Winz at Grumps....

So there was a very late email about a quickie $3.30 Stars home game Grump was putting together - since I was watching the baby while all sorts of other stuff was going on around the house on a Friday night - sure, why not?

A good mix of nine players, including cardgrrl, Goat, Captain, and Boat - which meant the prize pool was winner-take-all for the top 10% - and that happened to be me. I got HU with Grump down 2-1 and hit enough hands and boards to grind out a solid W.

I hit so many 40/60 hands with live cards it wasn't even funny.

***

Rereading all the recap Donkey Island posts, including Jamyhawk's Hoy-length review... It pains me to say this, but Hoy's analysis is the most spot on -

"Josie undeniably played a great game, but this shit was also handed to her. Absolutely handed to her. I mean, not literally handed to her. But the Donkeys had Josie and the entire Fish team dead to rights, and then they fucked it up. They made a terrible decision like four straight weeks, and just stood there and let Josie's rise to power be consummated."

I'm still not sure why Jamy and Jordan decided to reach out for a cross alliance to VJ in the first place - WHEN SHE NEEDED THE HELP A LOT MORE THAN THEY DID - and then decided to tell us Donkeys about it to boot. Did you think we were just going to let that happen, instead of making the logical connections and start to cut you off pre-emptively?

To fill in some knowledge gaps for the record beyond this post:

- I had already decided to be Goat's humble servant from the get-go, way before anyone else even asked, for a lot of reasons. You have to trust someone - I decided it was him. Maybe he was going to screw me in the end - it's certainly possible, although I'm pretty sure we had a solid working relationship. Everyone else I talked to, I basically told them what I thought they needed to know.

I didn't really have a Plan B, and after the Donkeys got out to a big advantage in team play, I didn't bother to find one. I never watched Survivor and don't have patience for all this alliance building and breaking everyone else loves. I picked a horse and strategy and was going to ride it into the ground - way too simple, I know.

- In retrospect, we should have realized that Jordan would have reacted a lot better to clipping Jamy than the other way around. We had to stop this cross-team alliance momentum while we could, figured Jordan was a more dangerous organizer and plotter - and it looks like we came pretty close to pulling it off. But, I think Jordan would have realized the overall danger of working with VJ and the Fish and figured out another way to make things happen within the team of Donkeys.
Instead, Jamy basically gave VJ free reign to use him to flip the power structure to the Fish and take us all out. She's too nice to say so, but there's really no way she wins anything in Survivor without that gift.

- Once Goat got voted off, it was pretty obvious I was a dead man walking b/c I really had nothing to offer to VJ (she already had her people lined up) and I was not about to listen to anything Jamy had to say (b/c there was no way I was going to trust his decision making).

Still, it was strange because the night Jamy got voted off, because both VJ and Jamy were IMing me at the same time asking for my vote. Of course I amused myself stringing them both along until it was obvious my vote didn't matter - but the fact that VJ worked so hard to get my vote when she had to know that she really didn't need it - told me she wasn't missing any angles in this competition.

So it was just a matter of time - by then my only hope was to manufacture a tie vote and get to play my way on or off the island - but I couldn't manage that. Still fun, though. You got to learn a lot about other people's thought process, and I got tighter with some blogger players as a result. Plus, I spewed back close to $200 with all the Mookie bounties I offered during the series, so at least I made it rain for everyone else and paid it forward.

If I do it again, maybe I'll try to actually "play" the Survivor game - but to be honest I'd probably just duck my head, try to winz as much as I can, and finish in the middle of the pack again.

Oh and to complete a lingering question from the other night - the Heff is..

*half-Okinawan (hello Miyagi-san! - Mom grew up on the island. Not really Japanese, Okinawans have an odd relationship with their bigger Northern neighbor that annexed them way back in the 19th century.)

*half-Eastern European Slav (Austrian, I think, or maybe further east than that. Pop's family came over around 1900 - very Eastern Orthodox, so they know about pierogis, kolackies, Easter bread and what not. Pop grew up a few clicks from Apalachin in a heavily Italian town and remembers that infamous 1957 mob raid.)

So that's that. Half grinder bee, half crasian gambool. Figures.