Okay hello all. First I wanna do the obligatory thank you to the hosts and players because what's a good jury speech without one + thanks to everyone who messaged me during the season and let me rant to them :). Also I waited before posting to make sure Nick City couldn't respond to my speech but since I'm going out I guess I'm FORCED to go first!!!!
On top of that, I wanna apologise to anyone whose feelings I hurt. Yap and Mackie, I realise there's probably almost no chance of me getting either of your votes, which is fine and I honestly don't deserve them based on our interactions but please realise everything I said and did against you was entirely motivated by game intentions and not personal dislike. If I did upset or anger you then that was never my intention and I hope there's no hard feelings between us and we can move on from it after the game! I never ever have the intentions of hurting people in these games and outside of them, for the past few years, I've been working on becoming a much better and kinder person, and I do genuinely believe I've succeeded. Although this did make me giggle, and I realise it was done for comedic reasons…
Mackie said, “The most fatal error I made in the All Stars house was...”
B. Thinking Jamie had a moral compass.
… I did kinda feel shitty reading it. My intention was not to upset or annoy anyone at any point, sorry if I did that to anyone.
When the game began, I wanted to put my best foot forward and talk to everyone, giving myself a lot of options. In the first couple weeks for example, I was never brought up as a target and I only actually began to be brought up as a potential person to target in later weeks because of the very fact that I wasn't on the top of anyone's target list. I wanted to slide somewhat under the radar for this portion of the game, I won an irrelevent PoV and almost won a HoH (during which I would've targeted the players in the middle and left the stronger players to go after each other), but most of the time I took bribes to avoid competition wins and stack up advantages for myself. The HoH and PoV advantage both were used by me as a bartering chip and I held onto them as long as possible just so I would appear more threatening. The vote spy as well, although I never actually used it, I was able to craft a narrative in my HoH reign that allowed me to target Yap and hide the fact that Conor told me the information that Yap voted Hannah.
But of course the most important bribe I took was the DPOV clue. The DPOV allowed me to play more fearlessly. I didn't really care who knew and who didn't, and I said this to a few people at the time including Conor: if people didn't know I had it then I could make people trust me by telling them confidential info, and if people did know then I could use it as a tool to threaten people with and scare people away from targeting me. I told people that I had it to try to get them to trust me and make them think I was very close to them, which I think did work for a lot of people, and before it was all exposed I think I had told maybe 7 people of the 11 still in the game. Though of course, I did try to hold onto the DPOV as long as possible just so I appeared more threatening and people were scared away from targeting me. I realise this could be used as a criticism against me, but part of the reason that I think I'm benefitted by having Nick as a final 2 opponent is that any criticism that I relied on my DPOV is outweighed by the fact that Nick relied on a returnee competition to even be sitting here at the end. Even if jurors do believe I relied on the DPOV/twists (which I'll attempt to disprove in a minute), this is, in my opinion, incomparable to relying on a returnee comp.
Unfortunately though I am worried that there will be a narrative that I wasn't targeted only because of the DPOV, I know Ali mentioned this before her elimination but I want to prove that's not true. For the first half of the game, I still wouldn't have been targeted even if I didn't have the DPOV. I set myself up very well, I was loosely aligned to BAMMN and also had my JADC (Jamie Ali Dom Conor) alliance to position myself well on the other 'side'. There is clear evidence that I was set up well, for example in the HoH I won, the competition where everyone had to choose between Apple, Banana, Cherry, etc - I won it because everyone gave me their info, either directly or through other people, and I even had 3 people willing to throw it to me because they thought I wouldn't target them (Ain, Mackie and Conor). There was not one round before Mackie's HoH that I would've been targeted without the DPOV (and Mackie claimed to me he wouldn't have targeted me in his HoH even if I didn't have the DPOV), and that's because the only person who was properly targeting me for a large portion of the time I had the DPOV was Yap, to my knowledge. All of this is indicative of my ability to form social connections, and my social game carried me through most of the first half of the season.
But my social game was not entirely detached from my strategic game. Like I mentioned before, I had my JADC alliance and alliance with Nick/Mackie until the double in which Nick was eliminated. On top of that, I had informal agreements with Brian, Alex, Hannah and Marie throughout the game, and was on good terms with almost everyone to the point that I was not nominated until the final 4, at which point nominations become redundant anyway. I do believe that my own social positioning put me in a spot where for most weeks, it didn't matter who won HoH as I was safe regardless, and like I've already said, this allowed me to go unnominated for an extremely long time, infact I was only first nominated 6 rounds after Nick had already been evicted for the first time. Moreover, I knew what was happening most weeks and always worked to ensure that what I wanted happened, not what other people wanted. Although I tried to hide this by blaming stuff on other people. When I wanted my own way and targeted others, for example Yap at final 11, instead of claiming the move as my own, I tried to craft the perception that my moves were caused by others influencing me. This might've gone too far in certain instances, I know Nick and Mackie both discussed how easily manipulated I was, and maybe in certain instances I was manipulated, but generally every move I made was my own move and independent of outside influence. This can also be seen at the final 8, when I wanted Yap gone once again, but I blamed my decision to keep Alex over Yap on the fact that Conor was mad at me. While I felt bad, if I genuinely viewed Alex as a bigger threat to my game than Yap, I would have voted him. But I knew Alex was a target to Nick and Mackie (at that point, I perceived them as the biggest threat since they were close), whereas Yap was a number for them, and I wanted them weakened so I kept Alex. This materially benefitted me the week after, when Nick won HoH and targeted Alex - I don't think he would've done the same if Yap was there, and there's a chance I could've entered final 5 with all of Nick, Mackie and Yap, and finding myself in a 3-2 minority. Yet, like I said, I outwardly blamed this on my guilt of betraying Conor, which helped paint me as way more innocent in it than I actually was.
This once again occurred during my HoH week. Yap didn't understand entirely why I targeted him, but I targeted him for a couple of reasons. At final 11, I had allegiances with Nick, Brian, Conor, Mackie, Alietta and Domonique, leaving my options reduced to just Alex, Yap, Ain and Eva. Of those 4, I viewed Yap as the most dangerous because he was clearly good at competitions, positioned well socially and strategically competent, but he was not being targeted as frequently as Alex and Ain, while Eva seemed somewhat detached from the game, making him the most logical person to target in my mind. Yet I blamed this move on misinformation I'd been told, as well as the vote spy, so that I could escape getting the main blame for the move.
Then during the latter half of the season, I realised I wouldn't be online as often as I was previously so I had to work through actions rather than words. I do think it's noteworthy that the final 4 were people who I had shown I trusted through my actions in the latter half of the season - Brian I saved through the DPOV as well as not nomming him when it was only Alietta and him as the options, Conor was my closest ally throughout the entire game, and Nick I saved from eviction with the veto twice. I do believe that I engineered the final 4 to be exactly what I needed to get to the end - the crucial competitions are at f4 and f3 and yet, despite winning none of them, I believe I was almost guaranteed to reach the f2. At final 4, it didn't matter who won PoV because I was safe, and at final 3, I do believe both of Brian and Nick would've taken me (although I'm genuinely curious on whether Brian would have - at first I didn't think he would, but the fact Nick wouldn't give a concrete answer on who he'd take to f2 might have tipped Brian into favouring me, please tell me if you would've in your speech Brian!!!!).
This should hopefully explain a lot of my actions though. While I made promises to Mackie, I knew he would cut me eventually, and I thought the same for Alex and Alietta, hence why I chose to prioritise people I had shown my trust through big actions. These 3 in particular I viewed as people who wouldn't respond positively to me acting like they 'owed' me anything. What i mean by that is, I think Mackie, Alex and Alietta would have cut me if it benefitted them the most, regardless of whether I had stuck my neck out to save them repeatedly. I'm not saying that as a negative, I'm exactly the same way as a player where I would cut someone if it benefitted me more even if they'd have helped me in the game, but I did perceive it to be that way. There were very few opportunities for me to turn around situations in the last half of the game through my social game, so I had to work with the social momentum I had created in the first half of the game and through explicit actions, like saving Nick and Brian with vetoes. So while I angered a lot of the cast by saving Nick, I viewed it as something that was worth it because I needed people that were definitely going to be looking out for me as they 'owed' me in a way. That's also why I used it at final 8 despite Brian probably staying regardless, heading towards the endgame I wanted to have someone in the game who I could say 'I used my DPOV on you!!!' to.
I also got a lot of information from Conor. Conor played amazingly this season in my opinion, I really think he was the deserving person to win this season and he had so much information. I used this information (and the ways in which he got it) to inform a lot of my decisions - for example, I knew Alex was giving Conor a lot of information, which was part of the reason I wanted Alex gone during the triple, as he would probably have chosen Conor over me and I needed people to be working in my best interests. The same is true for Alietta, she told Conor that Mackie had told her false information so she didn't trust me, so I worked to engineer the argument between Mackie and Alietta (during which Alietta quit) to deflect attention away from me, allowing me to get everything in the open and get Mackie and Ali against each other, but both with me. While I never intended for it to go that far and for Ali to quit, hence why I spoke to Ali and sincerely attempted to prevent her quitting (removed completely from game intentions), I do think I engineered that in a way where no one really realised the scale of which I had caused the entire blowup. This is partly why I was so close to Conor, Nick told me people thought he manipulated me but he did give me a lot of useful information that I then managed to use in a way that served me the best.
My physical game wasn't particularly impressive lol, which is KINDA ANNOYING because I love winning comps in orgs. I came 2nd a lot but only won 5 competitions (1 HoH, 3 PoV and the third nom comp), 6 if you count the final HoH part 1. But I have always maintained, throughout my entire org ""career"", that I don't believe physical competitions are necessarily indicative of good gameplay, I was able to make it to the final 2 without ever needing to rely on any single competition. I think this is quite a crucial difference between mine and Nick's games - Nick needed me to win the Week 6 HoH to prevent him from being targeted after the Hannah blindside, he needed to win the HoH or PoV at the double he was evicted, he needed to win the returnee comp, he needed me to win the 2 PoVs in which I saved him (although the first one he might've stayed over Yap regardless, I know Mackie lied to me about voting to evict him), he needed to win the HoH for the triple, he needed to win the final PoV too. I was barely targeted this entire game through my own gameplay, and not once did I need to rely on a competition win. This matters in my opinion because I think that if you ran this season on brantsteele (filling in competition stats, relationships, profiles, alliances and everything else lol) 100 times, you'd find me in the final 2 a lot more often than you'd find Nick. That to me reflects solid, assured and reliable gameplay that had clear intentions and executed them appropriately. Apart from the Hannah blindside, I believe I had a role in many outcomes and was maybe overlooked in this game, until it was too late.
At the end I also tried to make myself appealing as a person to take to the final 2. I let my strategic decisions be questioned without ever once explaining them, apart from very briefly to Conor at the final 4 or final 5, when I told him that I had worked to ensure the final 4 were all people who 'owed' me/were loyal to me. I hyped up how much the jury disliked me, and while I'm sure I'm not the favourite of Mackie or Yap (which I am genuinely sorry about), I don't think I'm necessarily written off in the way I presented myself to be. But I wanted people to think I would be written off, which is even reflected in Nick's final HoH speech where he said the jury was 'bitter' towards me. As far as I know, Eva, Ain, Dom, Ali, Alex, Conor and Brian all are not bitter (though I'm sure I may be corrected with some speeches lol), but I had deliberately made sure this would be the perception I had around me.
Before I end this, I want to address a few of my shortcomings. The biggest is undoubtedly my inability to deal with confrontation. I usually don't do this in orgs, I guess a few years ago I used to be more confrontational as a person, but this season if something was awkward, I tended to just ignore it or pretend it didn't exist. This is shown mostly with Yap, after I'd targeted him during my HoH reign, our conversations just stopped. Part of this is due to events surrounding my real life, but it's also because I wanted to avoid arguments or awkward conversations where I had to tell people I wanted them gone. I did this with Mackie too, as well as Dom when I changed my mind on using the DPOV at final 8 because I suspected there was a returnee comp. To these 3, as well as any others that I may have done this to, I want to apologise. At the end of the day, I think a jury speech should hype up the positives of a player's game, but it should be honest and acknowledge shortcomings. In my mind this is the biggest shortcoming in my game, but in general I do believe I played well this season, and even would go so far as to say it's deserving of being a winning game. To briefly summarise my season in a sort of concluding way: I entered knowing very few people but positioned myself arguably in the best spot of the entire cast for the first half of the game, I never once relied on competitions and remained in a solid strategic position which saw me not get nominated until nominations became redundant anyway, I engineered the endgame cast to be exactly what I wanted it to be, and created close allegiances and friendships with many people. My gameplay is not perfect and I've never claimed it to be, but I do believe there are many more benefits than there are negatives.
I'm sure there's sutff I haven't covered which will come up in questions and I do look forward to answering them, although I am scared about being beaten down in a few speeches lol. I wanted to end this by thanking some specific people but I'm afraid it'll be seen as jury pandering so I guess I'll thank them after the season ends. Whether this ends in a win or loss, I hope there are no harsh feelings, I know I myself have no harsh feelings towards anyone and really hope people know that I'm not some evil bitch, I just play these games in an extremely selfish way. I'm a very competitive person in real life and it's one of my best qualities in many ways, but also one of my worst qualities because it unfortunately means that in an arena like these games, I can betray people quite ruthlessly and justify it because it benefits my game. While I do believe this is acceptable in the context of these online games, I know many people don't like it so I do apologise for doing that. I also wish Nick the best of luck, he's one of the greatest people on this website and even though I believe I deserve to win this season over him, I feel extremely happy and proud of him that he returned, has made it to the final 2 and didn't finish 10th in an ORG that he built himself. If it wasn't Conor, I do feel very glad that I've made f2 with Nick and if he wins then I'll consider that a deserved win. Have fun with your speeches everyone and uhhhh yeah I guess I'm done!!!!
