by Eric Stein for RealityWanted.com

So we have come to the end of another week under the reign of Jessie in the Big Brother 11 house.  Jessie is so close, yet so far away this season.  He surprisingly has an impressively keen sense of the house and its dynamic.  He has managed to sift through all of the bullshit and properly identify who is a threat to his success in the game and who isn’t.  He knows exactly what needs to be done…the problem is, he doesn’t quite know the proper way to do it.  Let’s rewind back to last week’s HoH comp…it’s Jessie and Jeff locked in a tiebreak scenario…due to the clique twist, both are safe either way…Jessie should have launched his ball over the fence in the backyard.  The last thing he needed this soon was to already have his second HoH reign (hence, making him HoH the only two weeks that he could be HoH) and be under that spotlight.  Jessie only has one gear though…he plays hard all the time.  In many regards, I respect that greatly.  In the BB house though, he needs to learn to pick his spots.  He would have been safe either way.  Especially with the Ronnie plan in place, he should have just let it happen – it would have been a free week for everyone else.  However, he chose to fight a battle that wasn’t truly his to fight.  He should have let Ronnie go. After all, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.  Instead of sticking his neck out for him, Ronnie would have been a good egg for Jessie to fry.  Sure, his “loyal” soldier Ronnie stays…he’s HoH…he gets out a big target…great week, right?  Well, as he’s living it…it sure is!  However, it’s very short-sighted playing that totally abandons the bigger picture.  Jessie won the battle, but will lose the war as a result. 

On to Casey.  Take my word for it…Casey is done for.  How can I be so sure?  Well, since season 8, there have been 21 replacement nominees put on the block.  A whopping 16 of them have gone home (76%).  But it’s actually even worse for the replacement nom’s chance at staying.  The truth is that 16 out of 17 replacement nominees that were intended to go home did go home.  In the 5 instances in which the replacement nominee didn’t go home, 4 of them were never the target in the first place.  They only went up because one of the pre-Veto nominees saved themselves.  In those scenarios, the HoH was forced to (didn’t chose to) put up a replacement as a true pawn.  In the past four seasons, only ONE out of SEVENTEEN replacement nominees who were targeted to go home actually survived to stay in the house.  Anyone know who that one player was?  Oh yeah, it was me.  If you’re not a numbers person, just take the following away from this rant - Casey is screwed and well, I am awesome.  In my article during week one, I wrote, “The truth is that Casey is an aggressive guy (…) I’m inclined to think his mouth will sink him eventually.”  Little did I know it’d be as soon as week three.  It’s unfortunate for the show that Laura and Casey will have exited the game so early.  They had the potential to be two of the savviest players in the house.  They just got caught in the early numbers game. 

So is all hope lost in the BB house?  Are the athletes & friends going to sweep the whole game?  No way!  The game always unfolds this way in the early goings.  Every single season, a group of allies leave early on.  On season 8, Mike/Nick/Kail went consecutively.  On season 9, Jen/Parker/Amanda/Alex all followed each other out the door.  On season 10, buddies Brian/Stephen/Angie went out in succession.  And this season we find Braden/Laura/Casey following suit.  But alas, things never stay that way.  The closest comparison to the way this season has unfolded thus far was the early domination of the Four Horsemen for the first three weeks of Season 5.  Well, who went home in weeks 4 and 5 that season?  Four Horsemen rings leaders, Scott and Jase.  Going back to my early point of winning the battle and losing the war…dominating early pretty much means nothing other than guaranteeing that you have no chance of winning the game. 

The house is very muddled to me right now.  Several major blowups are on the horizon and we will not be able to get a true beat on everything until the dust settles and alignments reconfigure.  I think it’s quite safe to say that some combination of Jessie/Natalie/Russell/ Ronnie/Lydia will be exiting in the next two weeks.  Whoever survives the impending meltdown will have a shot to last for a while, but at least 2-3 of them will be going down for sure.  The great thing about BB is that the power changes every week.  Unlike Survivor (in which once you have the numbers, the game is yours), even when you are in control in BB, the next week you can be scrambling for your life.  As a result, casualties will ultimately fall on each side. With that in mind, since he’s the most obvious target for one side of the house, Jeff is also in danger.  It still looks like Chima, Michele, and Jordan will be in the best positions to make it through the next two weeks and come out in a solid position.  Chima is a surprise inclusion here, as I think she is brutally rude.  However, she is so far at the bottom of her alliance’s totem pole that I just can’t see anyone wasting an HoH week on her at this point.  I’m starting to lose faith in Michele’s social skills.  If you’re not going to make game moves in the first few weeks, then you MUST make personal relationships.  Without them, you won’t be able to make game moves later on when you need to.  BB8 Zach comes to mind as a comparison.  While Kevin has managed to stay mostly under the radar thus far, eyes are beginning to dart his way due to some recent questionable gameplay.  If you haven’t spoken for 3 weeks, yet when you do people immediately become suspicious of you, that’s not a very good sign.  If he doesn’t keep his mouth shut, he’ll be in trouble. 

Lydia offered up one of the most despicable ideas in BB history, when she suggested a strategy of intentionally upsetting Michele (who hadn’t done anything to her) by using the fact that her brother passed away against her.  Not that it would have made it better, but it wasn’t really even a game-related suggestion either…just an effort to be pointlessly nasty.  What a low life.  She is a disgrace.  From everything I heard, Lydia was supposedly intended to be the “sweetest person in the house” and was projected to be very well liked.  Whoops!  Didn’t quite pan out that way, did it? 

Tonight is slated to be an endurance competition.  And that big, game-changing announcement?  I anticipate that it’s simply that the clique twist is no more…every man for themselves.  Obviously, that will help to speed along the shakedown that will undoubtedly hit the house this week.  Also, it will add extra incentive for the likes of Natalie/Russell to hang on for dear life tonight.  I think tonight’s HoH winner will go a long way to shaping where this game is headed.  I expect whomever it is to make a big move this week that will have major repercussions throughout the house. 

If you wanna tell me what an idiot I am, how ugly I am, that I was the worst player in BB history, ask me out on a date, buy me gifts, or offer any other comments on my article, leave me a comment here or you can hit me up at: www.myspace.com/ericstein25

(Copyright RealityWanted 2009 - please contact support for rights to re post or distribute)

For more Big Brother 11 Links visit Sirlinksalot.net