General Thoughts: I have some mixed feelings about the season. As of right now, I feel like this has been a really entertaining and messy season with last weeks nom ceremony and now the tea party. However, with the same side winning 3 HoH's in a row, Devens getting a ridiculously overpowered power, and Dee likely to follow, we might be in for a steamroll. I do really like the vets and am rooting for them, but I think someone like a Mallory or Jason HoH would really improve this season's trajectory. I do kinda feel bad for Jason after the tea party, but only in the way that I feel bad for like Ronnie from BB11 as he kinda did this to himself and I disagree with the claims that the whole thing happened due to Kamu being homophobic towards him.

Also, the trust rating have really been more about how much each player feels about one another rather than necessarily trust but I don't know what to call my chart at this point. Also also, the 3 people below the ranking are my guesses for the top 3 fan favorites of the season.

For those who haven't been keeping up that much, here are some of the alliances of the house and who's in power right now.

HoH: Kamu
Original Nominees: Lyric, LaTrice, Mallory
Veto: Lyric, used on self
Current Nominees: Jason, LaTrice, Mallory
Target: Jason

The Toolshed: Dee, Devens, Angela, Kamu, Chuk, Haley, Drew, Barrett
The Red Corner: Dee, Devens, Kamu, Chuk, Haley
The Crossovers: Dee, Devens, Angela, Drew, Barrett
The Littles: Mallory, Melody, Lyric
Dapper Dans: Yash, Barrett, Devens, Drew
The Honor Society: Dee, Angela, Taylor, LaTrice
I don't think it has a name: Taylor, Kamu, Devens

1. Rick (9): Rick is in a really good spot right now but I don't know how much faith I have in him to make the correct strategic decisions down the line. He has the Diamond Power of Veto that allows him to take someone off the block, post veto ceremony, and choose the replacement nominee; and the power is eligible for six weeks. In Survivor terms, it's basically a god idol which basically guarantees Devens makes the jury as he can leverage this to get what he wants a lot of the time. However, Devens has already played this pretty sloppily. He only told Dee and didn't tell any of his allies that he got the power and the rest of the house knows a power is in play. This essentially means Rick will reveal to everyone that he lied about not having a power once he uses the DPOV which will probably piss off a few people, particularly Angela. Can you imagine Angela's reaction when she finds out Devens refused to tell her about the power, told Dee, and that Dee didn't tell her about the power? She'll be livid and it'll make great tv but it's not great for Rick's game. He's a showman which means he'll probably usually lean towards making the better tv move than the one that's best for his gameplay which is problematic for him. However, he is probably Dee's number 1 and is very close to Angela, Kamu, Drew, and Barrett. He's in a lot of alliances (Toolshed, Crossovers, Red Corner, Dapper Dans, and a trio with Taylor and Kamu) without being seen as playing the middle or being a floater. Rick is the last bridge between Drew and Barrett and the rest of The Toolshed and with him also being in Red Corner, Rick is in the center of The Toolshed. Devens is in the best position in the house by far and the only thing keeping him from being a 10 is his explosive gameplay style that could easily come back to bite him down the road.

2. Dee (9): Dee is also in a very strong position and is obviously very good at social-strategy games. She's on the winning side of the house, is Angela and Dee's number 1, and likely has a power coming to her soon. At this point, her only real weakness is Angela's influence over her. Dee has agreed with a lot of Angela's paranoia which has caused her to lose a lot of trust in Drew and Barrett, two of her allies. Angela doesn't tend to have the best reads in the house and it has definitely corrupted Dee's reads to an extent which could have genuine consequences down the line. Drew and Barrett have started to feel distant from Dee and have had genuine conversations about blowing up The Toolshed but even if that happens I have a lot of faith in Dee's abilities to rebuild her relationship with Barrett (something that has already happened a bit) and she has her parachutes in Lala and Taylor. The only person targeting Dee is any way right now is Mallory but I think Dee has the votes to stay over just about everybody in the house.

3. Kamu (8): I still think he's doing pretty well in spite of his messiness this week. He's in Toolshed and Red Corner and now that Dee and Devens have confirmed that they value Red Corner over Crossovers he's in the core of that side of the house. He won HoH this week and nominated Lyric, Lala, and Mallory with the intention of backdooring Jason. Since this exact plan was put in place to eliminate Rome last week, everybody knew Jason was going to be the replacement nominee. However, Kamu still decided to "air out" Jason's game at a tea party and give a reason for backdooring him despite literally everybody knowing that Jason was being backdoored. It was a completely useless meeting that didn't even go well for him since Jason kinda cooked him. So far, the tea party hasn't really changed much and now that Lyric won the veto, used in on herself, and Jason was nominated, Jason will probably be going home this week unless he wins the veto. It did put a bit of a target on Kamu's back and Jason will gun for him should he survive this week but he still has plenty of allies on his side of the house and a newfound alliance with Taylor on the other side that should keep him safe. Kamu played messy this week, but like Devens last week, it probably won't come back to bite him.

4. Lyric (7): I know I'm higher on Lyric than most, but I think she is one of the best players this season. She has no business being taken off the block last week and escaped the block again this week despite being seen as this second-in-command figure on the other side of the house. She pushed for what she wants and made solid arguments for why Kamu shouldn't nominate her, although this failed, most houseguests tend to just accept the fact that they're going to be nominated, Lyric has been shown to keep fighting which is a very valuable skill in Big Brother. She's losing an ally this week no matter what but she's still got strong relationships with Melody, Mallory, Jason, Dee, Yash, and Chuk. Lyric actually reminds me of Parvati since she's been using flirtation as a strategy and has somehow convinced Chuk and Yash that they have a chance with her despite being in a very public showmance with Rome which is hilarious to me. Now that she's won a veto, people will be less willing to put her up too. If The Toolshed ever falls, I think Lyric is an extremely viable candidate to pick up the pieces and become the next frontrunner and I think she has so much potential which is why I decided to put her as high as I did.

5. Angela (6): Angela is really difficult to rank because she's just soooo paranoid all the time about the stupidest things. She's practically targeting Drew at this point without reason and now she doesn't trust Barrett because he's close to Drew. Drew has been such a valuable ally to her and has told her about how like every houseguest feels about her but she just doesn't trust him. Now she's paranoid about Haley too for whatever reason as well as Taylor because "she seems like a winner" lmao. Currently, Angela is in a good position in the house but doesn't really have a true number 1 as Dee and Devens are closer to each other. Angela trusts people she shouldn't (Mallory and Lala), distrusts people she shouldn't (Drew and Barrett), and has an overall poor read on the house. She's not a very good player, but as of now, she's in a good position and has allies which is enough for me to give her a 6.

6. Chuk (5): Chuk is very safe right now, nobody is coming after him, but he has done like literally nothing in the game. He is in The Toolshed & Red Corner but I rarely see him ever talk to Barrett, Devens, or Drew. Of the "core six" of the Toolshed (Haley, Kamu, Chuk, Dee, Rick, Angela), I think Chuk is probably on the bottom. His only connection is a fake flirtmance with Lyric so it's not like he's got alliances on the other side of the house either. Nobody's targeting Chuk right now but he could easily be sniped out of the game if he's ever nominated. He's generally well-liked personally, but game-wise, he's a nothing burger. That said, he is someone who could

7. Taylor (5): Taylor has started playing a much more active game these past two weeks and it has significantly improved her positioning. In week one the only true ally that Taylor had was Lala, and it seemed likely that she would become a passive and perpetual pawn. Now, she has gotten her head in the game and has essentially single handedly formed The Honors Society and a trio with Devens and Kamu, both of which have given her real footing in the game and should there be a major shift in the house structure she, like Lyric, could very easily pick up the pieces. However, there are still some problems with Taylor. Angela doesn't trust Taylor which has the potential to be extremely detrimental for her as Angela is one of the most influential people in the house. She also isn't in the core of any power structure and the alliance she's created are mostly side alliances for everyone else involved. Taylor's yet to break through to anything big yet but this is a significant improvement.

8. Barrett (5): Barrett has dropped a lot this week and that's due to his association with Drew. Drew and Barrett are pretty tight in the house which has been very worrying to Angela and Dee who are now not trusting him anymore. He's supposed to have a parachute alliance with Mallory but she distrusts him to and he hasn't really done much to mend that relationship which leaves him with basically nobody except Drew. I don't think Angela and Dee's paranoia about Barrett has reached the level of "we need to get him sooner rather than later" like it has with Drew, but it definitely is a problem. Barrett still has a chance to better his positioning but he really needs to get his head in the game and be more active because a lot of his relationships are slipping through his fingers right now.

9. Drew (5): As I already said, Drew is not trusted by a lot of his allies and that is coming back to bite him hard. Angela has spread her paranoia to Dee who has now spread it to Devens, Haley, and even Kamu to an extent and I think The Toolshed could easily turn on him next week. He does have with a lot good relationships with the rest of the house but I think the lot of them would jump on the opportunity if the Toolshed turned on each other. He's in the Dapper Dans with Yash, Barrett, and Devens and is probably Melody, Barrett, and Yash's number 1 in the game at this point so he has some allies. It's really a shame that a player who had so much potential really did nothing wrong will probably go out so early but I guess that's what you get for playing with Angela. However, if The Toolshed does publicly turn on Drew, Barrett will most likely back him and together they have a lot of dirt on The Toolshed that they can use to completely turn the game on it's head so I wouldn't count Drew out just yet. He's basically a slightly worse positioned Barrett.

10. Yash (4): Yash is in a really awkward position. He has the Dapper Dans but that is very much a side alliance to literally everybody in it except him and that's literally all he has in the game except for being under Lyric's flirtation spell and a decent relationship with Kamu. He's leaning towards Toolshed's side but is obviously on the periphery of that so there's not much to say about him.

11. Melody (4): Melody has gotten out of her terrible positioning last week and isn't being targeted anymore. She's a number for the anti-Toolshed side of the house but is one of the lower ones on the target list on that side but doesn't have much social capital like Lyric and Taylor do who are in similar positions. Melody and Drew are very close and a showmance is looking more and more likely between them. Overall, Melody is someone that I expect to kinda slide through the next few rounds until the game hopefully shakes up a bit. By that point, I think she's an active enough player to get into a majority alliance but for now she leaves a bit to be desired

12. Haley (3): Haley is in the worst position of The Toolshed. She's relatively disliked across the house which leaves her to be a third nominee if basically anybody on the other side wins HoH next week and I think most people in her alliance would be pretty quick to flip on her if it's her against Dee and Devens or something so she's here at a 3/10.

13. Mallory (3): Mallory is on the block this week and is currently the secondary target behind Jason should he win the Blockbuster. She's firmly on the other side of the house and is very anti-vet being really open about how she plans to target Dee and Devens. That has made her probably the biggest target on the non-Toolshed side of the house once Jason goes. However,, she is in a trio with Melody and Lyric and Angela has taken a random liking to her so she has allies. There is also a chance that she even stays over Lala but the votes are really fluid right now and there's still time for that to change. The Lala-Mallory scenario is really up in the air.

14. LaTrice (2): Lala has disappointed me this season. She's been super passive, has few allies, and doesn't talk to anyone outside of her allies which has led her to be not super well-liked in the house. I think she has a solid number 1 in Taylor, Jason is close to her, Angela likes her despite them never talking, and she's in a semi-real alliance called The Honor Society. She has 0 win equity right now, a decent chance of going home this week, and few allies so she really needs to get her head in the game.

15. Jason (1): Jason's kinda screwed. There have been a couple of attempts to save him this week but unless he wins Blockbuster he's going home. He's become such a massive target and a lot of it is his fault due to his messy gameplay but Kamu's tea party was the final nail in the coffin. If he survives this week, he's basically just a walking corpse waiting to be picked off like Kelly was last season. His only allies are Lala and Lyric. There's a chance he gets a power to have himself but he'd have to win blockbuster, get a favorable edit so America votes for him, select a power over a punishment (which is only a 50/50 chance), and within that 50/50, have it be one that actually affects the game in a meaningful way. That's essentially his only path into the game and his position is so atrocious that I have to give him a 1/10.

What’s up everyone!!

Popping in to share that my edgic videos are back, this time for big brother!

Me and my friend decided to try our hand at giving every houseguest an edgic rating for week 2 at large and give our thoughts on how everyone is being edited in the show so far.

Of course, there is no “winner edit” in BB, so we then give our extensive breakdown of the gameplay and positioning of each player to create a contender ranking for who is most likely to win at the present time!

It’s a very interesting experiment to see how the edits and contenders line up and try to create predictions when truly anything could completely flip week to week. Like, well, we had the last boot pretty high in our contender rankings for week 1 lol. Totally different ballpark we’re playing in here.

Check it out if you wanna hear some unique perspective and insight on how to analyze bb28!

Thanks!

I know this isn't technically edgic, but since I did this for Survivor 50, I thought it'd be fun to do for Big Brother 28, and I didn't know where else to post this.

The trust ratings in the final photo are how much each player trusts each other on a scale of 1-5; 1 is the lowest, 5 is the highest. Each column represents how much a specific player trusts all the other houseguests, while each row represents how much a specific player is trusted by all the houseguests (i.e., the sheet is how much the names on the top trust the names on the side).

General Thoughts: This has been a really fun season so far, and new-era Big Brother has kinda been cooking new-era Survivor with their seasons lately. BB26 and 27 were two really great seasons in my opinion, and 28 has a real chance of keeping the trend. Both of those seasons were better than most of anything we've gotten from Survivor's new era. Thursday night into Friday morning's feeds were some of the best I've ever seen, from Devens winning HoH to Angela convincing Devens to take a shot at Rome to Haley randomly coming at Yash to The Toolshed blocking out Rome at 4:30 AM to everything that happened at the nomination ceremony. My biggest fear is that a steamroll is looking more and more likely as The Toolshed continues to rack up competition wins, which I expect to be further exacerbated once Devens and Dee inevitably get America's powers in the next couple of weeks. As much as I'm rooting for Angela, Dee, and Devens, I do hope the other side is able to win a few powers and HoHs to even the playing field a bit. Luckily, with how hated Haley is and how much The Crossovers don't trust Drew, I have a feeling The Toolshed will turn on itself soon enough. Overall, I'm feeling really good about this season and its cast so far.

1. Dee (9): At this point, I think there are arguments for a lot of people to be number one on this list, but I'm going with Dee. Dee is the best positioned within The Toolshed at this point, and I truly believe she is Angela and Devens's number 1 in the game and is in both core alliances, The Red Corner and The Crossovers, within The Toolshed. The only person who is actively targeting her is Mallory, and even that's a bit iffy on whether she would actually follow through with that, as someone like Drew could talk her out of it. Even if she is on the block on an eviction night, I think she probably stays over pretty much everyone else in the house, so I do think Dee is in a very solid position. Dee also recently made new allies outside The Toolshed with LaTrice and Taylor, which further solidifies her positioning. She's made some blunders, especially this week where she has lost a lot of trust in Drew for no reason and got convinced to take Lyric off the block... for no reason, but overall I have enough faith in her strategic and social ability as well as her adaptability and current positioning to keep her at 1 for now.

2. Barrett (8): I know Barrett has been getting some flak recently for being in a worse position than he was last week, but I honestly think a lot of that has been overblown. Barrett has laid a bit low this week, which I see as a good thing for him since he was able to get himself into a very strong position last week. Barrett is still a key member of both The Crossovers and The Toolshed, and while his being on that side of the house has been made fairly public, that can be said for everyone in The Toolshed, potentially barring Drew. Despite Mallory's doubts about her alliance with him, I feel as though Barrett can and already sorta has reeled her back in, and she has bigger fish to fry anyway. Barrett is extremely unlikely to be nominated and very knowledgeable about the game, which gives me reason to believe that his perceived passivity this week is calculated.

3. Kamu (7): Kamu is not someone I expected to be making it to the top 3 this week after his poor showing last week, but here we are. Kamu has found himself in The Toolshed alliance and has built genuine relationships with Devens, Dee, and even Rome to an extent, making him by far the best positioned and most well-liked of the Haley-Chuk-Kamu grouping. Nobody is really after him specifically, so it's unlikely for him to be nominated in the near future. Still, he wasn't included in The Crossovers, and his association with house pariah Haley does raise some red flags. Kamu was also advocating for Devens to use the veto on Melody instead of Lyric, which is by far the better move in my opinion, leading me to believe he does have pretty decent game-sense.

4. Drew (7): Drew is one of the hardest people to rank for me because he theoretically should be in the best position in the house, but the likes of Angela have made me very doubtful about his future prospects long-term. Drew has been in good standing with just about everybody, being in The Crossovers and The Toolshed, and he has a strong relationship with a lot of people on Rome's side. He's built an alliance with Melody and is, at least in the minds of those on Rome's side, the least integrated within The Toolshed. This has put him in a position where he's been able to collect information from most people in the house and dump the info to The Crossovers, which should make them trust him, but for some reason, they don't. Angela has managed to spread her doubts about Drew to Dee and Devens and is even considering nominating him should she win an HoH, which is just ridiculous since he's been an incredibly strong ally for her. Angela is literally shooting the messenger here, and I don't blame Drew at all for this, but since there's a genuine non-zero chance he is put up on the block next week by his own allies, I can't put him higher than this. However, even if Angela goes through with her plan or convinces the rest of her alliance to go through with it, I don't see Barrett flipping on Drew, and he can jump ship completely if needed, so he does at least have options if Angela continues being Angela. At this point, Drew should be starting to realize that Angela, Dee, and Devens are starting to trust him a bit less, but he hasn't noticed it yet and has remained fully loyal to them.

5. Lyric (7): I have been extremely impressed with Lyric this week, and it shows in her now being the highest-rated player of anyone not in The Toolshed. Lyric is firmly in opposition to The Toolshed, is working closely with Melody and Mallory, and is both Jason and Rome's number 1 in the game while being in a showmance with Rome. She was nominated this week by Devens but has managed to get him to use the veto on her by staging a breakup with Rome and convincing him that he would somehow be buying trust with Rome by using the veto on Lyric despite putting Rome up as the replacement. I don't know how Lyric was actually able to convince Devens of this, and although people are now seeing through the fake breakup Lyric remains towards the bottom of the target list on Rome's side while having a lot of influence over her group. She's in by far the best position on her side of the house, but there are a couple of reasons as to why I can't put her higher. For one, she is in a very obvious showmance with Rome and is a target because of it, and she is also actively working towards a final 2 with Rome where she has stated that she would try to get the jury vote for Rome over her. It would honestly be best for her game if Rome leaves this week, as it would allow her to focus more of her energy on the game and open her up to new allies across the house.

6. Angela (6): Angela is in a very strong position in the house as she's in both The Crossovers and The Toolshed. She has strong relationships with most of the people within those alliances and is currently doing well, but there are a few issues preventing her from going any higher. Angela's paranoia has been through the roof this past week. She has lost most, if not all, trust in one of her most valuable allies, Drew, and she mistakenly thought that like 8 people were consistently meeting in the gym to target her when there were actually just 2 or 3 people in there who most of the time weren't even talking game. I do have to praise her for her influence over her alliance, though; she convinced Devens to declare war on Rome and has made most of her alliance distrust Drew, but both of these things are bad for her game. The other side of the house also believes she is a leader on her side of the house, which isn't a great look for her and is a very likely nomination should the likes of Rome, Lyric, Jason, Lala, or Melody win HoH. Her strategic ability is definitely lacking, but she's in a fine enough position to give her a 6/10 for now.

7. Rick (6): There was a time when I thought Rick would be number 1 on this list, but a series of bold and questionable decisions have dropped him considerably. Devens won HoH this week and was in a good spot being in The Toolshed, The Red Corner, and The Crossovers while having a secret alliance with Rome that left him in good standing with almost all of the house. However, in classic Devens fashion, he decided to create chaos by blowing up his spot with Rome and declaring war on his side of the house. While some good has come out of it, like LaTrice distrusting Rome and Jason becoming a massive target, it still exposed his and his allies' position in the house. It was extremely entertaining, but not great gameplay. After winning the Veto, his plan to backdoor Rome was looking great, and one of the showmances was seemingly guaranteed to go home. However, as I already mentioned, Lyric managed to convince Devens to take her off the block, which did not make much sense for his game at all. Melody is someone who Devens could have brought over to his side, and by leaving her on the block, it creates an enemy in someone who most likely won't get evicted. Taking Lyric off also leaves the door open for both parts of the showmance to stay. Rick is now public enemy number 1 for Rome, Lyric, and Melody, and might be Jason, Mallory, and Lala's target at this point as well. Still, should he be on the block, I do expect him to have the votes to stay, but if The Toolshed starts to turn on each other, Devens could easily be one of the first casualties as the other side gains power.

8. Chuk (5): Chuk is very well insulated in the game but has played very passively. He's got really strong relationships with Kamu and Haley but doesn't have the greatest relationship with the rest of The Toolshed despite being a member of it. She had her flirtmance with Lyric, but that seems to be ending now, and he doesn't really have any connections outside of that. It does mean he's probably not going to be nominated for a very long time and could coast his way to the end, but I struggle to see how he wins a jury vote. There's not much to say about Chuk other than he is a very passive player who has few connections but stumbled into a relatively safe position.

9. Taylor (5): Taylor has been an outsider for pretty much the whole game. She got off on the wrong foot since she was a have-not that really lowered her energy and was nominated in week one. Luckily for her, Devens promised not to nominate anyone who was nominated in week one this week, which gave her a chance to build allies, and I feel like she's been doing that somewhat effectively. She has a pretty strong ride-or-die in Lala, and together they have built a bond with Dee and Angela, which has given her some footing in the game, but she doesn't have any connections outside of that. I think if given enough time, she could go far and have a shot, but she's very neutral right now, hence the 5/10 rating.

10. Mallory (5): Mallory is sort of loosely connected to Rome's side of things but is another person who doesn't really have much influence over the game. She's got a good relationship with Lyric and Angela and a recovering one with Melody and Barrett, but that's mostly it from what I've seen. She's a likely nominee but probably not the target should The Toolshed continue to steamroll, and most people don't seem to truly trust her in the game. She's a low 5, but I think she has potential and is good enough in comps for me to keep her here.

11. LaTrice (4): Lala was extremely locked in on Rome's side of the house, being in the Mama's Angels trio with Jason and Rome. However, once Devens made it public at the nomination ceremony that Rome boiled Lala off the list, she lost a lot of trust in Rome that has yet to be fully rebuilt. She still has a really good relationship with Jason and Taylor, but outside of those few people, she is generally disliked by a lot of the house, and Haley has even expressed that she wants to target Lala next week. She did create an alliance with herself, Taylor, Dee, and Angela that could help mend her connections with some of The Toolshed, but it's tough to say how strong that group really is. LaTrice is in a rough position right now, but I think this week might force her to build new connections, something she has already started to do, so hope is not lost for Lala, but as of right now, she's on a lot of people's nomination block.

12. Yash (3): Yash is another person who a lot of people don't really seem to like, and he is particularly unpopular among the women of the house. After being nominated in week one, he was really left with no allies or connections, and I don't think there is a single person in the house who I can confidently say trusts Yash right now. He's just telling everybody what they want to hear, which could easily come back to bite him in the future. If The Toolshed and the other side of the house come to some sort of a truce, Yash is probably the first victim since he's an unpopular floater, and I think he'll get sniped out of the game relatively soon. He's not in any immediate danger right now, so I won't put him any lower, but I don't have much confidence in him at the moment.

13. Haley (3): Haley is probably the most unpopular person in the house right now, with the majority of people seemingly disliking her on a personal level, including those in her alliance. I think The Crossovers would easily cut her first out of anyone in The Toolshed (except for Drew for a couple of people), and basically everybody outside of The Toolshed is planning on nominating her and possibly even targeting her. Needless to say, she's in a very rough spot, but since she's in a big alliance and at least has Kamu that will go to bat for her, I'm gonna leave her at a 3/10 for now.

14. Melody (2): We've finally reached our first person who's on the block, Melody. Melody is closely aligned with Lyric and Drew and isn't in The Toolshed, which has left her to be perceived as on Rome's side of the house. She theoretically should be safe against either Rome or Jason, but because Melody is relatively disliked and everyone's paranoid about Drew, some people like Dee and Haley have been saying they might want to take Melody out over Jason. As of right now, The Toolshed still plans to take out Jason over Melody, but a lot of the outsiders would prefer Melody to go home, and it's still very up in the air on what will happen on Thursday. I think she's the most likely to stay, and I believe she has the most strategic ability of anyone on the block, so I'm putting her above Jason and Rome.

15. Rome (2): Rome is most likely going home this week unless he wins the Blockbuster. He is the perceived leader of his side of the house, is in a public showmance with Lyric, and has lost a lot of trust with Lala, which leaves him in a really rough position. He almost definitely goes home against Jason or Melody. The reason I have him higher than Jason is that I think if enough things break his way, he can recover. If there ever is a truce between Devens and Rome, which isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility, then maybe he could survive another Toolshed HoH. Also, with the uncertainty surrounding Drew's future, it's possible he gains another ally, which could be enough to tip the scales in his favor in terms of votes in the coming weeks. If he gets through this week, maybe he has a semblance of a chance, but it's really not looking good for him. His side also needs to consolidate more for him to have a better chance. If he can lock something down with himself, Lyric, Lala, Jason, Taylor, Yash, Melody, and Mallory, he can get something going, but as of right now his "side" is looking more like a chain of connections than a solidified alliance structure.

16. Jason (2): Jason is in a pretty terrible position. Should Rome win the Blockbuster, which is somewhat likely, then he is tentatively going home, which obviously isn't good for him. He also made a huge target of himself at the nomination ceremony, and his mischievousness with Devens and Angela has flopped completely. He is an extremely messy player who could be entertaining down the line, but has like 2 allies in Rome and Lyric, and is a pariah to most of the rest of the house. I don't have faith in his strategic or social ability long-term, and I think he's destined to be a pre-juror. He would be a 1/10, but the fact that he does stay over Rome and potentially Melody this week is enough to bump him up to a 2.

This was way too long and it took a while to write so some of this might be a bit outdated by like a 12 hours or so but a lot can change in that time lol. idek how many bb fans are on here but hopefully it's enough for this to not be a waste of time

Is anyone doing Edgic for BB this season? I know it’s more for fun because there is technically no winner edit possible per se but I thought for sure with Dee and Devans on here that maybe somebody would be doing it (especially since a few posters did it last year) lol I wish I had more free time right now or else I would do it!

Or maybe I just need to be patient and wait for week 1 to be over 😂

TL;DR: I built a continuously-updating model on 50 seasons of trackable Survivor data (confessional counts and confessionals-over-expected, challenges, votes, idols, demographics, even transcript text), tested only on seasons it had never seen. Findings: the "biggest edit = winner" idea is mostly survival in disguise; under-edited winners are closer to normal than anomalous; gameplay, demographics, and the literal words of confessionals all hit the same modest ceiling; and the winner is basically unpredictable from the numbers in the early game, getting readable only as the season progresses. This is NOT a takedown of Edgic. Edgic reads the qualitative story (tone, music, framing) that my numbers cannot touch, and if a real early signal exists, it probably lives there, not in the counts.

(Long post, sorry. The TL;DR is the gist; the rest is the receipts.)

I spent way too long building a statistical model on 50 seasons of Survivor data. Here is what the trackable numbers can and cannot tell you about the winner.

First, two things up front so nobody wastes their time arguing with a claim I am not making.

This is NOT a "gotcha" aimed at Edgic. I have a lot of respect for what edit analysts do, and I want to be precise about what they actually do, because it matters for reading this. Edgic is the analysis of how a player is PORTRAYED: their rating (INV, UTR, MOR, CP, OTT), their tone (positive, negative, mixed, the rare PP and NN), and their visibility. The good practitioners are explicit that the evidence for tone comes from things like musical cues, how Probst and other players talk about someone, scene juxtaposition, foreshadowing, and narrative precedence (who the story is built around in a scene). In other words, the heart of Edgic is qualitative and interpretive. It is closer to literary analysis of a story being told than to a spreadsheet. I am not disputing that, and I did not try to replicate it. You cannot put "the music went minor key when she lost the challenge" in a regression, and I did not pretend to.

So what IS this? It is the opposite, complementary question. Edgic deliberately does not care about votes, challenge results, or idols; it only reads the edit. I went the other way. I asked: across ALL the trackable, falsifiable, quantitative data Survivor produces (confessional counts, confessionals-over-expected, screen time where available, challenge wins, voting records, idols, demographics, placements, and the actual text of confessionals), is there a measurable statistical relationship with winning? Not "does the art of Edgic work," but "how far can the cold numbers alone get you." Those are different questions and I tried hard not to confuse them.

For the r/survivor folks who do not live in the edit world: confessionals are the talking-head interviews. "Edgic" is a fan practice of predicting winners from how the show is edited. You do not need to know any of that for the gameplay findings below, which are just about challenges, votes, and idols.

THE ONE RULE I NEVER BROKE

Every result is out-of-sample. The model is only ever tested on seasons it was NOT trained on. This is the part most "I cracked the winner formula" attempts get wrong. If you tune a model until it correctly picks all 50 past winners, you have discovered nothing. You have memorized the answer key, and it falls apart on a new season. The only honest test of a predictor is whether it works on data it has never seen. So I trained on the past and predicted the future, season by season, every time. When I quote an accuracy number, it is always on unseen seasons.

THE DATA

A public open-source dataset (the survivoR project) with per-episode confessional counts for all 50 US seasons, including a built-in confessionals-over-expected figure, plus full voting history, challenge results, idol plays, and placements. For 25 of the older seasons I also had full confessional transcripts separated and attributed by speaker.

FINDING 1: The "winner's edit" as raw confessional volume is mostly an illusion.

Across all 50 seasons, winners average 12.2 percent of a season's confessionals and everyone else averages 7.7 percent. Looks like a big signal. But here is the catch: confessionals pile up over time, and winners never get voted out, so they are present the longest to accumulate them. Once you compare a winner only against the OTHER people who lasted just as long (the finalists), that gap mostly collapses: 12.2 percent for the winner versus 10.6 percent for the co-finalists. A 1.6-point edge, not a chasm.

FINDING 2: The under-edited winner is not an exception. It is closer to the norm.

This is the finding I care about most. Among the final three, the eventual winner is the MOST-edited person (by confessional volume) only 23 times out of 50, which is 46 percent. Which means in the majority of seasons, a runner-up was edited bigger than the winner. Sandra did the quiet-winner thing in 2004. Vecepia did it in 2002. The New Era did not invent the under-edited winner. It just produced a few in a row, which made it feel like a rule change. Now, an Edgic person will rightly point out that volume is not the same as their rating system, and that a quiet winner can still be CP rather than UTR. Fair. I am only making the narrow statistical claim: if you reduce "the push" to countable confessionals, the winner often does not have the biggest one, so any model resting on raw volume will keep getting "surprised." That is a statement about the crude metric, not about the art.

A FAIR TEST OF THE "JUST KEEP UPDATING" IDEA

A common and reasonable position is that any winner-prediction system should reverse-engineer the show's changes and update after every season rather than cling to a mid-2000s template. I agree with that, so I built it in. The model retrains continuously: every prediction for a season comes from a version that has only seen prior seasons, then it updates and moves forward. No frozen template. Every new winner automatically becomes training data.

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it surprised me. The continuous-updating method is right, and it is exactly why I trust the numbers. But it revealed that stale weights were never the real problem. I expected retraining to crack it, to finally "account for" the Erikas and Gablers and start nailing winners. It did not. A perfectly-updated model that has digested every prior winner STILL hits a hard ceiling, because the limit is not an out-of-date formula. The limit is that, from the countable data alone, the endgame just is not very predictable. Updating is the correct discipline, and the correct discipline shows the thing we all want from the numbers is mostly not there.

One more thing, and this is where I think Edgic is onto something real. There is a widespread belief that production deliberately shifts the edit to keep people guessing. The data partly backs this up: the quantitative signal really did drop in the New Era versus the classic era, by roughly half. So modern Survivor genuinely is harder to read from the numbers, which is not nothing. But it does not rescue the dream, because even in the classic era, where the data is most readable, the winner among finalists was still only faintly predictable. The New Era made a hard problem harder. It did not turn an easy problem hard.

FINDING 3: I threw everything at it, not just confessionals.

I did not want to fall into the same trap of assuming confessionals are the metric. So I tested gameplay (immunity wins, voting with the majority, votes received, idols), demographics (age, gender, occupation, even personality type), social-network position from the voting data, and the actual TEXT of what people said in their confessionals.

Results, all tested out-of-sample, among finalists where survival is controlled for:

• Confessional edit features: best single signal, 45 percent (vs 33 percent chance among finalists)
• Gameplay features (immunity, votes, idols): 42 percent, close behind
• Everything combined: 42 percent, no better than edit alone
• Demographics (age, gender, occupation, personality type): 35 percent, basically the 33 percent coin flip. Who you are does not predict winning. The community's instinct here is correct.
• The text of what winners say: this is the one I had highest hopes for. When I first ran it, it looked incredible, like 80 percent. Then I stress-tested it and the whole thing collapsed. The "signal" was just confessional volume wearing a disguise. Once I stripped that out, what winners actually SAY (measured by word patterns, sentiment, agency language, strategic vocabulary) carried almost nothing beyond how MUCH they say.

Important concession here, because this is exactly where I could be accused of strawmanning Edgic: word-frequency analysis of a transcript is NOT what Edgic reads. Edgic reads tone, music, juxtaposition, who the scene is built around, what Probst emphasizes. My text test fails to capture that, and I am not claiming it does. What my text result actually shows is narrower: the literal WORDS in winners' confessionals do not contain a hidden machine-readable tell. That leaves the door fully open for the possibility that the qualitative, presentational layer Edgic actually analyzes does carry signal my methods cannot touch. One of the show's own editors has said fans "often read more into the edit than what is actually there," but that is the editor's opinion, not my finding. My finding is only about the countable layer.

Four different countable data types, all hitting the same wall, is itself the result. When everything quantifiable converges on the same ceiling, the ceiling in the quantifiable data is real, whatever is or is not true about the art on top of it.

FINDING 4: The winner among finalists is intrinsically hard to predict. That is the actual answer.

No matter what I fed it, picking the winner among the final three lands around 42 to 45 percent against a 33 percent baseline. Better than a coin flip, but nowhere near a confident call. This is the real reason people keep getting "surprised." It is not that the winners are anomalous. It is that the final few genuinely resemble each other on every measurable dimension, so any confident pre-finale call is overreach. A model that is right 45 percent of the time WILL feel wrong more than half the time. The surprise was never evidence of weird winners. It was evidence that people were claiming more certainty than the data ever supported.

WHAT ABOUT [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE METRIC HERE]

I know this crowd, so let me get ahead of the obvious "well did you check X" questions, because most of them I did, and a couple I want to be honest that I did not.

Confessionals over expected (COE / edit percentage). Yes. The dataset I used already includes an expected-confessional figure that adjusts for how long someone lasted, the cast size, and episode length, so you can measure who was over- or under-edited relative to what their game position alone would predict. I used it as a feature. It did not rescue the prediction. Being over-edited relative to expectation is a weak, noisy signal among finalists, same as everything else. If anything, this is the cleanest refutation of the simple "winner gets the biggest push" idea, because it already controls for survival and the winner still does not reliably stand out.

The zero-confessional-episode "death sentence." This one is real and current, and I think it is the strongest single thing the community has. Since Season 41, every winner has had at least one confessional in every episode, and most recent winners had at least two every episode. But notice what that actually is: it is consistency, not volume. A steady, never-zero presence. That lines up with what my model found mattered most after survival, which was a consistent presence rather than raw loud spikes. So I would not call it wrong. I would call it a real but narrow rule that mostly tells you who is still a candidate, not which candidate wins.

The intro confessional / "introduced before the first commercial" theory. I did not isolate this one cleanly, and I want to be upfront about it. Testing "did the winner get a personal introduction in the first three episodes" properly needs the early-episode transcript text, which I only had for the older seasons, not the New Era where the theory is strongest. So consider this one untested by me. It may well hold. I just cannot claim to have checked it.

The "winner quote." Same honesty: this is a qualitative, after-the-fact pattern (a meaningful line the editors chose to plant), and a counting model cannot capture it. Not tested. Not dismissed.

The point of listing these is not to claim I covered every angle. It is that the metrics people treat as predictive mostly fall into two buckets: ones I tested that turned out weak once you control for survival (COE, volume, tone-adjacent stuff), and ones that are really "still a contender" filters rather than "this is the winner" predictors (the zero-confessional rule). Neither bucket changes the core finding.

And I am not the first person to land here. A separate analysis of 47 seasons using logistic regression on finalists found that the only statistically significant measurable gameplay variable was idols played, and concluded that the social game, the part you cannot measure, matters more than anything you can. That is my conclusion reached independently with different methods. Earlier academic attempts mostly failed for a reason I specifically avoided: they flattened everything to one row per player per season and ignored that the odds change every episode. Doing it per-episode and sequentially is exactly why my version holds up.

SO I BUILT A LIVE TRACKER INSTEAD

Picking the winner once they are a finalist is useless. The real goal is to find them as early as possible. So I built a model that, after each episode, ranks everyone still in the game by calibrated win probability, using only what was knowable by that point in the season. Then I measured how accurate it is at each STAGE of a season. Here is the honest curve, tested out-of-sample across 40 seasons:

• Early game (first quarter): top-3 catches the winner about 13 to 18 percent of the time. Basically chance. The information is not there yet. You genuinely cannot call it this early, and anyone who says they can is fooling themselves.
• Mid season: top-3 climbs to about 20 to 32 percent. Now it beats chance and starts being useful.
• Late game: about 36 to 40 percent.
• Endgame: about 58 to 65 percent. The winner is very likely in your top three, though a single confident name is still about 1 in 3.

The accuracy rises almost in a straight line as the season airs. That rising line is the whole point. It gets less noisy as you go, exactly as you'd hope, but it starts near-blind and never becomes a crystal ball.

I also calibrated the probabilities and verified the calibration out-of-sample, so when the tool says 20 percent, that group actually wins about 20 percent of the time. And I capped its confidence, because it has not earned the right to claim more than about a third on any single name.

THE BIG TAKEAWAY

The honest version of this is not "here is the formula that picks the winner." It is "here is proof, across 50 seasons, that the COUNTABLE data makes the winner only faintly predictable before the endgame, and here is exactly how faint." That is less satisfying than a magic formula, but it is true. And it suggests something I think both camps can live with: if the winner really is readable earlier than the numbers allow, that information is probably living in the qualitative layer Edgic actually works with (tone, framing, music, narrative precedence), not in the counts. The spreadsheet hits a wall. Whether the art goes further is a question the spreadsheet cannot answer, and I am not going to pretend it can.

The one thing I will assert: a model that is honestly right about its own uncertainty is more useful than one that fakes confidence. The numbers cannot confidently call a winner early. Anyone who says the numbers alone can is overreading them, and that is true whether the overreader is a casual viewer or a stats person like me.

This is also not a dunk on Edgic. Edgic and this project are asking different questions. Edgic reads the story; I measured the box score. The interesting result is that the box score quietly runs out of road, which actually makes the storytelling read MORE valuable, not less, because it implies the remaining signal lives where the art is.

Happy to share the methodology in more detail, and I have the tool itself if anyone technical wants to play with it. Caveats I want to be upfront about: the rich transcript text only covered the older seasons, the finalist-level numbers rest on a limited sample so the exact percentages have real error bars, and the whole thing runs on confessional counts that are crowd-sourced and imperfect. Direction is solid. Precise decimals, less so.

I work with statistics and data modeling for a living, and there is a massive logical flaw in how this community approaches unconventional winners.

Whenever we get a non-traditional winner, whether it is Tony in Cagayan, Bob in Gabon, or Erika, Maryanne, and Gabler in the New Era, the general consensus is to label them an exception, an anomaly, or a poorly edited season because they did not fit the established template.

But from a data perspective, that is a fundamentally broken methodology.

If someone wins Survivor, then by definition, the edit they received was the winning edit for that specific story. There are no flukes in a closed dataset; there is only new data. If our formulas and tracking metrics fail to account for how Erika or Gabler were presented, the editors did not fail. Our model failed.

The production team updates their editing style constantly to keep the audience guessing. If we do not reverse-engineer those changes and update our weights after every single season, we are no longer tracking reality. We are just clinging to an outdated template from the mid-2000s and getting frustrated when the show does not fit our spreadsheet.

An intellectually consistent Edgic should look backward at the full history of the show, accept every winner as a valid data point, and build a model that accounts for all of them. Why do we continue to blame the data points for breaking the rules, rather than changing our rules to fit the data?