Survivor: Samoa – Why Yasmin Lost

Even before this edition of Survivor began, Yasmin looked likely to be one of the first sent packing. And nothing she did while at Samoa changed that. However, there were two other viable candidates to be voted out before her, and tribal leader Russell S. pushed for Yasmin to stay. So what happened? Why did Yasmin lose?

This is our first column looking at somebody booted from Galu, but the tribe of origin doesn’t change how we handle answering our questions. So we’ll follow the usual path of looking through What Samoan Survivors Should Have Learned to see if the answers are obvious or there are any hidden reasons as well.

The first rule covers the most important things a Survivor contestant should do: scheming and plotting. But in order to scheme and plot, a contestant first needs to understand the game of Survivor, and it’s clear that Yasmin did not. It was clear from Yasmin’s statements on the show that she was expecting something completely different from what should be expected on Survivor, and I asked her about that in my interview with her. She responded by admitting she didn’t really know what she was signing up for – “It did take me by surprise.” Oy! How can you go on a million-dollar reality show and not know what to expect?!

To make things even worse, she admitted she had no plan or strategy coming into the game, other than “to basically just play hard.” We’ve already seen how well that worked for the likes of Betsy and Ben, with Ben’s personality being much closer to Yasmin’s than Betsy’s was.

Ironically, though, Yasmin did seem to recognize that scheming exists on Survivor, but she just didn’t understand how to deal with it. She told me, “Survivor is like high school – if you’re on the wrong side of the clique, you’re out no matter how good you are.” She repeated this same point later, saying, “It’s one of those things where if you in the wrong clique, you’re going to go whether you shut up or be opinionated.”

In a way, she’s right and probably didn’t even realize it. Being in the right alliance (which is strategy, not “clique,” which suggests personal relationships) will help excuse a lot of other issues. If you’re lazy and you have good allies, you’ll probably get away with it. If you’re a jerk and have solid game partners, you will likely stick around. We’ve seen it countless times before and that’s why scheming and plotting is the first rule. But even as Yasmin seemed to sort of understand this, she didn’t actually do anything to get into such an alliance in order to protect herself, instead criticizing those who did and those who talked behind others’ backs. Hello, that’s Survivor!

OK, I think we can move on now. We’ll quickly note that Yasmin had no problem with the second rule because she certainly was not scheming and plotting too much or backstabbing too early (since, to her, backstabbing would apparently have been bad no matter when it occurred).

Then we can head right to the third rule, which addresses the need for flexibility. Allow me to just laugh about that one as it applies to Yasmin, because there was no way she was going to be flexible in any way, shape, or form. Just look at what she told me when I asked if she considered scaling back on her strong personality: “Not at all. I can truly say not at all. … My bio said exactly who I was and I was true to who I was. That does not bother me. For anybody who has question about why I did what I did, read my bio!” I feel like I’m seeing Popeye – “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!” Yasmin wasn’t going to change for anybody or anything, certainly not for Survivor. Eh, what’s a million dollars anyway, right?

Yasmin’s decisions were not based on strategy, they were based on how she felt, which takes us to the fourth rule. It says not to allow emotions to control you, but that’s pretty much all we saw from Yasmin. Whether it was her lecture to the Foa Foans (which she later admitted to me was “obnoxious”), getting into it with Ben, or telling Shambo she wasn’t going to do any work around camp, Yasmin was emotionally-driven. Indeed, I would say she was so emotionally-driven that even when I talked to her, we still sometimes were talking on completely different planes, as I was asking strategy and she was answering feelings and the like.

One problem with being so emotionally-driven is that it makes it hard to follow the fifth rule as well, pretending to be nice. If Yasmin didn’t like somebody, I think it was pretty evident. If she didn’t want to do something, it was pretty evident. By her own admission, she was who she was and you either could take her or leave her. Her tribe chose to leave her.

The sixth rule discusses elimination of threats. With this being the first vote for Galu, the biggest threats were really those who might cause challenge losses or discord around camp – thus the choice between Monica and Yasmin. Yasmin was apparently bad enough that they would rather have Monica and her somewhat weak challenge performance.

And that actually makes sense, in looking at the seventh rule. Galu can still sit out Monica every other challenge if they’re that worried about her, and we didn’t see or hear anything indicating that Monica was terrible every time out – just one time on one part of one challenge. So getting rid of Yasmin certainly would be removing the overall weakest link for the tribe.

To get a more complete picture, we need to pull out Appendix A, which I don’t think I’ve referenced in quite some time. It discusses the two sides of working hard – providing food wins allies and being lazy can piss people off. Yasmin obviously fell into the second group, even admitting to Shambo that she purposely wasn’t doing work. Not smart.

But when I asked her about that, she talked a lot and didn’t give me a good answer. First she complained that the producers didn’t show her and Brett working for 30 minutes and then her and Kelly working for 40 minutes. Wow. A whole hour and ten minutes out of over a week. Hoo-boy, she must have been exhausted!

So if she truly believes she did a lot of work, why did she tell Shambo what she did? I asked her that and got a total non-answer, with Yasmin changing the subject even though I asked the same question twice. To me, that’s an answer in itself – what we saw and heard from her own mouth was the same thing the others on her tribe saw.

Sometimes, players can get away with a certain amount of laziness if they have other positive attributes. Yasmin didn’t have those. She was confrontational, “sassy,” emotional, and completely non-strategic. She may have thought it all depended on being in the right clique, but survival in this game really depends on being in the right alliance – something Yasmin apparently never bothered to work on. She said herself that she was not cut out for this game, and I have to agree. Between not working and not scheming, she set herself up to leave the game quickly. That is why Yasmin lost.

Now you can follow RealityNewsOnline on Twitter! You can get up to the minute notifications on article postings and other reality TV news by following us there. So head on over to RealityNewsOnline’s Twitter page!

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out these other recent Survivor: Samoa articles here on RealityNewsOnline:

David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com. You can also now follow him on Twitter!

Be sure to sign up for our e-mail update so you can stay informed about new articles on the site! Don’t forget to take a look at the rest of the site and buy reality show stuff at our Reality TV Store!

For more news about Survivor, be sure to check out SirLinksALot: Survivor and Survivor Fever!