Deshawn from Survivor 41, the first player (hopefully the last) to ever participate in the “Do or Die” twist In season 41 of Survivor, there were a lot (and I mean A LOT) of new twists introduced into the game. One twist that sparked a lot of conversation, analysis, and mathematical breakdown was something called the “Do or Die” twist. The twist worked as follows. At the...
This post was written by Amanda Rabinowitz and me (Sean Falconer). Murmurs that the game of Survivor is more difficult for non-White contestants have been with the show since its early seasons. Survivor’s first Black winner, S4’s Vecepia Towrey, discussed issues of race with fellow contestant Sean Rector in a scene that was groundbreaking television in 2002 and remains resonant today. Vecepia and...
This post was written by Amanda Rabinowitz and me (Sean Falconer). We recently took a close look at the gender discrepancy in finding hidden immunity idols and its impact on women’s likelihood of winning Survivor. While the gender-gap in idol finding is stark and appears to coincide with poorer odds for female players, this is just one small piece of how gender can affect a complex social...
This post was co-authored by myself (Sean Falconer) and Amanda Rabinowitz. In Survivor’s most recent season, David vs Goliath, Angelina Keeley was the first contestant to call out on air the gender divide amongst idol finders. She stated that only 15% of idols are found by women. As many predicted, Angelina’s comment foreshadowed her own eventual idol find later in the game, making her only the...
For the past three and a half years, each week, I’ve been listening to the Seinfeld Recap Podcast. If you are unfamiliar with the podcast, each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld. Our Seinfeld Recap heroes, Rob and Akiva, are closing in on the series finale and I wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion. Starting in episode...
I am a huge Harry Potter fan. In fact, I’m having a Harry Potter-themed wedding in just a few weeks. Like many things I love, I like to completely overthink and overanalyze every detail. In the spirit of this, I took a deep dive into analyzing how hard would it be to make it in the wizard sport of Quidditch? Quidditch as a Professional Sport Quidditch is the most popular sport in the...
With all the great pre-season Survivor coverage happening on RHAP, I was inspired to do my own pre-season project. We have all witnessed the awesome power of “Nicoletradamus” when it comes to winner picks, but what about predicting the “dateability” (i.e. whether a contestant makes the merge) of Survivor contestants? To address this age old question, I went back through...
If you have read my blog in the past, you likely know that I am a big fan of The Seinfeld Recap Podcast. Each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld. If you ever listen to this podcast, you will start to realize the Akiva has a ton of knowledge about certain pop culture topics but there are also many things that basically every human on the planet knows...
During the last two voicemail shows on Rob Has A Podcast, Rob Cesternino and his co-host have discussed the question, “What winner of Survivor had the largest net worth prior to their win?“ In this blog post, I explain how I came up with the answer of Yul Kwon, winner of Survivor Cook Islands. Before I dive too deeply into my research, I want to setup why this question is interesting...
Recently I wrote about calculating the “peak” season of Seinfeld. In that post, I ranked the seasons by computing a single metric based on the results of twenty top 10 and worst 10 episode lists that I collected from various online sources. In this post, I use the same sources to compute the answers to who are the best performing and worst performing Seinfeld writers and guest...
