The only openly jerky player during the game was Rocky (and to a much lesser extent, Stacy), and his final jury interview was pretty tame. Alex's diatribe really kind of came out of nowhere. For a while he was my favorite after Yauman & Earl, though near the end he did and said some stupid things that made me glad he lost.
It's true that the 3rd-place prize is better than 4th place. Actually, I guess 2nd and 3rd are both $100k now, since there's no way to distinguish them (especially when the final vote is unanimous), so it's probably even a bigger difference than in previous seasons. But the cost of losing all that goodwill, among the jury members but also among the TV audience, is probably a lot more than that difference. In fact, in some previous seasons they've had an additional "fan favorite" vote for $1mil, and if he had kept his word and then been voted out 4th, he'd almost certainly have won any fan favorite award. (It's possible that they don't even decide whether to give that award until the season is over, and if he had kept his word they'd have run the award just for him. That's sort of how it felt when Rupert won his award, at least.) If he had somehow made it more obvious in his confessionals that he was consciously playing everyone, especially the deal with Yauman, then he might have gotten credit for being a good manipulator, but it really looked like it was purely a last-minute giving in to temptation.
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It's true that the 3rd-place prize is better than 4th place. Actually, I guess 2nd and 3rd are both $100k now, since there's no way to distinguish them (especially when the final vote is unanimous), so it's probably even a bigger difference than in previous seasons. But the cost of losing all that goodwill, among the jury members but also among the TV audience, is probably a lot more than that difference. In fact, in some previous seasons they've had an additional "fan favorite" vote for $1mil, and if he had kept his word and then been voted out 4th, he'd almost certainly have won any fan favorite award. (It's possible that they don't even decide whether to give that award until the season is over, and if he had kept his word they'd have run the award just for him. That's sort of how it felt when Rupert won his award, at least.) If he had somehow made it more obvious in his confessionals that he was consciously playing everyone, especially the deal with Yauman, then he might have gotten credit for being a good manipulator, but it really looked like it was purely a last-minute giving in to temptation.