Although the Survivor rankings are based on a formula, explanations as to which events during the show affected them are given along with those rankings. This means that for the less mathematically inclined, it’s not necessary to understand exactly how they’re calculated. But for those interested, the details are given below.
Challenge performance
The better players will tend to do better at the challenges. Therefore, each week the survivors will be ranked based on how they well they performed at the challenges.
The way that survivors are ranked will differ from challenge to challenge because of the nature of those challenges. If a challenge involves survivors working together as a team (e.g. the initial tribal challenges), then those survivors will receive an equal ranking. If a survivor sits out a challenge for any reason, then they will be ranked ahead of those who lost the challenge, but below those who won the challenge.
As the immunity challenges are more important than the reward challenges, when calculating a combined challenge ranking for that episode, the immunity challenges will be given more weight than the reward challenges.
Tribal Council
Survivors are ranked based on the number of votes they receive at Tribal Council, with fewer votes resulting in a higher ranking. The survivors are ranked on the percentage of votes they received out of the total possible votes rather than the total number of votes.
Overall rankings
In addition to the challenge performance in each episode, survivors are ranked based on their average challenge performance. In order to account for the fact that the number of survivors decreases each episode and to prevent survivors from being influenced too much by a low ranking in an earlier episode, the rankings are recalculated each episode relative to those survivors left in the game.
In other words, if a survivor is ranked 6th in Episode 1, and in Episode 2 the survivor who was ranked 5th in Episode 1 is eliminated, and the survivor who was in 6th place is now regarded as being in 5th place in Episode 1, as only 4 survivors were ranked higher than them.
Once every survivor has been to Tribal Council (and therefore had the possibility of being voted against), combined vote and challenge rankings can be calculated. As staying in the game is ultimately more important than winning challenges (although those do help), the votes are given more weight than the challenges.
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