Austin's Aloha

[austin]

Hey guys, I don't really have any hard feelings towards either of you, so congrats on making it this far.

That being said, I'm just going to ask a few things here.


1. Survivor's ultimately a game that's part strategy, part social , part physical (although all 3 could be considered part of strategy), and part luck. I'd like you guys to give me a notable example of how each benefited you in the game.

2. Do you think the kind of game you played would have changed if you wound up on Tocola instead of Rhaeli? Why/Why not?

3. Since the Final 9 all are guaranteed to have some impact on this final Tribal, pick a number between 1 and 9.


Also, just an individual bit for each of you.



Mary: Were you ever at any point even remotely considering seriously doing that Final 4 deal you offered Naonka and I? I have no qualms about it either way, for the record, I'm just curious on if you were, and why or why not.


Hayden: Were you you ever actually seriously considering my offer at Final 4, or was your mind about 100% made up the entire way through?



Thanks again, guys.

[Mary Sartain]

hi austin! i gotta go to bed acuse i work in the morning, but i will answer you questions as soon as i get home!

[Hayden Moss]

1. Strategy: I think some of the choices myself and my alliance made throughout the game in terms of who to vote our were very important in putting ourselves in the majority. Votes like the Trish vote were very important in putting us, and therefore me, in power.
Social: Social play is probably the most important aspect of my game. By forming the tight bonds I made early on, I was able to get people to trust me. That way, when I approached them with ideas on who to vote out, they would go along with it. Also, I think my social game was very important in Mary taking me in the end.

Physical: While physicality is not as important to me as it was to Marys game (though I did win one immunity which people shouldn't forget ) I think my participation in challenges was very important to my tribe. If Rheali didn't win as many challenges as they did early on, we could have gone into the merge with a much lower majority, which could have completely changed the game.

2. I think the fact that I would be playing with different people alone would have changed my game. What I was concerned with was forming relationships with people so that they would want to take me to the end. So by being with different people, I would have to form different bonds. Theres also the case of being on a tribe that went on a losing streak, though, if I was in place of one of the people who didn't show up, the losing streak might not have happened.

3. Five.

And of course, I absolutely considered the offer you made me. You made a very convincing case. I truly think that, on paper, me voting with you would have been my smartest move. However, because I knew the relationships I had built with Mary and JT, and trusted them both to take me if I didn't win immunity, I didn't believe it was necessary. And, as I'm sitting here now, I think I made the right decision.

Thanks for your questions Austin!

[Mary Sartain]

~ Mary responds for Austin ~ 

hi austin! neat questions!

Sept 12, 2014 1:26:02 GMT -5 austin said:

1. Survivor's ultimately a game that's part strategy, part social , part physical (although all 3 could be considered part of strategy), and part luck. I'd like you guys to give me a notable example of how each benefited you in the game.

strategy: i think strategy was always at the forefront of everything i did, so it's hard to pick a specific moment. i think i would probably have to say that the round that eliza left was probably the biggest strategy session of the game for me, because it was when i had to bring together my alliance with you and na and my alliance with jt and hayden, and get everybody comfortable with working together so that we could pull off the trish blindside the next round. getting people talking and making sure we were all on the same page wasn't as big or dramatic of a move as, say, helping pull in the votes the round that bubba left, but i think it was the most significant moment in the sense that it laid out all of the connections that i would use throughout the rest of the game and set the whole thing in motion.

social: the bonds that i formed with you and nay during the swap helped pave the way for a lot of the moves that were made at the merge. i don't think i can claim the credit for how you guys decided to play the game, but i do think that if i hadn't pursued that and bonded with you guys, that you guys could have flipped at any point in those first three gone councils and stuck with trish, or with bubba, or with sarita, and wound up taking rheali out of the picture. so not only did that keep me from going home at the swap, but it also wound up benefiting you guys and getting you to the final five, and could have gotten you to the final three if amanda hadn't disappeared.

physical: i think the fact that i stepped it up in the early challenges and showed myself to be a good contributor was a great factor in my game. by showing that i was a capable player, but not necessarily a threatening one, i attracted people like hayden and jt and bubba to want to work with me. they knew i would be a solid ally and wouldn't flake out and disappear on them the way that people like t-bird did, and that helped me form the bonds that influenced how things went from there. winning the final three challenge was also a huge benefit to me in the game. not only did it get me to the finals and finally break up the boys, but it forced hayden to show everybody his true colors when he immediately threw jt under the bus and started spewing all kinds of ridiculous unnecessary lies to try and get me to keep him. 

luck: i've already addressed this in my response to nay, but the amanda vote was basically pure luck. that was where the battle lines were drawn, you guys tried everything you could think of to get me to vote hayden, i tried everything i could think of to get you guys to vote amanda, and neither of us was budging. if amanda hadn't self-voted, you guys would have won out and had numbers, hayden would have gone home, and i would have been at a massive strategic disadvantage. it's only pure luck that saved hayden's butt and got me and my allies safely through that round and gave us the majority going into the final five. 

2. Do you think the kind of game you played would have changed if you wound up on Tocola instead of Rhaeli? Why/Why not?

oh, absolutely. if i had been on rheali, i would have had to seriously reconsider everything. i think that with all of the inactives we'd still have gone on a losing streak even if i'd been there in place of erik or tasha, and that would have changed things up dramatically. i'm not sure whether i would have stepped it up in the challenges, or whether i would have laid low to try and keep the target away from myself so that i could unleash at merge and surprise everyone. i think i would have wound up in a threesome with you and nay, and it basically would have been us three against the world going into the merge. i think with us three as a unit, we either would immediately have gotten picked off for being huge threats, or we would have managed to pull off an amazing underdog comeback and been the world's most awesome final three. (especially if nay had found the idol clue and shared it with me.) 

3. Since the Final 9 all are guaranteed to have some impact on this final Tribal, pick a number between 1 and 9.

6. it's my lucky number. 

Mary: Were you ever at any point even remotely considering seriously doing that Final 4 deal you offered Naonka and I? I have no qualms about it either way, for the record, I'm just curious on if you were, and why or why not.

i absolutely considered it. i didn't just make deals for the heck of it. i've seen it a lot of times where a tribe will be really tight pre-swap, but then if they have majority after the merge, the ones who stayed on the tribe the whole time will wind up banding together against the ones who were switched to the other team for a bit. so me there was a definite worry that bubba, trish, hayden and amanda could have formed some kind of group that jt and i weren't a part of, and that if i went with all rheali to the end that i could get picked off for that reason. i also always knew that jt was more loyal to hayden than he was to me, so i basically spent the whole game preparing myself in case the two of them tried to make a move against me. so going into the merge, obviously you and na were huge threats, and you both would have kicked ass against a jury, there's no denying that, but still did what i could to keep you guys safe so that we could both be saved in case jt and hayden got greedy. 

you guys were also way more talkative and social than hayden and jt were, so i thought about going deep with you guys just for that reason alone. but i think the point where i started to realize that that probably wasn't a good idea for me was at final six when i asked you to be my partner in the challenge. almost an entire day later you pmed me back saying nay had already asked you, which i really was skeptical of. i was pretty sure i had asked you first, and that nay hadn't even been online in between when the challenge was posted and when i pmed you, so it seemed like you two wanted to be together to keep yourselves safe and you were bs'ing me about it. i really didn't blame you for that, but that definitely suggested to me that you guys didn't trust me to keep you safe. it also meant that you guys were a very tight pair, which meant that nay probably wasn't actually going to take you out at four like she'd been telling me she would. so to me that suggested that i was very definitely the third or fourth wheel to very tight pair of huge social and physical threats, and that made it unbelievably risky to think about going to the final four with you. and, sure enough, you guys tried to pull in amanda and break up the threesome, so i was forced to pick a side and stick with it, and there didn't seem to be any going back from there. 

for what it's worth, even then i wasn't entirely committed to taking you out. after nay left i was thinking very strongly about flipping at final four and giving you a shot at a tiebreaker, but you posted your plea to hayden before i got a chance to say anything to you about it. that stopped me from going ahead with it, because i figured if i did flip, there was a huge risk that hayden would piggyback on my move and flip as well, and then i would be in the same two-against-one position, except that now hayden would be extra pissed at me, and you would be doing the final three challenge. since i'd done my research on previous seasons and figured out that it was almost definitely going to be endurance, i really didn't want to get into that scenario since you seemed to be online way more than anyone else, and you'd probably have kicked ass at that challenge and sent me home. 


thanks for the questions, austin! let me know if there's anything else you want to know! 

[austin]

All right, thanks for the answers!