Survivor: Fiji – Why Edgardo Lost

For much of the game so far, Edgardo seemed to be in a prime spot. He was in a tight alliance that was controlling the game, while he did not seem to be the one in charge, and should therefore have been less likely to be targeted. But Edgardo’s alliance was double-crossed and then the double-crosser was also crossed, with Edgardo taking the fall. How could things have gone better for Edgardo? What might he have done to prevent this outcome? Why did Edgardo lose?

The vote leading up to Edgardo’s game demise was rather chaotic, but we can bring order to the chaos by looking back at What Fiji Survivors Should Have Learned and going through step-by-step to get some satisfactory answers.

As always, the first and most important rule is to scheme and plot. Edgardo knew this well, as he told me in my interview with him that his strategy was to form an alliance with somebody he trusted and to stay in the background so it looked like the other person was making the decisions. While it is the second rule that specifically note, “do not let it be known that you are the decision-maker,” it’s appropriate to mention it here as well, because that was all part of Edgardo’s plan.

Edgardo paired up with Alex and formed a good team. While still on Moto, they also brought in several other loyal people, including Lisi and (they thought) Boo and Stacy. When the tribes were mixed up and both Alex and Edgardo ended up on Ravu, they once again set to making new allies. And again it worked for the time being.

But once the merge hit, they found themselves in a minority. Yes, they had Mookie and supposedly Dreamz. Yes, they supposedly still had Stacy too. But none of these people were particularly trustworthy at this point. More importantly, their previous allies – Lisi and Stacy, in particular – had managed to alienate Dreamz and Cassandra, ensuring it would be difficult to make solid plans with them.

Edgardo and Alex did the best with the scraps he had left. They had Mookie – at least for now. They thought they could hold on to Dreamz for at least one vote. They knew Stacy had become a lost cause. So their best hope was the sneaky plan of using Dreamz as a mole and finding out who needed to have the hidden immunity idol. Well, that would have been their best hope if Dreamz hadn’t turned out to be a double-agent who wasn’t even trusted fully by the people whose team he really wanted to be on!

Basically, Edgardo had the right idea in terms of scheming, but he just didn’t do enough of it. We’ll get to that more in discussing the third rule.

But first, the second rule, which says not to scheme and plot too much, to keep your scheming secret, and not to backstab too soon. Let’s go in backwards order. First, it could be argued that voting out Lisi was, as Edgardo told me, a mistake. Keeping her around would have meant having somebody loyal (and it would have also been more likely that Stacy would have stuck with them). However, Lisi was also, in Edgardo’s words, “unstable.” At that point, she had gone bonkers. She wanted to go, then she didn’t, then she did, etc. I don’t think they had any choice but to vote her out.

As for keeping their scheming secret, Edgardo certainly didn’t do a very good job of that, though it wasn’t all his fault. He and Alex told Mookie not to say anything to Dreamz about the hidden immunity idol. But Mookie opened his mouth. They trusted (well, at least they hoped) Dreamz would not divulge this information to the other alliance. That didn’t go their way either. But even without all the secret-spilling, it was obvious that Edgardo and Alex and Mookie were together. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind because they didn’t really do anything to cover it up.

Finally, did Edgardo scheme and plot too much? I don’t think so. That wasn’t really an issue here.

With that, we arrive at the third rule, where I already mentioned we’d further discuss some of what Edgardo could have done differently. This rule tells players to be flexible and has a particularly-important part of it boldfaced in big print:

That, however, is precisely what Edgardo did. He bound himself to Alex and never considered that if everybody else was potentially jumping ship, he might need to start swimming on his own too. He already knew that Stacy was a lost cause. And he suspected that Dreamz was as well. But apparently, he didn’t expect Dreamz to move as quickly as he did. I’m not sure why he wouldn’t, especially given that they were targeting Cassandra, Dreamz’ main tie to the other group.