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If you listen to the Why ___ Lost podcast, you know that Jessica Lewis and I go through each of my Rules for winning Survivor and discuss how each player who lost – or eventually won – did in following them. After each season, I evaluate whether any tweaks need to be made or examples added to the Rules so we thought it would be interesting to do so here!
The rules actually started after Borneo as a newspaper article! I was a freelancer doing mostly book reviews, but had started writing about Survivor on a website, so I presented my editor with the idea and they went with it! Beginning in Season 2, I started writing Why ___ Lost columns on that same website. The first set of Rules was highly based on how Richard Hatch had won, and a lot of that has remained in the core through the years. Certain Rules have moved around in importance or even been removed completely, such as Providing Food Wins Allies. Others were clarified or emphasized, such as when I added Play the Social Game to the title of my Pretend to Be Nice Rule as emphasis after Russell Hantz’s back-to-back losses.
Once I started podcasting Why ___ Lost on RHAP with Rob almost ten years ago (it was originally him and me!), the Rules continued to change as the game itself did. It wasn’t until after Jessica joined me that the Rules solidified into their current state. They can’t change now because she worked with Erik Reichenbach to create our Rules Poster, below. However, I still make minor tweaks almost every season.
While the Rules Poster is just one large page, the full Rules themselves take up many pages on RobHasAWebsite.com – over 30 pages in my Word document! There are still a fair number of people who go through the whole thing and even players who sneak them into the Survivor pregame, such as Rob himself back in the day and even more recent players like Voce, Cassidy, and Carson. Those are where my smaller changes come in to address both general trends in the way we see the game changing and specific things that players have either done very well or… not so well. Admittedly we don’t update the website every season and I generally save them up. But as seasons have gone by, I keep notes about what needs to be changed in the next version, so let’s take a look at the most important ones here!
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We start with the first Rule, which tells players to scheme and plot. There is a fair amount of discussion about using alliances and sub-alliances within the game, and I added a paragraph about Survivor 44’s Carson because the way he played was a good example people can learn from.
This additional example notes Carson had:
a spider web of relationships and information-sharing that relied upon the other people not comparing notes. He told Mike Bloom, “my big thing was separating information. If Ratu and Soka never conjoined and talked about different stuff that I had told them, that was good. As long as I kept them not wanting to talk to each other, it would work that way. And that happened with Helen and Sarah versus Carolyn and Yam Yam. It was that way throughout my entire game, putting myself in the position of the middle where people think that they're closer to me than I am with anyone else.”
Rule 2 is of course about the flip-side, not scheming and plotting too much and, importantly to the new addition, keeping your scheming secret. Part of the Rule already says, “as much as players might feel like it’s a good idea to let the targets know in case they make it to the final three and have to face those previous targets at the jury, the fact of the matter is that it’s better to risk it and at least get to the final three rather than giving your target an opportunity to turn the tables. Then you can talk to the jury about how good a player you were, and hope they buy it. This is especially true nowadays with the prevalence of so many idols. You never know when your target might have one and you certainly don’t want to let them know they should plan to use it.” After last season, I’m adding in:
There was a perfect example of this in Survivor 47 when Andy was absolutely certain Rachel was getting voted out, so he started lobbying for her to give him a winning vote from the Jury at the end. The problem was, of course, she had an idol and wasn’t going anywhere! And now she understood the parts of his game that he’d kept hidden and realized she didn’t really want to sit next to him in the end!
There is another part of Rule 2 that talks about needing to keep in a person you don’t really trust for a while longer if it means keeping the alliance, and therefore yourself, secure. There are already a number of examples, but I added another one. It’s from an international season and I know not everyone is caught up with everything all over the world, so this is a modified version of what will go in the Rule:
There are some players who just don’t understand how to sit back and stay calm. There was a player in an international season I won’t mention and in only Episode 2, they felt they were being left out of an alliance even though that alliance was actually including them in discussions! Rather than wait a bit and see what happened, they revealed the alliance to the planned target and ended up getting themselves voted out instead! As another player said, the alliance offered them a life raft in the game and they set it on fire.
Skipping to Rule 4, which tells players not to let their emotions control them. There is already an example about Survivor 41’s Tiffany putting aside her fast friendship with Voce to vote him out. After Survivor 44, I wanted to add something more to clarify the situation regarding emotions in the game:
This is a good place to mention Voce and Tiffany’s later mutual friend, Carolyn Wiger, who was certainly known on the show for being emotional. However, like Voce, Carolyn had studied these Rules and she had even bought one of our posters before heading out to play! She knew that you can have and show emotions, but they can’t control your decisions! We saw a number of confessionals in which she said essentially that. So I want to emphasize that I’m not saying here that people need to be robots. Of course everyone will have emotions and sometimes will show them, but when making decisions about the game, you need to step back and put those aside to figure out your best path forward.
Skipping a bit again, Appendix A tells players to keep their end goals in mind. This section used to also be a Rule itself, about voting out the weak then the strong then the weak then the strong. I made some changes and additions to the early language to represent what we’ve seen in the New Era compared to prior seasons.
The Appendix notes: “Early on, the weak are often those who will hurt your tribe's chances in the immunity challenges or who will cause divisions in the tribe that will overall weaken the group dynamic – which will in the end hurt just as much as losing challenges.” Now it continues:
Before the New Era, there was almost always some more mixing of alliances and tribes pre-merge, but now that is much less common. As such, the best bet for staying around post-merge has typically been to have a cohesive tribe going into the merge. You don’t have to have the numbers, you have to have loyalty, even if you only have a three-person tribe by then. With that in mind, sometimes being “weak” isn’t a function of challenges but rather of alliances. It’s true that by winning the immunity challenges, your tribe stays strong and you stay away from Tribal Council. But when there is a choice of voting to keep someone who is strong in challenges but isn’t aligned with you, or someone who is weaker in challenges but will be a longterm tight ally, go with the ally. That should always be your top concern, though you need to be certain. If you’re in the very first vote, are you willing to bet your whole game that someone you’ve known for three days will be loyal to you for 23 more if they’re also terrible at challenges?
Finally, I made an addition to Appendix B because of the example we had from the end of Survivor 47. This Appendix discusses the jury phase of the game and Final Tribal Council. There are already suggestions about what to do at that point, but Rachel’s win emphasized that sometimes it doesn’t really matter what a player says by that time because the jurors’ minds are made up. This is not a criticism of jurors who do that, but rather advice to players that they need to recognize this and ensure they don’t wait til the end or do things earlier that put them in a bad position:
Players should be considering that ahead of time and setting things up the best they can so that will happen in their own favor! A great example was Rachel in Survivor 47, who came into Final Tribal Council with a situation where, as she noted, every other player in the game talked about how great she was to the jury in earlier Tribal Council. While Sam tried to argue that he was trying to make her appear to be a bigger threat and sometimes people just win immunity and you can’t do anything about it, her response was (literally) on the money as she said you can’t spend days calling someone the biggest threat and change your tune at the end. The jury won’t buy it. Even though pretty much everyone agreed Sam had an incredible Final Tribal Council, that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, determine everything. It would be like having a trial and then the jury just deciding guilt or innocence based on closing arguments. While those are certainly important, all the evidence leading up to it should be more important! Players should be judged on the entirety of their game, which means that you can’t wait until Final Tribal Council to make your case, you need to be doing it all along the way.
There we have it, the latest changes to the Rules Jessica and I – as well as a guest almost every week this season – will be using on Why ___ Lost to evaluate each player who leaves Survivor 48, and the one who wins it all!
-David Bloomberg
As Survivor 48 begins, be sure to watch for Why ___ Lost every week on RHAP: We Know Survivor! David Bloomberg is one of the original Survivor writers and has been covering the show and reality TV in general for over 24 years -- online, in newspaper columns, on his reality TV websites, and for almost ten years in podcasts. He also posts reality TV videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram as @DavidBloombergTV and talks quite a bit about the topic on Bluesky as @DavidBloomberg.
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