Host Jeff Probst is now explaining fully why two contestants were kicked off of Survivor season 49.
If you don’t know, ahead of the start of the game, production flies out all their chosen contestants, as well as two alternate contestants. The two alternates will only play in exceptional circumstances, like illness in an original contestant. In this case, in season 49, two contestants broke a major rule in pre-game and were kicked out.
Keep reading to find out more…
“So the way it works is in the days leading up to the beginning of the game, all the players are together. They’re at a place we call Ponderosa. So you have all of your competitors, but you’re not allowed to talk. That’s why we have so many handlers there to make sure nobody’s talking. You can obviously look at each other, you can try to make eye contact. That might work for you, it might not.… A lot of people scribbled down assessments of their players. Like, ‘I think this,’ or ‘Maybe I’ll get aligned with that person, whatever.’ The only thing is we have rules. And the rules are you cannot talk to each other, for obvious reasons. And in this season, season 49, we had two players who were disrespecting that rule. They just kept talking. So much so that I got a call from our Ponderosa team saying, ‘There’s a level of concern,’” he said on the “On Fire with Jeff Probst” podcast.
“So we asked [the handlers], ‘Please remind them with a stern warning that you can’t talk.’ And I went and met with our executive team and said, ‘Look, we might have a situation.’ And before we could even finish our discussion, I got a second phone call saying that the level of disrespect had reached an even more blatant level,’” Jeff continued. “That was all it took,. Candidly, the decision was made in that moment to immediately remove those two players from the game and replace them with our alternates, Jason and MC. And it sent shock waves through the rest of the players as it was very clear that something was happening with those players.”
He continued about the reactions from fellow contestants, “What really happened was the players, once they were able to talk, they thanked our producers because they said ‘We were all aware that this was happening. And it felt like cheating. Like there was an advantage being had.’”
Meet the 18 contestants competing in season 49!
