Survivor: Gabon – Why Bob Won

Bob was the last of the onion alliance – and he wasn’t ever really in the onion alliance, because they planned to sacrifice him first! Instead, he took home the first place money! Bob certainly looked like dead meat several times over, but kept pulling through. The question is how. Well, really the question is: Why did Bob win?

Throughout this entire 17th season of Survivor, we’ve looked at why each player before Bob failed to make it where Bob ended up. Now it’s time to turn the tables a bit and use the same methodology of looking through What Gabon Survivors Should Have Learned to examine Bob’s success.

Right off the bat, we start with an area where some it didn’t look like Bob was very strong – scheming and plotting and overall strategy. Throughout the game, Bob allowed other people to make decisions and he went along with them. Indeed, even when questioned about it at the final Tribal Council, he said clearly that he was not some sort of game mastermind.

But he did have a strategy. As he told me when I interviewed him, “My strategy was to let other people step up to the plate. Everybody who stepped up to the plate got whacked by the pitcher. That was a strategy. They consider a strategy to be planning it all out. My strategy was to stay under the radar and when I needed to win challenges, to win challenges.”

I’m afraid that I fall into the “they” category described by Bob – I consider a strategy to be more planning it out. Staying under the radar can be a legitimate strategy, but planning to just win challenges when needed really isn’t. Yes, Bob was a challenge god, but it didn’t have to be that way. One small move in many of the challenges was all it would have taken for him to lose. Or if the challenges had come in a different order, such as the house of cards challenge being earlier. It just reminds me too much of Big Brother contestants who say, “OK, all we have to do now is win the HOH and Veto competitions for the next three weeks, and we’re golden!”

The fact is that there were a number of more strategic players than Bob who engaged in a lot more scheming and plotting. Marcus, Charlie, and Corinne formed the onion alliance. Bob just joined in. Ken formed the underdog alliance, which carried Bob along for a while as well.

That’s not to say Bob didn’t do anything. He did propose the Operation Fake Idol 2 plan to try to save Corinne. He did create the first fake idol, with the idea of letting it be seen in order to perhaps save himself. But he just didn’t go out and form alliances and help direct the way the game was going, which could have given him more control over how the game played out. Since he won, you might think he didn’t need to do that, but there are other significant factors that contributed to that win that had nothing to do with strategy, and in other circumstances, Bob would have been toast. We’ll get to those shortly.

Since I’ve already said that Bob didn’t really scheme and plot enough, it’s safe to say he didn’t have a problem with the second rule, which says not to do so too much. In fact, it’s so safe to say that we can blow right by that rule.

The third rule tells players to be flexible. Among other things, it emphasizes that they cannot just stick to one alliance and hope that it lasts. I think Bob understood this and got to a point where he was willing to go along with just about anybody who could get him a bit further in the game.

First he was with the onion alliance, and things stayed that way for a while. Then he stayed in the background while the more obnoxious and dangerous allies were systematically booted. Indeed, he was ready and willing to help get rid of Randy with the fake idol when he saw it could buy him another week (though he certainly didn’t like the way Sugar and the others reacted when it happened). Then he aligned with Ken and Crystal, then against Ken and Crystal. So I think he did a fine job in this area.

Bob also seemed able to put aside his emotions and not let them control him, thus abiding by the fourth rule. He was certainly a friendly guy, but he wasn’t about to let somebody stick around just because he liked them. Look at the Randy situation – some people would have refused to participate because Randy was a friend. But Bob understood that this is a game and he had to do what he had to do.

And like I said, he was a friendly guy – he knew how to be nice to people, as called for by the fifth rule. The only times I recall us ever seeing him not being nice were when he blew up at Sugar for her behavior and basically told super-annoying Susie to stop blathering when he believed he was about to be voted out. While Susie took offense at it, Sugar actually seemed to take it in stride, as fatherly advice.

That is a key word, actually: “Fatherly.” In Why Sugar Lost, I talked about how Sugar viewed Bob as a father figure, which was a key reason she chose to help save him in the end. But it goes beyond that.