Survivor Poker: And the Insanity Continues

The Goat held his weekly $1 rebuy this past Sunday night as the Survivor Poker challenge continues on Donkey Island, and -- this is getting kind of tiring saying the same thing over and over and over again every morning after one of these events -- but I simply cannot believe who got voted off. The latest victim? Julius Goat himself.

The Goat is Gone! The creator. The godfather. He is out, voted out by receiving 6 out of 9 votes, and something tells me that we were surely looking at yet another one of those disbelieving moments as Goat listened to the final tally counted out live by Buddy Dank on BDR. Goat will I am sure comment on things himself as he wishes, although I can say from personal experience my backstab-elimination did take several hours for me to be able to write about it in an appropriately objective manner, so I would expect the same from Goat today. But something tells me that Mr. Goat had no idea that this was coming, and if the recent pattern holds true, he probably had every reason to believe that a specific other person was set to be booted on the night.

So NumbBono is out. Al is history. I am gone. Jordan is busto. And now Goat has vanished from Donkey Island as well. It certainly does seem that a lot of people who at least have played some role as Alpha Wolf have found themselves just one or two short events later the subject themselves of an elimination vote. Is that common on the tv show? It certainly does not seem like something that would be common. Guys one week contributing to the decision to vote someone else out en masse, and then the very next week they themselves are voted out? How does that happen anyways? What are the inner workings of a team that totally takes one person's vote one week, but then bands together in secret to vote that very same person out as a group just a few days later? Maybe it's because I have never even one time watched the show, but I simply do not understand the deep-down inner workings of the team members here. I guess there is a lesson right there in that, but I'm just not getting it.

Several of us have asked the same thing upon our eliminations: why didn't the alliance members just stick with the agreed-upon plan? Now, in my case I give a 10% reprieve to my teammates, because Dawn winning the individual immunity threw a huge monkey-wrench into our plans as we had basically already cast our votes for her before she even busted wolfshead to nab immunity for that night. But still, there was plenty of time and the team had standardized on another teammate to vote out. And although nothing exactly specific has been written to this effect, suffice it to say that, in addition to myself, Jordan and I imagine at least one other of the knockouts so far has believed they had a solid voting alliance heading into the actual reading of the votes. So what is it that makes someone on Survivor Poker deviate from a plan -- a plan that is pretty much guaranteed to carry them at least another few weeks without issue into the challenge -- in favor of a different plan, championed by another person who you just know is by definition ultimately trying to dick you over just as much as you are them? These are the things that just fly right over my head as things continue to play out in shocking fashion on Donkey Island.

But one thing that isn't going over my head is the likelihood of the various remaining players taking this thing down. Through a number of unnamed sources, I'm starting to develop a picture of what things are like on the inside right now on Donkey Island, and although I am sure that will change about ten more times between now and the time we crown a champion I guess in a little over a month or so, I think after this week's Dank tournament might be the right time to start posting my odds on who will survive Survivor Poker. After this week, a full half of the field will be eliminated, and if there's one thing I am happy for it is that my coverage so far of Survivor Poker has not included pre-game odds, which surely would have had guys like Goat and Jordan and probably Numb as well running pretty deep into the field before hitting any real resistance. So sometime after Wednesday night -- maybe as late as this weekend -- I will hopefully get up my first post about the eight remaining players and my thoughts on what they are exactly up to in the game, how they've survived so far, and just how far into the inner circle they may actually be, culminating in listing the odds in Hoy fashion for each survivor of taking this entire thing down.

That is, if the contestants don't do something so outlandish on Wednesday that I just have to write about that instead.