Big Brother 10: Why Ollie Lost

Ollie was the second houseguest voted out on double-eviction night, but it really only hastened the obvious. Ollie was an almost-certain target if he didn’t win HOH or the veto, and his super-fast eviction may have just made things a bit easier (especially given the tantrum he threw earlier). But that still leaves us with the question: Why did Ollie lose?

Even though Ollie’s eviction took place in under and hour, we still look into it the same way as usual – that is, looking through What Big Brother 10 Houseguests Should Have Learned to figure out where Ollie went so wrong.

To Ollie, the first rule of Big Brother seemed to involve attaching himself at the hip to April. However, the real first rule that he should have known involved scheming and plotting, not kissing and… well, anyway.

Ollie seemed to have an inkling of understanding to this effect. Indeed, we saw that he agreed to a very early deal and then led the charge in going back on it and forcing Brian’s eviction. Good for him in terms of making the deal; good for him in realizing that it might not be in his best interest to keep the deal. But I have to wonder how much of that decision was made with his brain and how much with a different part of his anatomy.

Once Brian was out, any strategy Ollie had pretty much went with him. Indeed, even his answer about strategy in my interview with him left a lot to be desired. What was his strategy? “Not to make many enemies.” Please. That’s not a strategy! He might as well have said, “To breathe, eat, drink, and sleep.” I mean, duh.

But “duh” was pretty much how Ollie played the game. He followed April around and was a strategic non-entity until she left. Suddenly, he decided then that he had to play. Unfortunately, he really had no idea what to do. So he made a deal with Dan that, if it had been followed, would have been great! But it was simply stupid for Ollie to believe that Dan would adhere to the terms of the deal, to Dan’s own detriment. A strategically-intelligent player would have realized that.

Indeed, Ollie was so strategically-impaired that he even told me, “My relationship with April actually helped my game.” I don’t see how he can say that, but there it is. In fact, not only is it ridiculous to say, but it’s also a violation of the second rule! That rule specifically notes that players need to avoid creating obvious duos. And nobody has ever been more obvious than April and Ollie.

What’s perhaps worse is that Ollie didn’t even learn his lesson. When April left, he stayed partnered up in an obvious fashion with Michelle. There was no way Ollie could even pretend to be interested in joining another alliance or trying to crack his way into the majority group. So after Michelle left and the quickfire HOH and veto competitions occurred, his eviction was a certainty.

The third rule tells players they need to pretend to be nice. I’d say that most of the time, Ollie was a nice guy. Indeed, he was nice enough that Renny made a strategic error and failed to nominate him against April when she had the chance (April still ended up leaving, but it could have worked out quite differently). But Ollie also showed a darker side when Dan broke the deal, as Ollie threw and broke various objects in the house. I doubt this was a major factor in the decision to evict Ollie, but let’s face it, it couldn’t hurt. I mean, here the houseguests were given the opportunity to get rid of him immediately, without having to face a whole week of his behavior. Off he went!

Fourth is to not allow your emotions to control you. Just as his allies, April and Michelle, couldn’t follow this rule, neither could Ollie. As I noted with April, obviously, his emotions (or at least certain parts of his body not including his brain) ran amuck when it came to April. So that certainly put him in a bad position.

But it was more than that. Ollie followed his emotions in making the deal with Dan. If he had been thinking straight, he would have known from the beginning that the deal was far too good to be true. But he wasn’t – he was running on emotions and continued to do so for the entire week. Then, when Dan broke the deal, those emotions overflowed into the throwing/breaking tantrum we saw.

The fifth rule says not to be too much of a threat. Obviously, Ollie was no strategic threat. However, as I said in regards to Michelle, Ollie was a threat to the majority simply because he was in a different alliance. And sure, if he made it to the final two with one of them, he could have been a threat to win it all due to the number of his allies in the jury. But both of those are simply outgrowths of the two-alliance structure, not anything really particular to Ollie himself. So he wasn’t a threat in the usual sense.

Sixth is to be flexible. Ollie was about as flexible as a concrete block. There was never any way he was going to go against April. And since she wasn’t going against Michelle, that was another way he couldn’t be flexible. Ollie could never look at the house and make a decision on which way to go – that was all decided for him.

The seventh rule is key to Ollie here, as it says players should trust nobody. We will never know for sure whether Ollie could have outlasted Dan in the HOH competition, but Ollie was just plain wrong to trust Dan to carry through on the deal they made to end it. Indeed, Ollie should have felt lucky just to not be nominated. As it happened, he went out the same night as Michelle anyway, but he could have been the first one out the door. Trusting deals from opposition alliance members in an endurance challenge has historically shown to be a bad idea, and Ollie should have known better.

But really, Ollie should have known better in a lot of different areas, from the need to scheme to the bad (strategic) idea of pairing up with April. Overall, he simply didn’t play the game for much of his time in the house, instead preferring to direct his attention to April. Then when she left, he found himself in a position of weakness, trying to negotiate as if he had strength. He never should have believed it would work. We don’t know if he could have outlasted Dan, so we can’t say the trust issue is the reason Ollie lost – and we don’t need to. His failures in rules one, two, four, and six provide ample reason to explain why Ollie lost.

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David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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