

Yeah it’s my own tweet. Perception is everything in competition reality TV and she was a master of using the perception of her to her advantage. Not everyone starts at the same place in these games and if you know yourself and how you come across, that actually puts you ahead.

This newsletter has been a ton of fun. Thanks for tuning in.

I won’t be writing every week of BB25, or this summer. I’m going to keep the mailing list and occasionally send updates this way. Will be getting married soon and that’s the current focus along with my work.

I’ve got a lot to do and only 100 years to live, if I’m lucky. Is that morbid?

Onto the Next Chapter,

Kevin 🐍

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