Week 2: Survivor Scrubs

Recognizing the "scrub" mentality in your opponents  during any sort of competitive situation and playing to this advantage can be a powerful asset, just as Richard Hatch demonstrated in Survivor. It definitely paid off in his case--but it was a very, very risky move.

Rich's original strategy to form a voting alliance was definitely the right course of action, at least by the Playing to Win mentality. Survivor had no rules outlawing such tactics, and a successful alliance would increase its members' defensive and offensive capabilities precisely where it mattered most. The only problem with the strategy: members on the alliance were bound to make quite a few enemies among the scrubs outside of the alliance.

If Survivor had been run in a pure "last-man-standing" fashion, this would not have mattered. But it wasn't purely last-man-standing; competitors who lost didn't disappear forever. It was the very people that were voted off who would ultimately decide the fate of the finalists. Rich played the game very well to make it to the final round, but his plan could easily have backfired in the end if the "scrubs" he took out with his "dirty" play held a bad-enough grudge against him. That said, he pretty much had no other choice but to try to convince them one last time that he did the right thing in doing everything possible to win. It was the only edge he had against Kelly, after all; she was the better candidate by every other criteria, especially from the scrub players' point of view. Fortunately for Rich, that single edge was ultimately all he needed...