Board Thread:703’s Showdown 1/@comment-24900484-20180728102110/@comment-30575847-20180728113617

Hey Matt! Thanks so much for your speech. Sorry I can’t do a video right now since its late and my 1 year old brother is sleeping in this house right now lol. Also this Q required planning and thinking out so I think its better to write this but I will try tomorrow to answer your final question……

'''Did you intentionally align yourself with the bigger threats so you wouldn't be made a target for the votes? Or was it just a thing that you clicked with the bigger threats and thus wanting to work with them '''

Great question, okay this might be confusing to explain

So, going into this I knew Nadine was going to be my closest ally. We were both from Carthage and have been good friends outside of orgs since Carthage ended so naturally we were going to work together. It just so happened that she is a past winner and known to do well in orgs. So no, I didn’t align with her because she was a threat, I’m sure we would be allies regardless if she hadn’t won Carthage, but it helped that as well as being my friend and ally, she just happened to also be a huge threat. And I knew that would work in my favour, as like she used “Will” as a shield in Carthage, she could be mine in this season. As we saw that was exactly what happened, she was targeted at final 11 and ultimately voted off at 10. ☹

Once Nadine was gone, it was just me and Nicole. I think her main reason for being viewed as a threat early merge was because everyone knew she had an idol, and knew I didn’t since I just wasted it (so wow wasting the idol really worked out in my favour). That immediately put a target on her over me. But in terms of aligning with her originally, it was because we got along so well and live in the same city so it was easy to talk often, especially with other players having very different time zones. I'm not a gamebotty person to just think "That person is a threat, I want to align with them." I think trust is more important than that.

Once merge hit although we were in a very bad situation, I quickly realised that out of the 3 of us, I had the best chance of surviving due to Nicole for some reason being seen as extremely social compared to Byzantium, and last minute scrambling/lying that put some people off working with her ie Jenna. On the other hand I was also very social, but wasn’t a target while Nadine and Nicole were still in the game, so I was able to effectively reduce my threat level, and being the last unvoted I think shows this. I thought me and Nicole were relatively equal, after she used the idol, but the perception of her being a threat was far greater than mine. Final 8 vote could have easily been me over her.

Even when my main “threat allies” left I still wasn’t a target (bar F7), I didn’t need them to shield me all the time, like as you mentioned Brandon and Sam didn’t even target me at final 4 when I was just sitting there without immunity. Having threat allies is useless if you are in the minority as it usually just delays the inevitable, but I still managed to survive without them. So as I mentioned in my speech as well as having Nadine and Nicole as shields (and only for 4 out of 9 merge rounds) it was also my own doing of openness/convincing people I thought I didn't deserve to be here etc which caused me to be underestimated, that helped me remain un-targeted for every single round except final 7.

Oops I realised I went slightly off track but yeah