Board Thread:703’s Showdown 1/@comment-31683906-20180728174522/@comment-27281906-20180728193426

Hey Sam!

1. I definitely have made A LOT of mistakes in the game, and obviously I haven't done such a great job of explaining them. I'm more than happy to go through them and admit to the my mistakes. Please don't think I was trying to cover them up or avoid speaking about them all together.

- I did ignore people on purpose when they would message me, and this definitely was a major flaw in my social game. The reasoning I had at the time for doing that to people was because I believed that sometimes it was better to just ignore someone instead of deciding to tell the truth or lie. This by far is the biggest social regret of mine. Looking back, I would've changed this by answering people instead of being a pussy about it. I definitely would've gained more respect this way.

- final seven and six were just huge mistakes for my game in general. I was not socially aware of how you and Matt felt about getting rid of Toby and that is because I allowed people to see how close I was with him and therefore people wouldn't let me in. Jenna made me aware she wanted to target him but gave up trying to convince me when I told her I didn't want to. The mistake in this round was putting too many of my eggs into one basket which caused me to get majorly blindsided. Final six was a mistake because one again I wasn't socially aware of how tight Benj felt with you and Sam and instead of being selfish and trying to split the votes knowing I was immune, I shouldve had rallied Jenna and Rhys against one of yall and forced a tie. My insistence of going with the riskier move while I was immune was selfish and a mistake because I lost a close ally.

Another big mistake was my jury speech. Although I'd like to debunk the claim that my speech was dishonest (I don't think it was) I'm willing to admit that it is heavily biased toward the positive social and sttategic aspects of my game and failed to mention anything that I said above. My speech created an image that i was egotistical and delusional and reading it back again a few times after posting it I regret the way that I set that whole thing up, although it's too late now. To fix this mistake I would've just given yall the authentic truth, the good, the bad, and the ugly, instead of trying to highlight only the positive.

There are definitely more mistakes than this in my game, but these were the big ones that came to me and felt that I needed to explain the most.

I fully own up to and claim the mistakes in this speech as my own and only my own, and I apologize that I was unable to explain all of this previously.

2. Benj definitely deserves to be here, he worked hard on building friendships, always treated people with kindness and repsect, and at the final four made the risk of having to win immunity at f3 and totally did, so Benj absolutely deserves to be sitting here.

As for the reasons why he doesn't deserve to be here, I would say is that Benj at times would make up excuses to me as to why he made certain moves (like the Rhys and Matt votes) instead of being honest with me. Looking back, I did the exact same thing to other people so this is just that coming back to bite me. But back on track, if anything makes Benj not deserve to be here, it's that he didn't play a traditionally agressive game with big moves and generally didn't make as big of risks as I did to get here.

3. If I got voted out at final eight, I imagine toby would've went home at 7 or 6 depending if he played the idol or not, and that Rhys would be gone pretty soon after too. In a f5 of Sam, Matt, Jenna, Benj, and Nicole, I could've seen Jenna, Benj, and Nicole teaming up to the top 3, and we would've probably seen a final 2 of Benj and Jenna or Benj and Nicole.

4. Matt definitely deserves to be up here. He did an extremely good job of playing the UTR role and had a good social game with a lot of the jury members. Had Matt been able to convince Sam to keep him at final four, I believe he would've been in great contention to win at the end. Another person that deserves to be up here is Jenna. I know a lot of yall slept on her in the game, but despite her being very busy she was very intentionally playing a UTR game and was very rarely out of the loop strategically. Jenna is also a very good FTC preformer and if she was here I'd definitely be scared for my chances.

5. I believe that the jury can never pick a wrong person to win the game. The whole point of Survivor is that the jury is allowed to use any criteria that they want to decide the winner, and any criteria for votes is considered valid. If yall pick Benj to win or pick me, you will not be making a wrong choice, you are making what you feel is the best choice, and the finalists should repsect whatever decision yall make as a group.

I hope all of this helps you make your decision. You most out of everyone got to see the passion I had for this game, and I really hope that you reward me for all the hard work that I put into this.

I appreciated our rivalry in the game and playing with you is something I'll never forget.

Thanks again!