Cousin Don argues that the fix is in on "Survivor." He may be right, and certainly some players have made that allegation. I would argue that with upwards of 100 former contestants and who knows how many crew members, that it would be unlikely to maintain any large, active conspiracy to fix the game. It's just too difficult to keep that many people quiet, particularly with the ravenous media on a 24-hour cycle.

A more likely scenario would be for the producers to design challenges and rewards that favor some over others, thus influencing the game in a more indirect fashion. I imagine, too, that there is considerable creative editing going on in order to make some look less competent, attractive, and/or appealing, and others more so during the course of the game.

In a related matter, here is an interesting discussion of game theory as it relates to Survivor. (At least it's interesting to this layman with a non-mathematical background)

But Survivor and Chess have very little in common. Unless you're playing some new version of Chess where there are sixteen players, none of them actually have their pieces on the table, all players move whenever they feel like it, at regular intervals players are forced to checkmate someone but at any given time there's at least one player you aren't allowed to checkmate, and players are allowed to make agreements behind each other's backs. Okay, no matter how you cut it, Chess is nothing like Survivor - people should quit making naïve comparisons to it.