Survivor Philippines: Ranking the top 5 castaways of the season

4) Pete Yurkowski

After the first couple of episodes, Pete Yurkowski seemed like a typical, naïve guy who aligned with two young manipulative women (RC and Abi) just because of their appearances. However, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Pete began to see how RC was a more dangerous person to have around than Abi, so he came up with a brilliant gamble.

RC and Abi found an idol clue and promised each other not to tell anyone about it. Of course, Abi goes on to tell Pete and show him where they hid the clue. In order to create a real rift between the two women, Pete took the clue and placed it on the top of RC’s bag. When the entire tribe was forced to stay under the shelter because of the rain, RC’s bag was sprawled on the shelter floor, revealing to the entire tribe that RC had the clue to the Immunity Idol!

That embarrassing manipulative plan worked like a charm, as Abi totally lost it with RC, putting RC on the outs just as Pete drew it up. Since their tribe: Tandang, never lost an Immunity Challenge, Pete came into the merge as the head of a majority alliance. During the first Tribal Council following the merge, he was able to successfully gather the numbers to split the votes with Penner and RC, sending her home as Penner played his idol.

When all chaos broke loose during the next Tribal, Pete was able to keep Tandang strong by voting off Jeff Kent. At that point, Pete was playing a great game as he showed the ability to take control over Tribal Council. There was just one flaw in his game, and that was his ignorance of the other players in his alliance.

Pete, Abi and Artis were known to the rest of the castaways as being negative, arrogant and disrespectful people. His poor treatment with Lisa and Skupin is ultimately what led them to flip on Tandang, sending Pete to the bottom. Despite Pete succumbing to the common Survivor sin of overconfidence, he still played a solid strategic game, deserving of another shot!