In the annals of Survivor, many winners have carved out reputations for themselves. Richard Hatch has become the poster child for strategic thinking. Ethan Zohn was the series’ first universally beloved winner. Sandra Diaz-Twine remains the show’s only two-time champion and one of the hard core fans’ favorite players. One winner, Kim Spradlin, has often been cited as the most likely to win any given season placed the largest amount of times due to her mastery throughout Survivor: One World.

That kind of belief about Kim isn’t crazy. She was truly in a class of her own on her season and totally ran the operation from start to finish. The stranglehold that Kim held on the game was something that is rarely seen among first-time players. That said, she isn’t the only one to have displayed such competency for the game of Survivor. There is one other first-time winner who to me, should be put on par with Kim’s One World victory but for whatever reasons, has fallen by the wayside. Well I say no more, let’s bring some relevance back to his name.

Back in the early days of Survivor, establishing an alliance was the major key to success. Richard wrote the blueprint for the winners that would come after him: get the numbers and never let them go. Around Survivor: Thailand, the game was starting to evolve. Survivor: Marquesas the season before had established that majority alliances could be toppled. Going into Thailand, the belief was that it would take more than just creating a dominant alliance and sticking with it in order to win. The game was changing.

For one season, the game went back to the way it had previously been. That was for one reason and one reason only Brian Heidik aka Mr. Freeze. At the time of his appearance on Survivor, Brian was the USA’s top used car salesman but he had also previously appeared in soft-core adult movies. The reason that Brian is not recognized as a Survivor legend is mostly because of his off camera character. Brian is not a likable human being and may not even be human at all. He is cold, calculated and quite possibly a real-life sociopath.

All of those characteristics are not great for being well-liked by the general public but they are extremely useful if you want to be a good Survivor player. In the days of Thailand, Survivor still had a fairly large market share and this is the first season to be universally panned. A lot of that has to do with the entire cast of characters but being represented by a winner like Brian certainly doesn’t help. As poorly as Thailand was received by the public is as dominant Brian was during his season.

Thrown into the decidedly older and less athletic tribe, Brian was never in danger early on. As a former college athlete, Brian was one of his team’s best competitors and everyone knew they would need him around if Chuay Gahn ever had hope to win any kind of challenge. That kind of safety allowed for Brian to establish partnerships with the people he saw as fit to take him to the end. His first big target as a teammate was Clay Jordan. If Brian was a sociopath, he was one who had the key ability to understand how people would perceive others and he knew that Clay was seen as unlikable and annoying by most of the tribe. Aligning with Clay gave Brian the first true goat in Survivor history.

As the tribe lost a good amount of challenges, he took the opportunity to get rid of anyone who might pose a threat to his dominance. He roped Ted Rogers into his alliance and following “grindgate”, Brian coldly used the controversy as a way to pull Helen Glover to join him and create a tight foursome. At this point, Brian established final two deals with each individual member of his alliance. Outside of that four, he also kept around Jan Gentry who was perceived as nothing more than a crazy old lady by the Chuay Gahn tribe.

The brilliance of Brian’s alliance composition is that as long as he made sure the other three didn’t talk to each other, they never felt on the outs. The only reason anybody would consider flipping on a tight alliance in Survivor is when they feel on the bottom. With Helen, Clay and Ted all feeling like they were Brian’s number one ally, they had no reason to seek refuge with anybody else because they saw an easy road to the final two. As for Jan, she wasn’t much of a strategic player and Brian understood that he just needed to appease her so that he could keep using her as a number.

Once the merge hit, Chuay Gahn had a numbers advantage on Sook Jai. Brian was the driving force in keeping the tribe united until they Pagong’ed Ken Stafford, Penny Ramsay and Jake Billingsley out of the game. As he had planned, he was not sitting pretty in the final five with three people who wanted to take him to the final two and Jan who was a non-entity. He had accomplished phase one of his plan without any trouble and now he had to find a way to turn on his allies without burning the bridge so much that they would not vote for him in the end.

Believing that Helen and Ted were conspiring against him, Brian decided to turn the tables on them. After winning immunity, he convinced Jan to follow Clay and himself and vote out Ted. The following round, Brian won immunity again and voted out Helen because he still believed she had tried to make a move against him but also because she the only actual threat left for Brian to win the game.

Going into the final three, Brian once again copped an immunity which gave him the final choice as to who he would face off against at Final Tribal Council. This was probably the easiest immunity he would ever win since neither Clay nor Jan were good challenge performers and Brian was one of his season’s best. Since he did not have a final two with Jan and he believed that Clay was by far the more hated player, it was an easy decision. He sent Jan to be the final member of the jury and finished his shepherding of Clay, having brought him to the final two with him like he desired.

Despite a fairly angry jury, most notably Helen, Brian’s instincts were right. Though most of the Sook Jai jury members could not bring themselves to vote for Brian, all three Chuay Gahn members and Jake gave him their vote win the game. The vote may have seemed close but there is really no scenario where Brian loses the four votes he had locked in and he did not put in any more effort to try and recoup any more than he needed.

Throughout Thailand, Brian was never in danger of being voted out. In fact, he never received a single vote cast against him despite attending 9 of a possible 14 tribal councils, even Kim received three votes during her various tribal councils. Once it came down to the final five, Brian never gave up individual immunity and thus got to call the shots in terms of who he was bringing along. Like Kim, Brian knew when to turn it up a notch when it came to the immunity challenges and won the ones he needed to win.

While they may have hated him after seeing their season air, Brian won because of his ability to connect with his tribemates. He was clear that everything he was doing was for the purpose of them awarding him a million dollars at the end but in the heat of the game, his tribe bought what he was selling. Brian was the calm and collected leader of a bunch that should not have been able to work together. Helen in particular despised Clay but agreed to work with him only because Brian was around to be a buffer. He was a hard worker in camp, a team player in tribal immunities and seen as an asset to keep around both socially and for camp life. There were no weaknesses to Brian Heidik’s game.

You’re probably saying to yourself, if he was so fantastic, why haven’t we seen him play again? It’s a good question. Plenty of unlikable players have gotten a second shot at playing. People like Colton Cumbie and Abi-Maria have both played twice. Brian wasn’t even that bad of a person on the air, most of his actions came afterwards when most of the public weren’t paying attention. The problem when it comes to Brian is that Jeff Probst does not like him. If Probst does not like you, the odds of you ever being cast on the show again are slim to none.

That said, if gun to my head I was asked to pick one Survivor player to play on a season with random strangers who know nothing of each other and my pick had to win or that trigger was pulled, give me Brian Heidik every time. He understood how to use people’s motivations to further his own game, knew how to position himself in an alliance that all felt the most allegiance to him and was smart enough never to reveal how in control he truly was. Kim Spradlin is a masterful Survivor player who controlled her season from day one but let’s not forget that Brian Heidik did the same thing nearly a decade before her.