On Wednesday’s 10th episode of “Survivor 47,” the four remaining Tuku players enjoyed the thought of potentially making it to the final eight together — a future reality that could give them enough power in the game to make it all the way to the end together. But on the flip side, the other players saw that possibility as too big of a threat to let sit through another vote and rejected the thought of voting out someone more strategic to instead take a shot at the one player holding Tuku together — Gabe Ortis. Read on for his “Survivor 47” exit interview from the end of the episode.
“I felt really good about my chances to make it to the end. It was just a matter of — was I gonna get through nine? I didn’t get through nine,” Gabe explained as he reflected immediately after his elimination. He knew that if the vote had gone the other way that he would be able to ride with his closest allies — Sue Smey and Caroline Vidmar — all the way to the end. What he didn’t realize is that Caroline had come to the realization that she couldn’t let Gabe get to the end because she would ultimately lose to him.
In order to help pull off the blindside against her ally, Caroline worked with the scattered remnants of the other two tribes and also the fourth Tuku player, Kyle Ostwald, who might have been on the chopping block himself this week if he hadn’t earned a fourth immunity challenge win. Kyle knew that taking out Gabe could put a bigger target on his own back, but also knew that the two of them would come for each other at some point and so he had to take the shot at Gabe while he could.
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Caroline purposefully left Sue out of the plan because of how close she was to Gabe. Sue and Gabe were the only two players to vote for Genevieve Mushaluk despite there being a general sense around camp that she had emerged as a power player to be scared of and that many want to vote out sooner rather than later. Like Gabe, Genevieve expressed in a confessional that if she made it through to the final eight that the game would open up for her again and she’d still have a shot at winning. Gabe, however, was not lucky enough to see that come to pass in his favor.
When Gabe said in his exit interview that he “forged the exact relationships that [he] wanted to forge,” Sue is the relationship he meant. In the early days of the game, Gabe formed a tight bond with Sue and was excited to realize a plan he had pre-game to make an alliance with an older female player. He believed this was the type of alliance that he could be most successful maneuvering through the game with. In many ways, that alliance and the way he played the game overall was a point of pride for Gabe. “I never woke up saying ‘What am I doing?’ — I never went to sleep saying ‘Oh god, I really messed up today.’ I did everything and played as hard as I wanted to play,” he said. “And I got a good feeling that I’ll be back.”
Gabe is now the 10th person eliminated from “Survivor 47” and the third member of the jury, joining Sierra Wright and Solomon “Sol” Yi. The players booted from the game pre-jury were Jon Lovett, Terran “TK” Foster, Aysha Welch, Kishan Patel, Anika Dhar, Rome Cooney, and Tiyana Hallums.
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