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If you played in a manner such that someone will not vote for you, it's your own damn fault.

Quiddity, may I just say that this is EXACTLY my feeling. Sometimes, you end up with a shootout between two good players, like Cook Islands or Outback, and sometimes you end up with a suspenseless blowout like Palau or Fiji. This quote is EXACTLY why I felt zero sympathy for Matt back in the Amazon; yeah, Jenna was kind of appalling at times, but she played the game and understood what the jury wanted to see from her, and Matt had no clue and no self-awareness. (It's also why I feel Rob Mariano, Brian, and Steph are overrated as players, but that's neither here nor there.)

You know, I really found this finale to have an interesting dynamic... three players, none of which I found objectionable, and it was genuinely an open field. Although I think, realistically, it would have taken abysmally poor jury performances from both Todd and Amanda to even get Courtney to a tie, it wasn't inconceivable. I think this was a final where most jurors didn't make up their minds until the end.

And, that being said, I want to say something about Amanda. In terms of being a strong strategic player, I think that Amanda is quite possibly the best female player we've had post-All Stars. (Which, granted, isn't saying much, when you consider the non-entity women of the past two seasons.) Amanda was a smart player. She was a strong strategist. She was a good athlete, and she made the right moves and the right alliances.

And then she went and completely screwed EVERYTHING up at the end. She got fewer votes than COURTNEY, for pete's sake. COURTNEY!

Firstly, making an undeliverable promise to Denise was STUPID. Denise might have respected her for being honest if she'd said "hey, I promised Todd we'd stick together to the end, and I'd rather face Courtney than you, no offense" instead of her hand-wringing and waffling. And then, when Denise called her on it, she COMPLETELY lost her confidence. It was her game to lose and she blew it, big time. Unlike Colby, who took his fate into his own hands and lost by a vote to a worthy opponent, Amanda just gave up ALL the votes by the way she mismanaged the jury. She was not Rob Mariano or Brian Heidik, needing to come to the jury with tail between her legs. Instead, she blew Denise's vote by making a promise she couldn't keep, and I suspect that Peih-Gee and Jaime were both jurors that would have voted for her if she'd had a good jury performance. Instead, Amanda channeled Neleh, who is quite possibly one of the most abysmal finalists in terms of how she handled the final TC... wanting to focus on how nice she was (and, well, she wasn't, so much) instead of defending her strategic game. (It's not like the performance of Katie, who had no chance in hell and was fighting back, or the performance of Cassandra, who babbled about being nice because she had done NOTHING strategic of note to discuss, and her only hope of any votes was that someone would not want to vote for Earl for whatever reason and found her less objectionable than Dreamz.) Honestly, it's EXACTLY how Neleh lost the million, except that instead of facing lesser-of-two-evils Vecepia, Amanda had to face the sneaky little weasel yet strategic mastermind Todd, and Courtney, who if NOTHING else was consistent and brutally honest. Todd and Courtney did not apologize for who they were and how they played; Amanda did nothing BUT cringe and apologize and act like a whipped puppy. Not only that, but Amanda failed to apologize to Denise, the one person who WOULD have appreciated hearing her grovel. I think Peih-Gee was quite right... Amanda undid any advantage she would have had with her final performance. This was a jury that cared about strategy. James, Jean-Robert, Jaime, and Peih-Gee, the four votes for Todd, wanted to hear about strategy, because I think they all wanted to view themselves as being cerebral strategic players, and Amanda completely did not get that. There have been juries that didn't give a crap about strategy (Thailand comes to mind, as do All-Stars and Africa) but this certainly wasn't one of them.