Previously on Survivor Hamilton: Old Meets New
Well, the first 3 weeks of the game are in the books, with Kobara winning 5 of the first 6 Immunity Challenges, and Nevala going to 5 of the first 6 Tribal Councils. With 24 players remaining in the game, we are officially 20% of the way through the game, with Kobara truly dominating to this point. As rumours begin to swirl about possible change-ups to the game, can Nevala show the fight to get more of their players into the later stages of the game?

It was another week to forget for Nevala, a tribe that lost 4 Immunity Challenges over the past 2 weeks, and had the scars to prove it. In a series of back and forth votes, and one withdrawal, Nevala had been reduced to 10 players – all eager to stop the bleeding and pull some wins together this week. If Nevala was going to turn it around, some leaders would need to emerge to encourage the tribe, and help get them organized similar to the way that the veterans on Kobara applied rules to themselves to ensure consistent challenge performances.

We saw over the weekend that Ian had become Nevala’s top challenge performer, jumping ahead of Jonathan and James in the rankings. That fact could make him the defacto leader of Nevala, at least when it comes to the challenges, and it was likely that he had begun coaching the team on some processes to put in place to increase checks & balances, and eliminate all the double-answers that kept happening. Losing Marishka was a blow to their chances, but the 10 remaining players on Nevala were not giving up, and losing yesterday’s Reward Challenge by seconds should have lit a fire under them.

On the Kobara Tribe, things were still looking very good. Not only did they win yesterday’s Reward Challenge, but they were given a huge amount of power in today’s Immunity Challenge. With the need to sit out 4 (four!) players this time around, Kobara would get the opportunity to give some of their top performers a rest. To be honest, it seems like some of Kobara was ready to lose already. A huge part of the fun of Survivor Hamilton is Tribal Council, and to go over 2 weeks without a vote was starting to take a toll on the paranoia levels over there, as open dialogue died down.

It seemed like it was winter in Toronto back when Silas was voted out of the game in a tense first vote for Kobara. Since then, they worked and worked on continuously improving their Immunity Challenge performances, paying attention to my advice, and organizing how they respond. Mistakes were all but eliminated, and once they knew how “not” to screw up, all the pressure was just on finding the correct answers. With the rookies at Nevala still making the occasional mistake (by not paying attention to the instructions), Kobara was taking all the time they needed to get the correct answers, and it had been paying off for 2 weeks straight.

So now we come down to it. Nevala was going to have to show serious improvements from their 3 weeks of tough lessons, because at this point, any fewer Nevala players is going to make it really difficult to integrate with Kobara players when the time comes. For their part, Kobara got to make all of the decisions for this Immunity Challenge, starting with who was going to sit out. Sitting out for the first time would be Kobara’s top 2 performers Chris and Bryan, as well as Paul, while James would sit out his 2nd Immunity Challenge.

Because our last challenge was so close, we’ve decided to go back to the matchup format, and with 10 players participating from each tribe, we also decided to pair them up. So going head to head, pairs from Kobara and Nevala would work together to solve 2 questions before their rivals could, earning a point for their tribe. The first tribe to 3 match wins (3 points) will win Immunity and safety from Tribal Council, while the loser will vote out someone on Wednesday evening.

Kobara’s advantage from Sunday’s Reward Challenge win was that they would not only get to choose their own pairs, but Nevala’s pairs, and who would be matched up against who. After much consideration, Kobara made their decisions, and we had our 5 matchups set. We also gave the hint that one question per pair would be more math-related, and the other more logic-related, so each tribe could decide who from each pair would handle which question.

Do you want to see how it all played out this evening? Let’s do it!

The VERY important rules of this challenge stipulated that each player would answer their assigned question, and then add the answer to their partner’s answer. Since all 10 answers in this challenge would come in the form of a number, how hard could that be?

First Match:
 VS
In our first look at how hard that could be Amanda and Sharon took on the “logic” question, which was literally just “How many elements in the periodic table end with the letter C?”, which a Googled list of elements would show is only 2: arsenic and zinc.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements)

Kyle and Dave needed to answer “At the CNE in 1960 there were two ticket prices: child admission tickets were $2 each and adult admission tickets cost $3 each. If a group of 15 people purchased admission tickets for a total of $34, how many in their group were children?” The answer: 4 adults at $3 each, plus 11 children at $2 each, comes to the required total of $34.

Add 2 to 11 and you get the correct answer of 13.

Did anybody get it?

Of course not.

First Amanda sent in “5” (wrong!) and Kyle sent in “11 children” which was the right answer to his question, but not both answers added together as the challenge demanded. Great job not paying attention to the instructions.

With a point up for grabs, Dave and Sharon took their sweet time figuring out the answer, yet both responded within seconds of eachother. Unfortunately they both sent in “16” which was the wrong answer. It seems that Nevala understood the first question as “How many ‘abbreviations’ in the periodic table end with the letter C”? I can understand the confusion, but did they confer with their tribe before answering? I don’t know so you’ll have to ask them. Out of the element itself and the abbreviation, what is it more likely the question meant considering it said “elements”???

So neither tribe gets a point. I can’t believe I’m saying it after 2 remarkably easy questions, but we’re tied up at an ugly 0-0.

Second Match: 
 VS
Praying to God that I will be able to have any reasonable expectations from these players moving forward, I sent the questions for the second match. Peter and April had to answer: “In the seven-term sequence A, B, C, D, E, F, G, each term after the first three is the sum of the previous three terms. If B=3, E=17, and G=60, determine the value of A.” which was probably the hardest question of the evening, and for that I’m sorry!

I solved it in about 10 minutes on Excel with trial/error, working through different combinations until I came up with the correct answer of “7”, after a number of attempts didn’t satisfy the requirements.

Cowin and Ruth also got their question at the same time: “Two friends plan to meet for lunch twice a week, always on the same two days each week. In how many combinations can they select two days of the week to meet so that they never meet on consecutive days?”.

Again, I just used columns in Excel, started with Sunday & Tuesday, and listed out all the other potential combos with at least 1 day in between them. I came to the correct answer of 14 on my first try, but this was still one of the trickier ones as well.

Add 7 to 14, and what do you get? The correct response of 21. Did anyone else get that?

Well April and Ruth both answered 29, so not them. Being too speedy with the response, and not getting any second opinions probably playing a factor there.

Cowin and Peter?

No seriously, Cowin and Peter where are you?

Then out of nowhere Cowin answered “21” and my heart skipped a beat. When Peter followed him up with a correct answer of his own, I couldn’t have been prouder.

Kobara jumping out to a 1-0 lead after two matches.

Match Three:
 VS
When this match was announced, I knew right away it would probably be the closest out of all of them. Ian and Jon were Nevala’s  top performers so far, so in pairing them together, Kobara may have been looking to reduce the damage. While Elliott was 5th overall, Jonathan was Kobara’s 2nd last in terms of the stats, so the result would be very interesting!

Elliott and Ian’s question was “I have six packages of mints. When I open the first five packages and count them, I find a total of 90 mints in the first five packages. The sixth package contains five fewer mints than the average number of mints in all six packages. How many mints are in the sixth package?”

There is an average of 18 mints in the first five packages (90/5=18), which means that all you need to do is try out a handful of options for the 5th package to discover that with 12 mints in the 5th package, the average of all six packages is 17, 5 more than 12.

In the Battle of the Jons, our question was: “A long rectangular banquet table has the same number of participants seated on either side, and no one sitting at the ends. Banquet participants are all served either a chicken or a vegetable entre. On one side of the table, 11 people are served chicken and the rest are served vegetables. On the other side of the table, 5 people are served vegetables and the rest are served chicken. In all, how many more banquet participants at this table were served chicken than vegetables?”, which was by far the longest question of the bunch.

Some simple trial and error reveals that no matter how many total people are at the table, there will always be 12 more chicken dishes than vegetable ones. That means the answer is also 12.

The total between the two questions was 24.

After about 15 minutes, our first answers from Ian and Jon arrived, and they were right!!! That Elliott and Jonathan also correctly answered 2 minutes later didn’t matter, you snooze you lose, and we’re tied 1-1 after three matches. Only two left…

Match Four: 
 VS
Looking to break the tie, we have a couple heavy hitters from Kobara, and two guys from Nevala with almost identical smiles on their faces. I mean look at them. Chelsea and Jordan up against Shareed and Andre. Let’s go.

Chelsea and Shareed got probably the most tedious of the questions, needing to answer this dandy: “One arrangement of the letters in the word PUPPET is UETPPP, but this example ends with the letter P. How many different six-letter arrangements of the letters in the word PUPPET are there that neither begin nor end with the letter P?”

Once again, use Excel and list out all the different variations. I know there’s probably an algebra formula to solve it quicker, but I don’t know it. The answer was 24 arrangements.

Meanwhile Jordan and Andre had to answer: “Every attendee at a business meeting exchanged business cards with every other attendee. if 42 cards were exchanged, how many people attended the meeting?”, to which the correct response would be 7 attendees handing out 6 cards each.

7 attendees plus 24 arrangements equals 31. That’s what we’re going for here.

With a very quick turnaround time, Jordan and Chelsea chimed in with the correct answers of 31, followed a minute later by Shareed and Andre with the decidedly not correct responses of 34. WELL THAT’S A SHAME. How much help did they get?

Kobara goes back up 2-1, with Nevala hoping to eke out a tie in the final match.

THE FINAL MATCH:
 VS
To determine if Kobara would finally head back to Tribal Council after over two weeks off, or if Nevala would be going back to their fifth in a row, we had a battle between 2 Hamiltons, a sleepy man, and someone who asked for less math questions and more word/logic puzzles. I hope everyone’s as excited as David C. is tired, because we’re going to find out right now.

With the easiest question of the night, David C. and Sasha merely had to find the answer to: “In any leap year, a calendar page for January is always identical to the calendar page for which month later in that same year? (Indicate number of month, eg. November = 11)”.

Now as we are currently IN a leap year, all David M. and Sasha had to do was bring up the calendars on their phone to discover that January and July are identical this year. July is the 7th month of the year, ergo, the answer was 7.

In the main event of the evening son met father, like Luke and Vader, with Graham and Jim battling for power over the game. Because the first question was so easy, the winner of this all-important test would be whoever could figure out this question first: “If 9 Christmas elves fix 9 toys in 9 minutes, how long will it take 10 elves to fix 20 toys?” 

It’s one of those stupid ambiguous questions right? Like where does it say that each elf works at the same rate? It has to be a trick question. It’s definitely more important to spend my energy challenging the grammar of a question from a published book than it is to use math (like I TOLD YOU TO) to just solve it exactly as it’s stated.

Anyway, you can probably guess where I’m going with this. We assume that David M. and Sasha solved their simple questions in a matter of moments while Graham and Jim went to work. April likely pestered Graham, attempting to distract him from his task. Jim probably got to work on his answer, solved it, then double and triple checked with his tribemates. Right?

Well let’s see.

Christmas elves take 9 minutes on average for each toy they fix. So if 20 toys gotta get fixed, and they have 10 Christmas elves to work with, it’s gonna take 18 minutes to get the job done. Yes it’s tricky, but that’s why you have a whole tribe, and a Survivor Hamilton sanctioned WhatsApp group to discuss and build consensus on the most likely correct answer. But in this case, it’s math.

So 7 months plus 18 minutes equals the correct final answer of 25. 

Anyway, Jim and Sasha were first to respond. This was Nevala’s chance to send us to a tie-breaker! Could they get it done??? Could father outduel son when it counts, earning family bragging rights all eternity? Would Sasha help deliver this much needed win to a tribe she loved? Would David C. get to go back to sleep?

But oh no, what’s this? Jim and Sasha jumped the gun with the first answer, but they definitely did not build a tribal consensus, because they each answered 27. OH NO! Before anyone else in the tribe stepped in to help them determine the right answer, the rush of the game, and the taste of victory pushed Jim and Sasha to answer too early.

Graham and David M. smoothly entered the chat less than a minute later with the correct answers of 25, sealing the 5th Immunity Challenge win in a row for Kobara! 

And after all that excitement we return to the status quo. That was the best Immunity Challenge of the season so far, and a night to remember. Another back and forth battle with a lot of great performances, some people answering too quickly, and Kobara WAY out-collaborating Nevala. I know that some people had a hard time with some perceived vague or ambiguous questions, but Sandra and I went through each one of them, and solved for the correct answers because we understood what the questions were asking, not trying to find holes or reasons why the questions weren’t worded the way we liked. If this was university you’d just have an “X”. That’s what this is, a test.

Nevala came into this challenge touting a new strategy. Collaboration. Double and triple checks on answers. Helping eachother. Working as a tribe. When it came down to it, the collaboration started far too late in the game, and when it counted, there weren’t enough voices in the room to help Jim and Sasha.

So on Wednesday night, 10 Nevalas will become 9, and the torture of the newbies continues. At least you will all be able to say you truly played Survivor Hamilton, the good and the bad, and you came out stronger on the other end. Hopefully the collaboration that was lacking today can help you over the next two days as you work to build a stronger tribe.

MH

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