There are 14 teams, each with two players. 7 teams of men and 7 teams of women. Each episode has a reward challenge and an elimination challenge. Win a reward challenge and you get a prize. Win an elimination challenge and your team stays in the game, lose and you are eliminated from the show. The final 3 male teams and the final 3 female teams go to the final challenge. The winning male and female teams in the final challenge gets $100,000, the second place teams get $50,000 and the third place teams get a copy of George Plimpton's Video Falconry. The elimination challenges alternate between having two female team participate and two male teams. The team that performs the worst in the reward challenge automatically gets sent into the elimination challenge. The other team is voted into the elimination challenge. If you win a reward challenge you are immune from being voted into the elimination challenge.
The goal is to reach the final challenge and win money. The best way to accomplish this is to avoid having to play in elimination challenges. Each elimination challenge is essentially a coin flip so teams can maximize their chances of winning money by avoiding elimination challenges. Having a strong voting alliance allows a team to avoid being voted into the elimination challenge. A strong voting alliance also allows teams to vote strong non-alliance teams into the elimination challenge. The best outcome for a team is to reach the final challenge with two weak teams as only the 1st and 2nd place finishes get cash prizes. As there are 14 teams, a voting alliance of 7 teams is enough to control who gets voted into elimination challenges. In practice a unified alliance of 5 or 6 teams is likely enough to control the voting.
However there is a bit of a problem. If a team allies itself with weak teams, then it runs the risk of its allies being eliminated. Weak teams are more likely to lose reward challenges--and get sent into the elimination challenge--and lose elimination challenges. An alliance with weak teams risks losing its voting majority. Ally with strong teams though, and you will have a harder time in the final challenge and a harder time not losing the reward challenge. The optimal strategy to me is to ally with strong teams of the opposite sex. Since the teams are of the opposite sex, they do not compete against your team in the final challenge, elimination challenges, or reward challenges. Those teams are also less likely to get eliminated than the weaker teams so your voting alliance will be more stable. That will then allow you to ally yourself with some weak teams of your own sex.
If such a voting alliance can be formed, the strategy is simple. Do not lose the reward challenge and hope someone not in your alliance loses the reward challenge. Try to vote the strongest team not in your alliance into the elimination challenge and hope that they lose. This will maximize the expected winnings in the final challenge.
I am interested in seeing what happens as teams begin to be eliminated. There will likely be a tension between teams in an alliance wanting to stick together to control the votes while at the same time wanting to vote the strongest ally into the elimination challenge--in the hope that the strong team will be eliminated and not compete in the final challenge. I might explore this idea in my next post about when it makes sense to abandon an alliance and vote a strong ally into an elimination challenge.
Random Thoughts & Predictions:
- If I had to wager on which teams would win it, I would say Laurel & Cara Maria and Kenny & Wes look to be the best bets.
- I'm guessing that CT & Adam--who may be the strongest team--will be undone by the lack of a social game. I'm guessing Kenny & Wes, Johnny & Tyler, and Evan & Nehemiah will form an alliance with some female teams and control the voting.
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