Survivor: The Greatest of All Time – An Introduction

What makes a Survivor player great, and which player deserves to be crowned the Greatest of All Time? All of this started with that fairly simple question addressed to my fellow RNO writers. Many players of the game have been quick to bestow the title on themselves, usually before asking a question as a member of the jury. Others have been given the title with a conditional, such as Greatest to Never Win the Game. Surely, with ten years of competition to look back on, we could examine the pedigree of these players and determine who in fact deserves the title of the greatest player to ever play the game.

Anyone who’s spent some time reading Survivor articles here on RNO over the last few seasons knows that opinions about what makes a worthy winner vary wildly among the RNO staff. While we respect each other’s opinions, we have different senses of what makes a player “the best.” Even where we have similar criteria, how we grade the actions of players against those criteria often varies as well.

The complete list of RNO writers who contributed to this project are listed below. This article wouldn’t be half as interesting if so many hadn’t been willing to pitch in.

Jenn Brasler
Jeffrey Clinard
Sarah Freeman
Chris Harris
William Hammon
Shane Revelle
Sting 7
Brian Towers
Christian Williams
Eileen Witker

What Does It Take?

In order to crown a player as “The Greatest,” we first asked each of these writers to send us their answer to the question: “What makes a player great?” While each of us emphasized certain criteria over others, there was a fair amount of overlap across our lists. Below you will find the consolidated criteria of the various writers on what exactly qualifies a player as the best ever. While these criteria don’t reflect the exact views of any one writer, they do reflect that average of those opinions, and were borne out by our voting.

Victory: While there were a few dissenters, the majority of our roundtable agreed that to truly qualify as one of the best ever, you have to win the game. While you can make an argument that several great players have fallen short of the prize due to bitter juries, bad luck, or the strategic missteps of other players, the ultimate proof was exhibited by our voting.

Only a single competitor who did not win the game received a vote as the Greatest of All Time. Several players with great reputations but no wins were left off the list by the majority of our panel entirely. In the end, only a few of our RNO panelists ranked non-winners in their top five, and only two non-winners received enough votes to finish in the top ten. Chris Harris probably put it best:

Well, first and foremost, in order to be the best, you have to actually WIN. I think you can put people like Rob C., Russell, and Cirie in the category of “among the best” for having dominated their seasons strategically – and maybe Panama’s Terry or Cook Islands’ Ozzy for dominating physically – but they can’t be at the top.

Outwit: There have been players of Survivor who’ve gotten deep in the game without doing any of the strategic work. These players – thanks to the work of their alliance members, challenge wins, the strategic missteps of other players, or simple dumb luck – have made it to the jury phase, the final Tribal Council, and on at least one occasion stood tall as the sole Survivor. The voting panel didn’t give much weight to players who advanced in the game by default. One of my favorite RNO writers, William Hammon, put it best when he summed up this item in the list of our criteria:

The strategic game. How can you manipulate your opponents to vote the way you want them to? Are you able to blindside? Can you systematically eliminate the biggest threats to your game existence?

The importance of this category is why some very good non-winners didn’t make our lists. Each move a player makes has to be motivated by both short-term and long-term consequences, to ensure that the player survives the current vote and that the resulting tribe will carry that player even further into the game.

Outwitting also means knowing when to not make a move, when to let your alliance have their way and avoid creating resentment. Survivor is a continuous game of mental chess, where your moves, the moves of your opponents, and your opponents’ feelings all have to be balanced on a board that exists only in your head. All of the players on every season have faced physical exhaustion, but it’s the test of having to be “on” for 39 consecutive days that most players fail.

Outplay: A great mental game will get you far, and will let you put yourself in a position to advance to the finals. But to paraphrase an old saying, “The best-laid plans of Survivor players are often wrecked by the ‘challenge monster.’” The legend of the “challenge monster” started with Colby, who was a physically dominant competitor and an intense performer.

That mantle was passed on to Ozzy and, in recent seasons, Jud / Fabio. Jud in particular shows the havoc that a challenge monster can play in the plans of a strategic player. Jud won challenge after challenge while his opponents could do nothing but sit back and watch their plans fall apart. Eventually Jud “stole” a victory from Sash Lenahan, who most would concede played a better strategic game. That’s where being able to outplay your opponents comes in, as Jenn Brasler put it:

I’ve seen more of The Amazing Race than I have of Survivor, and though the two shows are very different, I think Phil Keoghan has some words of wisdom that can be applied to Survivor. Every season, he tells us that the winning team needs to have the right combination of brains and brawn to succeed. I think a successful Survivor player needs the same. Survivor is a game that requires strength – physical, emotional, and mental – as well as brains. If you’re physically strong but not savvy enough to negotiate the team dynamics or formulate successful strategies, you won’t get anywhere. If you’re smart and socially adept, you’ll go far, but brains won’t always win you challenges.