Stephen Fishbach was the runner-up on Survivor: Tocantins and has been blogging about Survivor strategy for PEOPLE since 2009. This season, he will blog about his experiences in Cambodia as a competitor on Survivor: Second Chance. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenfishbach.

"It’s about winning the war. It’s not about winning the battles." –Peih-Gee Law, Survivor: China

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Julius Caesar wrote, “Fortune can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.”

He was talking about war – and about life – but those words ring equally true for Survivor. You grab the green-colored woven Cambodian box instead of the pink and suddenly everything is different.

We are all fortune’s fools on Survivor – at the mercy of the television gods for the people we’re competing against, for the food we find, even for the weather that buffets us at night. The right immunity challenge when you need it most can be the difference between reality TV greatness and irrelevance. Witness poor purple Tyler from Worlds Apart. What happens to our narrative of the entire season if he wins a memory challenge at the final seven instead of losing an endurance competition?

Small injuries can bring down entire alliances. That’s why it’s so important to be careful with your chopping! You scrape your hands building the shelter, your tribe narrowly loses immunity and suddenly you’re cooling your heels at Ponderosa, your best moments confined to the YouTube secret scenes.

Nowhere is the topsy-turvy impact of chance so apparent as at the Survivor swap. I used to hate the swap, the way it could unravel all of a player’s hard work and planning, but now as a viewer – and, hell, as a competitor – I recognize that the swap creates a thrilling upheaval, keeps the stable predictability that contestants like me struggle to establish from ossifying the entire season.

Spin the wheel of fortune, and find yourself at the mercy of your enemies Joe and Savage, or secure amongst your friends Jeremy and Kimmi and Spencer.

Tyson Apostol on Blood vs. Water chose last at his swap and at the rock draw. He placed himself at the mercy of the Survivor gods, and they rewarded his humility. Ciera and I imitated him this season: Ciera elected to choose the last box for the women, and I chose the last one for the men.

We both lucked out. I couldn’t believe my good fortune to wind up on a tribe in the majority alliance and with people I legitimately liked. I’ll also admit a little schadenfreude: I was thrilled to see Savage head out to Camp Suck.

I could hardly wipe the manic grin off my face as we walked back to camp. Jeremy, Monica, Kimmi and I quickly affirmed our bond, and Spencer and I had a joyful hello. Best of all, finally my alliance and I could look for the immunity idol in earnest.

One thing TV doesn’t communicate is Survivor‘s level of uncertainty. Viewers at home know for sure there is an immunity idol in play; you also know that the clue was hidden in a tree. But while we spent hours every day hunting under every rock or branch, we couldn’t be certain there even was an idol – or if there was one, where it would be hidden. Would it be buried underground? High in a tree? Would it be obvious or obscure? At Bayon beach, every tree looked significant; every cluster of water-carved rocks held a thousand little hiding places.

On recent seasons, idol clues have been hidden in rewards, so we turned every reward we won inside-out. At Bayon, whenever we brought a reward back to camp, the savvier tribe members would eye each other warily, waiting to see who pounced first.

Tasha and I dug deep into a bag of coal once while the rest of our tribe was off gathering food, then quickly washed off the black dust before anybody noticed.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that you’re climbing trees and getting devoured by rabid mosquitos while somebody else has already found it.

It was fun to be in the tribe majority. Spencer and Wiglesworth threw each under the bus – or, I guess in the new idiom of our times, kicked each other there. Both of them insisted they were at the very bottom of their tribes with no commitments to anybody. (Spencer, we saw last week, was telling the truth.)

Spencer was more baldly strategic in his attempts to integrate himself with our Bayon foursome. Wiglesworth took the classic old-school approach. She never spoke strategy at all but rather worked hard around camp – went clam hunting with Kimmi out among the tidal rocks, sliced coconuts with the practiced arm of a seasoned outdoorsman. It was a wonder to watch her spring into action when she saw that scorpion: she grabbed the machete and cleaved the pale monster in two before the rest of us even recognized it.

At Bayon, we felt that our new tribe probably had the most even strength spread across our six members – but that Ta Keo had the challenge advantage. Survivor challenges favor specialists (though not, to be clear, The Specialist). Because the challenges are often done in stages – a physical part then a puzzle part – you’re better served to field a carnival of oddball experts than a squad of generalists. On Ta Keo, Terry is strong, Keith is a master at balls and knots, and while Ciera and Kass may be small, they’re both superb puzzlers. Joe is a Survivor freak, probably created by Mark Burnett in a secret laboratory to dominate challenges, build camp and flip his hair.

I’m not sure I love Wentworth’s decision to tell everybody on Ta Keo that Terry was idol hunting. If I’m in the power position on that tribe, I’d probably be more inclined to throw votes at the person who I don’t think has the idol than the one I do. (That said, I doubt Wentworth’s work at building bonds with her new Bayon masters began and ended with Terry talk.) Terry, on the other hand, is just sitting back and being awesome. In some ways, their strategies on Ta Keo mirror Spencer’s and Wiglesworth’s new school/old school split on Bayon.

We weren’t surprised that Ta Keo won the first Immunity. In fact, Bayon only came in second by unabashedly copying their puzzle. We had the advantage – fortune once again at play! – to be placed between the other two tribes, so we could see the Ta Keo puzzle much better than could Angkor. Wigles and I shouted orders to Spencer and Jeremy from the mat. It’s not cheating if it’s not against the rules!

The challenge that day was brutally hot – that’s something else that TV doesn’t capture. Kimmi almost passed out afterwards, and we were all a little loopy and sun-drunk when Varner exploded. Has anything like that ever happened before – an entire tribe just falling apart in full view of everybody?

RELATED VIDEO: Survivor‘s Jeff Varner Sounds Off on the Other Contestants

But the Angkor meltdown wasn’t just “crazy people being crazy.” Remember their conditions. Having to build shelter and establish a camp is tough on day one with 10 people at work. A week into Survivor, when you’re malnourished and baking in the blazing sun, it’s brutal. Savage was the biggest guy on their tribe, and his hands had just been lacerated at the previous immunity challenge. Hot tempers were running particularly hot that day.

It’s a tribute to the full insanity of the Angkor tribe that Varner didn’t go home. And of course it’s a tribute to Tasha and Savage. There’s a lot of luck on Survivor – but you also have to make your luck work for you. The Fishy goes to Tasha and Savage for brilliantly playing a tribe of erratic people off against each other.

Of course, Abi also deserves credit for Peih-Gee’s ouster. My favorite of Abi’s qualities is that she constantly asserts how loyal she is. Yet she has betrayed every single alliance she’s been a part of – sometimes the same alliance multiple times. She seems almost predisposed to prefer the sweet nothings her opposition is whispering to her – like an insecure lover who cheats first because she’s afraid of getting cheated on.

“There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” says Hamlet. On Survivor, we call our divinity Jeff Probst.

And on Angkor, there is no hewing Abi-Maria.

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Survivor: Second Chance