Board Thread:Survivor 21: Kerala/@comment-25204107-20161208095914/@comment-1928659-20161208200600

Hello Daulton, Long time we haven' t spoken.

I would like to disagree with you on the sheeping. Sheeping would be to pick a herder, lose any initiative of my own and follow them blindly to my elimination or the 0 jury vote spot. That is the last thing I did. Instead I disengaged myself from everyone and was attached to multiple people and groups. By doing this, I acquired the distinction of the flipper/wishy-washy weirdo who would flip in the blink of an eye, I became a huge target that everyone was willing to vote, but at the same time the groups and trends that emerged every round found an open vote on my face. I agree with what people think, it is true, I could have been voted out in any given round that I was not immune. But 1) I had a hidden immunity idol noone knew about and 2) with me gone that open vote would have been lost. And with so many inactives and goats and people unwilling to do anything, it would be the battle of the loudest and one would get the power to just Boston Rob their way to the end.

Tucker claims that I could not have played middle because until the F8 everything was unanimous. I do not agree with this. There were a lot of waves coming forward in every round, but when the majority became obvious people would jump on the majority train. That was what happened at the Vikram vote and especially at the Jacob vote.

After that point, starting from the Anna vote and my soon-to-come attachment to Catherine and Jake I was pretty much essential for all sides to have numbers. So I proceeded with a general safety (even though I did doubt it sometimes) to think of my end game and see what would benefit me jurywise. And with this I want to pass to your jury management question...

Ok I have to admit. Jury management has not been my best asset. I had on some occasions blindsided people, that I could have avoided blindsiding them. I was paranoid more than I should have on many occasions but I will explain why, and that led me to be a little more ruthless to my cuttings of people.

Like I already told, my time zone was crap for this game. I would stay up late to catch everyone logging in to see what was going on, so I would seem very direct and wanting to speak only about the game. Then I would be off on the main hours and I would come back when everyone was off to find a million messages and a million different plan suggestions. People targeting me, people lying, people targetting different people. Groups full with messages. I was lost a lot of the time and I couldnt chat with anyone to clear the air for many hours. It was obvious to me, that the votes could turn on me veeery easily. I did not expect whole groups to wait for me to go back home, to forge a plan that I may not agree to. This situation made me overthink this, I was handling different groups, with different lies in different situations. At least one time per round I would have someone say that was targetting me. I was going constantly crazy and created crazy scenarios. I ended up agreeing on multiple plans and that was bad cause I was blindisiding people all the time. And this should be an explanation for my bad jury management.

The worst cases was with you, Catherine and Jake. You left very early in the merge, when I was more lying low than changing sides. By then, I really could not realise why you Thekkadys were not voting me and Tucker out. I was surprised and did not believe that you were not going through with eliminating us and especially me. I wanted to ensure that Periyar would never be down more than one member and you guys were giving it with open arms to us. So when your name came up right after the Vikram vote, and everyone was so obsessed about it I had to do it. Our communication with this was on a positive manner but very minimum before the round you were eliminated. There was no real reason for me to get you informed on the vote coming your way. There was no way we could have done something, I was worried about and idol that it was very possible you would have had it and I wanted you to be open to me if something happened and you would have survived. It was a lousy jury management move with yme doing this to you, but at the point we were at F11, the jury was a long way to go, and I really thought my chances to reach there were very small, so I had to keep scenarios open.

Also, in terms of general jury management. I do expect people to go by gameplay and not by who was kinder to me. I think I am on good terms with everyone and I believe I had some genuine relationships with most of the jury. And I have worked with all of them in one occasion or another. If the jury doesn' t see why I had to vote for them to survive, and on what a dangerous and tight spot I was sitting all the time, I cannot do a lot of things. I am doing my best to explain it as good as I can. But sometimes, it was a case of jury management versus reaching the jury. So I picked reaching the FTC after playing a respectful and strategic game. Instead of asking for votes of 'we were friends in the game', I ask votes of "You outwited us and we can see this'.

I wrote a looooot. I will try to keep my answers smaller. Hope I covered you. See you at the reunion!