We're still months away from the Survivor 49 premiere on CBS, but it looks like some of the fans are starting to think they know who the Survivor 49 winner will be.
Survivor 49 and Survivor 50 just finished filming out in Fiji this spring and summer. After the Survivor 50 cast returned home within the last week, Inside Survivor published a list of the three tribes and revealed which players will be on each tribe to start Survivor 50. That list is key to the Survivor 49 winner, according to fans.
Potential spoilers ahead for Survivor 49 and 50 ahead!
There are two winners on the Survivor 50 cast: Survivor 45 winner Dee Valladares and Survivor 48 winner Kyle Fraser. According to Inside Survivor, Kyle begins Survivor 50 on the purple tribe, while Dee begins the season on the teal tribe. Interestingly, Rizo Velovic, who is one of the two Survivor 49 players on this cast, is on Kyle's tribe. There is no Survivor 49 player on Dee's tribe.
As reported by Entertainment Now, some fans believe that means Savannah Louie, the other Survivor 49 player, is actually the winner of Survivor 49. She's on the orange tribe, which features legends like Cirie Fields, Ozzy Lusth, and Christian Hubicki, but doesn't feature one of the winners.
So, does the orange tribe not have a winner like the teal and purple tribes? Or, is Savannah the winner of Survivor 49? If Survivor 50 starts with one winner on each tribe, Savannah very well could be the winner of the next season.
Now, there are many ways to poke some holes in this theory. Mainly, of the 24 players, only two are confirmed winners, and there's no guarantee that each tribe will start with a winner. Yes, Kyle and Dee are starting on different tribes, but it doesn't necessarily mean another winner would be part of the cast.
On top of that, there was always going to be two Survivor 49 players. I'm sure the plan was always going to be to split up Kyle and Dee as the two former winners, so unless they ended up on the same tribe as Kyle and Dee, one of those players was going to look like the potential Survivor 49 winner simply because we haven't seen Survivor 49 yet. So, maybe, it was more about gameplay potential than separating the winners. Based on how the tribes look, there was clearly some amount of care in choosing which players to put on each tribe.
With that said, it is pretty interesting. It makes sense to have a former winner on each tribe. Survivor could have easily kept a little bit of mystery by making sure Rizo and Savannah ended up on the same tribe as Kyle and Dee, respectively. That would have stopped most of the speculation.
At this point, I don't know if I subscribe to the Savannah is the winner of Survivor 49 theory just based on this report. This is not the official tribe list. This was reported by an insider. While I don't doubt its accuracy, there is just part of me that just feels like it's a stretch to assume Savannah is the winner of Survivor 49 simply based on the tribe list.
Now, there's another part of me that's been wondering this whole time why Kyle and Dee are even playing. They are super popular players, so I understand it from that perspective. They are both insane strategists, so they check that box, too. Ultimately, it's never made sense why they are the only two Survivor winners. There were a lot of other winners to choose from who made sense for Survivor 50, including Rachel LaMont and the pre-season 40 winners.
So, I don't know. I like the theory! Is it true, though? We'll find out when Survivor 49 ends in late 2025. The new season will not premiere until September 2025, and the wait for Survivor 50 is even longer than that, though we do have the release month (February 2026) for the 50th season.
We'll share more Survivor 50 news as we find out!
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