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Australian Survivor Winner Mark Wales on “the Most Awful Move” He Made in the Game
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Chatting to POPSUGAR Australia after winning Australian Survivor: Blood Vs Water, Mark Wales said that “it’s funny”, because “the game you remember playing and the game you watch back are often two different things”.
Mark went on to say that while “a lot of the work” they put in made it into the final edit of the season, “there were parts in there” that he “felt like were excluded”.
Specifically, Mark said, he “felt like Josh [Millgate] really didn’t get his game covered like he should’ve”.
“He was such a good player,” Mark said, “but all of the work that Sam [Gash] and I did together, you saw on the screen, and I think the fact that we were able to work together as a team toward that common goal meant that we were able to get as far as we did.”
After his winning pitch to the jury at the Final Tribal Council saw him win in a landslide victory with all 10 votes going to him, Mark said his best move was flipping on his alliance with Josh in the second-last Tribal Council to take him out of the running.
“It was the most important move, and probably the most awful move, because we are mates, I was with him the whole time,” Mark explained. “We played together, we shared all the highs and lows together, and to turn on your mate at the last minute like that, it makes you feel pretty empty, it’s awful.
“He was just as deserving a winner as anyone else sitting there, out of the top five, six, seven people. He was an absolute frontrunner.”
As for the move he was most proud of, Mark said that it was the way he’d “really subtly and implicitly” positioned Josh as the leader of the Big 6 alliance to all his tribemates.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d end up going up against Josh and at the final minute,” he recalled. “It was a choice between Josh and I to get voted out, and he was just a little bit more of a threat than I was, and that was enough for them to target Josh and not me.”
Looking notably upset throughout the Final Tribal Council as he served his time on the Jury, Josh still ended up voting for Mark to take the win, and Mark said that all is well between them.
“He was good, he said ‘I’ve got a pretty good resting bitch face!’, he was having a joke about it,” Mark laughed. “But yeah, he respected the plays that were made and I think the best players don’t take it too personally. Josh was like that, he didn’t take it too personally, and I’m still mates with him.”
Mark met his now-wife, Sam, when they appeared on season two of Australian Survivor, and as returning players to the game, were able to avoid a lot of “common mistakes” that new players make.
“There are a lot of small things,” Mark explained. “People don’t pace themselves properly in the game.
“It’s a long game and you’ve gotta play it long,” he said. “You don’t have to make a tonne of big moves, you can just make one or two great moves.
He continued: “If you go far in the game you’re gonna have to do more stuff, anyway, so you don’t need to rush, you can be patient. You can hide in plain sight.
“I hid amongst big guys, who were physical and similar to me, and I didn’t share a lot of information,” he said. “I kept a lot of information to myself and just used it when I needed to. So just having that discipline to be patient and play the long game was probably the biggest part.”
Still, playing a Blood Vs Water season added “extra layers” to the gameplay, which Mark said “made it really interesting” due to the heightened level of emotion people were playing with.
Going into the Final Tribal Council, Mark said that he was “nervous about it” because “it’s totally possible to play a good game and lose at the Final Tribal Council”.
Mark felt that with Chrissy Zaremba‘s social game, it “wasn’t a shoo-in” that he would win, and in fact, he was “just hoping [he] had secured enough votes to get a win”.
“To get a clean sweep was pretty cool!” he said. “It was a surprise.”
Mark went on to say that having Sam at the Jury Villa to “explain [their] thought process and what [they] were doing” was “probably the deciding factor that secured him the win, and now, the couple are laughing all the way to the bank.
Of the $500k prize money, Mark said: “It’s not a bad haul, right?!
“Sam and I have been working pretty hard for years now as self-employed people, so this is going to be a great chance for us to spend some time together as a family and figure out what we’re gonna do next,” he finished.
Miss the finale? Australian Survivor: Blood Vs Water is streaming now on 10 Play.
Want more Australian Survivor? Read all of our stories here.
