Stranded for Revenge

Cassandra, Sarah and Yul. You three have come as far as you can on your own. The power now shifts from the three of you to the people you had a hand in voting out.

I will now turn over to Rudy. Rudy, you have until Saturday at 11:59pm c/12:59am e to address the final 3 and ask them for as much information as you need to cast your vote. They will then have until 9:00c/10:00e on Sunday to answer anything you have asked.

The floor is yours!

Hey y'all. Congrats on doing what so many here couldn't do. Despite what the jury has said, myself included, you all deserve to be there. A king has a few questions.

Cassandra - excellent game really! You are the front runner and for good reason. You never had me fooled. You were always on my radar and someone I never really trusted. The Katie vote is officially the point where I knew you would be my biggest adversary. However, when I came to you at F7 and told you my thoughts about us being targeted, I was genuine.

I think starting with my boot, you made decisions that would force yourself into a position where you had to win immunities to make it to the end. This, darling, is not the best positioning ever in my opinion. While Andrea and I's boots can be accepted, the most egregious was Ozzy's boot. At F4, if you don't have immunity, what's your play?

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Yul - at the F7, you acted really strange towards me. You weren't calming me down or making me feel good. You weren't being the big brother you usually was towards me. You weren't being the best friend you had previously been to me all game long. I knew immediately that I had lost you. It stung a little bit especially considering how the Candice vote went down. My question to you is this: why didn't you fight for me to survive the way I fought for you when Candice had your game in her hands?
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Sarah - I'm confused by your communication style. You seemed to be very confrontational with me. Please explain to me if there was anything I did or said to warrant your accusatory tone and confrontational demeanor. I'm having a hard time justifying voting for you when our conversations were so unpleasant.

That's it for now guys. Be honest in your answers please. The king shall return.

I'm sorry we never got along, that's definitely on me. I felt like things weren't working out for you and I so I just stopped caring. I kept pushing and I feel like nothing I said sank in for you so that became negativity and resentment. That's my fault. We were in different positions, I was on the outs and you were in this near perfect position so I was jealous and angry. It was a big mistake to be cold to you and I'm sorry for that. It's definitely a me problem but I think if I was closer to you then I wouldn't be here either. I don't feel like I would have ever made it here if it weren't for the fact that people thought I was an aggro bitch so I'd say it worked out for the best.

Rudy wrote:I think starting with my boot, you made decisions that would force yourself into a position where you had to win immunities to make it to the end. This, darling, is not the best positioning ever in my opinion. While Andrea and I's boots can be accepted, the most egregious was Ozzy's boot. At F4, if you don't have immunity, what's your play?

I didn't vote Andrea. I think when you realize that there's no question that what I did was the best for me strategically. You can see in Yul's response to Ozzy that he was planning on going to the F3 with him and Rory. My guess is that Ozzy had the same intentions. Rory did realize Ozzy was a threat, but if he's keeping both him and me at F5 I'm not sure he's keeping me over him at F4. When you realize that it becomes clear that voting Ozzy at F5 was actually by far my best play. If I wait a round, I still need to win immunity to penetrate that Ozzy/Yul/Rory trio, but now I need to win against Ozzy.

Meanwhile, by playing my idol on Sarah, I secure her vote at F4. To vote me out after I saved her would've been suicide to the jury, and she knew that. She was not going to vote for me at F4. She told me this, and there was no reason to lie. Granted, I felt secure enough in my challenge performance to tell her that I was considering all my options, and I wouldn't have blamed her if she rescinded her vote at that point.

I didn't have to win immunity at F7. You were going home. I didn't have to win immunity at F6. Either Ozzy or Andrea was going home. I didn't have to win immunity at F5. Ozzy was taking me to F4, Rory wanted Sarah gone, and I had an idol. But immunity did help me so that I knew where to play my idol. I probably had to win immunity at F4. I had as many backup options as I could (was even going to play that fake idol I made at say it was the merge idol, and that Brenda's was the Bai Qi idol, and that the merge idol worked through F4...but that would've been quite the hail mary and I didn't have to do that), but, yes, my primary option was to win immunity. And I did. And I was confident I would against Yul, Sarah, and Rory. I put my money where my mouth was and I don't think that should be a flaw in my game.

To answer your actual question, you'd have to ask Sarah if she ever actually had any intention of voting with me at F4. But I also made a deal with Rory not to vote each other out, because he was convinced that she had too many jury votes on lock (I wasn't, but of course I rolled with it). You'd have to ask him if he was serious about that too. Barring immunity, barring Sarah voting with me, and barring Rory voting with me, I would've done that fake idol play, and, hell, maybe they would've bought it. It's a pretty sweet photoshop job.

Cassandra wrote:Meanwhile, by playing my idol on Sarah, I secure her vote at F4. To vote me out after I saved her would've been suicide to the jury, and she knew that. She was not going to vote for me at F4. She told me this, and there was no reason to lie.

Sarah wrote:

Cassandra wrote:Meanwhile, by playing my idol on Sarah, I secure her vote at F4. To vote me out after I saved her would've been suicide to the jury, and she knew that. She was not going to vote for me at F4. She told me this, and there was no reason to lie.

I'm not denying you weren't actually going to vote with me, but I think it's pointless to lie at F4. So I don't think you're being 100% truthful if you say you were never considering it.

Regardless, I had security besides you.

Hey Rudy. First off, let me get the ass-kissing out of the way. You were the best friend I made in this game. Your vote will not change that. Whether I get your vote to win or not, I promise we will stay in communication and we will be friends, even if I have to stalk your streams.

Yul - at the F7, you acted really strange towards me. You weren't calming me down or making me feel good. You weren't being the big brother you usually was towards me. You weren't being the best friend you had previously been to me all game long. I knew immediately that I had lost you. It stung a little bit especially considering how the Candice vote went down. My question to you is this: why didn't you fight for me to survive the way I fought for you when Candice had your game in her hands?

I'm not very good at being fake. Rory and Liliana can probably attest to that because I spent a lot of my relationship with them just bullshitting them about who I was voting. Sophie was another one; and she would call me out on it too, bless her heart. So if those people could tell I was full of it, there was no way I was going to fool you.

I knew pretty early on that you were going to be a huge threat to me. My intention in the beginning was that I was going to have Courtney be my ride-or-die. No offense, but you probably did too. You had history with her and we had just met. But when we were switched (twice) and we had to survive in the minority together for over a week, we got really close and I knew I needed you next to me. Plus, Courtney got eliminated and that changed things too.

I'll forever be grateful to you for the Candice vote. There's no question that you saved me there. I didn't claim to get here to the finals on my own. I had awesome friends stick by my side through thick and thin. But the difference between your decision to keep me, and my decision to vote you out, is this: You benefited in keeping me, and me keeping you was a clear disadvantage.

You needed me in the merge. Never mind we were friends, but strategically you needed me. You even called me your knight. There was no advantage to going with Candice and Rory, who would immediately get back together with the Faroes (or even worse, the 'blues.') You knew you could trust me and that I would be grateful to you.

But in the final 7 I was at a point where strategically, you were just not helping me anymore. Well, you were definitely helping me stay sane. But in the game, I had strong relationships with other people that were separate from my relationship with you. So to answer your question: I didn't fight for you because at that point I needed you to leave. I had already put the wheels in motions with Ozzy, Rory and others before that. Mia calling me out helped, too.

If you're basing your vote off of who was your most loyal friend, then I probably don't fit the bill. But you know better then anyone how I played this game and I think you know if you are voting based on who played this game the best, and who deserves to win, then you should vote for me.

Thank you all for your responses.

Yul. That was exactly the answer you should have given me. I hope the jury looks at that and sees your growth in this game and realizes that you played harder than what they are giving you credit for. Wishing you good luck.

Sarah I really appreciate the answer you gave me. I apologize for my visceral reaction to our relationship and take back some of the harsh things I've said about you in ponderosa. I will chock up our bad relationship to simply the stars not aligning right. I'm actually more impressed by your performance in the F3 than I thought I would be. Keep fighting. You're not out of this. Good luck.

Cassandra - on the contrary. For Sarah to keep you in the game at F4 would have been suicide imo. Thank you for your answer. I think you make a good case that you actually didn't need Immunity at F7 or F6. The other two rounds I'm a bit unsure of.

Another set of questions for everyone. Be short if possible:

What do you admire most about the games the two people sitting next to you in the F3 played?

I definitely admire Cassandra's strategic prowess. I think she handled her target really well while still playing the game extremely hard and fast. She's done a great job here.

I think Yul did a great job avoiding any real backlash or drama. The only one who was ever really unhappy with him was me and that was because I felt like he was just sitting back and watching the game happen. I admire anyone who can stay out of the way and blend in. It's a skill I fortunately lack.

Rudy wrote:Another set of questions for everyone. Be short if possible:

What do you admire most about the games the two people sitting next to you in the F3 played?

I admire Sarah's fighting spirit. I know what it's like to be on the minority with the numbers stacked against you, and I didn't succeed in the way she did this season. There are times when it would have been understandable for her to accept her fate, and she never did.

I admire Cassandra's ability to separate the strategy from emotions. I think we both had a similar approach in that way, having both voted out threatening allies over people who might not have our backs later. She kept me grounded a lot of the time because I felt like I could trust the meaning behind her words. Maybe not the words themselves, but I always felt like we knew where each other was coming from because we're both kind of game-bots. Mutual respect there, I hope.

Maybe it would have been suicide for her to take me also, but putting her in that unwinnable situation was my best shot. The alternative was going to the F4 with Ozzy, Yul, and Rory, none of whom would have taken me to the F3 with them. My best chance there was to target Ozzy, but there's a good chance he wins immunity. I felt my chances improved if I only had to win immunity against Sarah, Yul, and Rory. Yes, that was my primary route, and yes my backups were tenuous, but if I pulled it off and never even had to see if my backup plans would work, I don't think you can call that an error.

And I 100% disagree that I wasn't safe at F5 when I had an idol no one knew about. I had to win one immunity challenge in this whole game, and even then I could have tried my backup plans. I didn't need to.

As for your other question, I'll say that I admire the fact that Yul and Sarah didn't need to do that. They didn't win immunity and they put themselves in a position where they didn't have to.

More specifically:

Yul is nice as hell. He wasn't lying when he said that. He built a lot of relationships purely out of amiability, and for someone branded as a "gamebot" that's very impressive.

Sarah was tenacious. She didn't hesitate to message me, without shame, after tribals where we were on opposite sides of the vote, asking what her options were. And it worked. Her willingness allowed me to work with her eventually.

Cassandra wrote:none of whom would have taken me to the F3 with them

I should rephrase. Ozzy might have taken me, but only if he could have beaten me.

Cassandra wrote:Sarah was tenacious. She didn't hesitate to message me, without shame, after tribals where we were on opposite sides of the vote, asking what her options were. And it worked. Her willingness allowed me to work with her eventually.

Thank you all for the answers you gave me. I haven't had a chance to look over other responses but based on my questions this I think all 3 are doing well.

LAST question. As a KING, I can't really go without a question about myself. I want you each to tell me the best qualities of my game this season as well as the worse. For this one, the more descriptive, the better.

This is also a test to see how closely to paid attention to the games of others and their journey in the game.

Coming into the merge you were in a similar position as Yul and, to a lesser extent, Ozzy, but, unlike them, you managed to evade being targeted. The line you kept feeding me was, "I'm not in danger because I have relationships with other people, but I gotta look out for my boys!" Whether that was true or something you repeated until it became true, I can't say. But you had an impeccable gauge on which relationships you let others in on, and which you hid from them.

For example, I didn't realize at the time that the Katie boot made you distrust me. That's because you knew to downplay your relationship with her to me. I heard from others that you may object to her going, but when I asked you about it myself you really convinced me that you didn't mind and that you were placing a lot of trust in me with that vote. Later, when we were part of the fivesome, you knew the exact amount of negativity toward the other four that you had to share with the rest of us to convince us that you were invested in that group long-term, or at least for a few more rounds.

Ultimately, that reputation--of being the underdog who was never really in danger because of his connections--caught up with you. By the time of Survey Says, I had already started having conversations with everyone but Yul about how you were a threat to win (and apparently Ozzy had talked about that with Yul too). So when the challenge came, that was a label that you wouldn't be able to shed. Talking to me about using each other as a shield was probably the correct play for you. The problem was that I had shields in Ozzy and Andrea also, and even though you may have thought I was a bigger threat than them to win, the others hadn't quite caught on.

If I wanted to be poetic, I could say that your best qualities were also your worst qualities. You sort of crescendoed the amount of information you were willing to share as the merge progressed, so that by the time of the Vytas blindside, Andrea and I both fully trusted you. You knew to hold your tongue at the Wigles boot and the Katie boot, or else I, who admitted to you that I was playing the middle, would never fulfill my promise of pulling something off with you eventually. You knew to tell Yul about your qualms with me because he wouldn't tell me, you knew to tell me positive things about Andrea and Brenda because even though I didn't explicitly say so you gathered from everyone else that I had a good relationship with them, and you knew to express your loyalty to Yul and Ozzy to me even at the expense of appearing "too close" so that you could telegraph to me that you were good to have as an ally. This ability to gauge whom to tell what information when helped you to a certain point, but unfortunately other people started to sense that you were positioning yourself well for the endgame, while also keeping your cards a bit too close to your chest, and the game had become more transparent by then.

In terms of personality, I got no qualms. I liked when you subtly slipped in something like, "Anyway, how was your weekend? If we're gonna work together I should know something about you." That way you were implying we'd work together long-term while also changing the subject so a rejection would be out of the question for me. Anyway, after those gears were greased, I loved talking about your boyfriend, referencing RiRi, and discussing cozy towns. My conversations with you were usually more game-oriented, but I felt like that was due to a mutual recognition of similar approaches to strategy.

If I were you, I probably would've flipped with Yul at F7. I told Andrea and Ozzy that if we voted you out at F7 Yul couldn't flip at F6 without forcing a tie, whereas if we waited it could be 4-2. I'm not sure if Yul would've gone for that, though. It was certainly a tough position to be in when you were branded Most Likely to Win.

GREAT answer Cass. Thank you for the analysis. It is appreciated.

Rudy wrote: As a KING, I can't really go without a question about myself. I want you each to tell me the best qualities of my game this season as well as the worse. For this one, the more descriptive, the better.

Your best quality was your social skills. I don't even like to define it as 'skills.' It's not like you practiced to be a good dude. You're just naturally a good guy to talk to. I don't know if it's because we were in bad situations together, but you were always super easy to talk to. And not just to me, either. Everyone would tell me about different things they'd talk to you about, and it was different for everyone. Outside of personal conversations, you had a great mind for strategy. I talked in other threads about people being a rock for me. You were the rock because you always kept me grounded and focused. I'm an admittedly paranoid person (as an understatement), but you were always solid and logical. It was almost like you had a string theory thing going on because you knew who was connected to who, when and why. A lot of my information about relationships (Cass/Andrea comes to mind) came from you.

Cass is right on the money in saying that your best and worst qualities on two sides of the same coin. You would always tell people that you weren't in control as much as people thought, and sometimes that was true. But even when you weren't in control, you still had a vast network of information at your disposal and you weren't shy about sharing it with people. In a game where everyone exchanged stories with everyone else, it made you look dangerous because of how close you were to people and how much you knew. This wasn't because you were in constant control, it was because you were in contact contact. I think you just don't know how to be subtle, and in a game where the the size of your target matters, you needed to be.

Thank you for the reply Yul. Good answer. Like Cass, it helps shed some light on my game and also gives a fuller picture of how you both viewed things.

I disagree with their points. I think your worst quality is that after a while, your game seemed to become static. Like there was no getting in on whatever you had going on. I tried constantly to get something going with you but I felt like I was getting shut out at every turn and not heard. I would give my honest thought on who I thought should go home, usually Mia, and I felt like I was just being ignored. I agree that you were bad at not looking in control, but I think that's only a bad thing because there seemed to be no changing your mind. I think if you had shown slight flexibility to me, I would have worked with you.

My perception of you stayed the same through the whole merge, you were closest to Yul. You knew that was the perception but you never worked to dispel it at all at least for me.

HOWEVER, I think you are EXCEPTIONALLY good at making people feel comfortable. If I wasn't a complete bitch I think you would have hooked me in too. The conversations we did have were nice and I absolutely understand why you were in control. You are very likable and I never had any problems with that aspect of your game. It wasn't even that I was too threatened by Yul and Ozzy. I was threatened by the fact that I had no way of working within that at all because I was pretty much isolated from Ozzy. Yul hated me. You didn't trust me to give me a bone. I wish we could have worked together.

And you never mentioned all the Stranded games you played to me so I think that's a good thing.

Thank you Sarah for your response. I definitely agree that I was pretty obstinate against working with you. I didn't think I needed you which is a super arrogant thing to feel. And whether true or not, it was bad to show that side in the game.

And yes, I tried to not mention the fact that I'm Stranded ROYALTY. I don't know how successful I was at that but thank you.