A QUESTION OF TRENDS
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This is a really quick thing I put together recently, and quite frankly I'm not exactly sure where it is going. It came about through thinking about how the game is evolving (or not) and whether this is tending to favour certain types of players. In other areas of this site I have explained how, once the players are down to nine, I split the players into four overall groups.
Dominant Pair: The structure of the game naturally lends itself to two players pairing up and making a final two pact. The dominant pair are the two players that have the most support (see A Question of Leadership). Six of the first seven players that have won Survivor were in the dominant pair at this stage of the game.
Thirds & Fourths: Players in a final four pact with the dominant pair and planning to stick to that plan. Some games have had no fourths. The dominant pair plus the third and fourth compromise the dominant alliance.
Weaker Alliance: Other players, usually from the same tribe though not always, that are supporting the dominant alliance, or at least feigning support.
Weaker Tribe: Everyone else. Usually these are the players of the tribe in the minority, though there have been exceptions.
Clearly this is dynamic and can shift around, but what I did was take the final nine players from each game and plotted how they finished against the season in which they were in. Each point is coded as to the above position they were in when there were nine players left. I then added trend-lines (least-squares, linear regression fits for you math types) representing how the players in each group have been fairing over time.
Anyway, here it is.
So what does this tell us? Well one has to be careful as you can make trend lines fit any kind of crappy data and the correlation is definitely not a strong one. None the less, I think there are general trends we can observe.
The dominant pair are posed for a dethroning: Despite the fact that six of the seven winners have been from this group, there has been a steady decline in their success as increasingly they have had difficulty in getting both members of the pair into the final stages of the game. In fact, only twice has both members of the dominant pair gotten into the final two (Tina-Colby and Brian-Clay) and, not surprisingly, in both cases the jury vote was close. What is even more of a concern for these players is that in the last two games, one member of the dominant pair didn't even make the final four and were disposed in coups. Truth be told, if players play as the should, the dominant pair should almost always be disposed of before the final four and it's hopefully only a matter of time for the other players to realize that.
Thirds and fourths are no way to play: Just being happy with a final four promise is no way to play and the fortunes of these players have certainly plumetted as the game has evolved. Of course what has really hurt them recently is early attacks on players like Alex and Rupert, but even without that their records are not great. A third or fourth has never won this game and both times one has made it into the final two they lost, once in a landslide. Ironically, there seems to be no shortage of players that want to play this role thinking that hiding behind the leaders is a good way to play. Wrong!
Rise of the weaker alliance: As the game has become more aggressive, it is the weaker alliance that has benefitted the most. Though this has never paid off in one of these players winning, perhaps their time is at hand as their trend-line has now crept above that of the dominant pair. These are the players that are sitting in the drivers' seats when it comes to coup attempts, and even though three of them have made the final two in the last four games, all three times they have lost, twice in landslides and once to a member from the weaker tribe. The simple truth is that there is a social class structure to any tribe and these players are pretty close to the bottom rung. As any revolutionary knows, when you topple the establishment, you've got to clear out the old regime completely. The weaker alliance members in the last two games apparently haven't learned that. Hopefully All-stars will be different.
The weaker tribe is going nowhere fast: Despite all the coups we've seen, and Vecepia not withstanding, the weaker tribe really hasn't reaped much of the benefit. As they decide which members of the dominant tribe to support the simple truth is no matter what they do they are still at the bottom of the totem pole. Playing from the weaker tribe is certainly the toughest position to be in and it emphasizes all the more the importance of building a strong tribe in the early going and entering the merge in the majority.
H.C.
All-Star Update:
Well, it certainly didn't work out too well for the weaker alliance once again. Here is the graph updated with the (supposedly?) All-Star players.
Actually, it was the third and fourth in this game that was really in the position to seize control but, as is typical of thirds and fourths from previous seasons, they merely continued to ride in the dominant pair's draft.
I'm frankly pretty dubious as to this graph's ability to predict winners, though the averages tend to be interesting. The weaker tribe continues to be bottom feeders reinforcing the importance of winning immunity challenges before the merge. I still consider the weaker alliance to be a strong position if two members of the weaker alliance are paired and they are decent players. The former was the case in Pearl Islands but certainly not the later. This game should have produced our first winners from this group if not for the boneheaded play of Jon and Burton in targeting Lillian.
Perhaps the real issue is simply the type of players that fall into each of these rolls. The strongest players form the dominant pair and immediately seek the weakest players in the tribe to fill the roll of third and fourth (this is nowhere more apparent than in All-Star). So far the players in the weaker alliance have yet to get their act together. The strongest weaker alliance was likely in Marquesas (Paschel, Neleh and Kathy) but they were defeated by an aggressive Vecepia and a purple rock. Their day has to come sometime, right?