Survivor glossary: What are blindsides, and why are they so effective?

It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in Survivor: the blindside. But what exactly constitutes a blindside? Why do they work so well?

As Survivor terms go, one of the most commonly thrown around, even by Jeff Probst himself, is the “blindside.” Probst, being Probst, likes to tell tribes when they’re “perfecting the art of the blindside.”

In its most basic form, this is a blindside: whoever goes home as a result of the vote didn’t know that they were being voted out. Or, to make the term usage more obvious, they didn’t see it coming. (Get it?) Throughout this glossary entry, we’ll be looking at Sierra’s elimination in Survivor: Game Changers, as she explicitly said later that she’d become complacent and didn’t see Sarah’s moves coming.

Actually making a true blindside work is more difficult in practice, because people talk to each other, and the intended target might have friends that can tell them what’s coming and force you to scramble to come up with something else. In the case of Sierra, she was convinced that the vote would go Andrea’s way. Feeding the target a fake person to vote for is a common tactic in helping to ensure that the blindside happens smoothly.

The blindside is also further complicated by the proliferation of hidden immunity idols. Sierra herself didn’t have an idol at the time, but it makes the fake target an even more necessary component of the plan.

Blindsides work because they leave their targets defenseless. However, they’re also risky moves — if just one person isn’t trustworthy and doesn’t vote as they said they would or tells the real target that they’re actually being targeted, then the whole plan can fall apart quickly.

If they pay off, though, the architect of the blindside, provided this is taking place in the post-merge, can point to that as a significant portion of their gameplay. In Sarah’s case, she mostly talked about how she thought that everyone she worked to get rid of in the game was a threat to her.

And, what do you do with a threat?

Next: Who would win if Survivor had a Game of Thrones version?

Try and vote them out without their suspecting a thing.