If you were placing bets on who would win Season 1 of The Anonymous, you probably had some money on Jack Usher. He won the power of The Anonymous not once, not twice, but three times. However, his luck ran out in Episode 9 when Victoria Vesce won the power to eliminate him and sent him packing.
When DANI dropped the news that Jack had been kicked out of the competition, we saw an emotional reaction, unlike anything we’d seen from past eliminations. You could feel through the screen just how devasted he was to go home — especially after playing such a solid game.
As heartbreaking as it was for Jack’s time to come to an end, let’s not forget, he’s a gamer through and through. Losing is a part of playing, and in an exit interview with Reality Tea, he explained how he mentally navigated the loss. Plus, he dished on the slight changes he’d make to his gameplay if he got a second shot and why each of the remaining players has left him feeling “impressed.”
Jack Usher did his homework before The Anonymous
When Jack introduced himself on the show, he explained that he was a professional board game player. At first glance, that might sound a bit unusual, but check his resume. He’s got championship titles under his belt for tabletop games. He’s the real deal.
Part of that competitive background is why he hit the ground running on The Anonymous. From Episode 1, he started making allies while simultaneously plotting against them. He’s also a major fan of competition reality shows, so he had years of experience watching this kind of action from the sidelines.
“I’ve watched a ton of Survivor, The Circle, Traitors, Squid Game: The Challenge,” Jack shared.
“I wasn’t a big Big Brother guy, so Xavier [Prather] on the show, someone else clocked him for me. Thank you so much,” he added with a laugh.
Even for the biggest reality competition pros, a show like The Anonymous is hard to navigate. DANI is constantly throwing twists at the players, and since there haven’t been fifty seasons of this show to study, nobody has a blueprint to follow.
“This game is really so cool I think because it takes a lot of good elements from other games, and then wraps it all up, and I think that it really created a game that has a lot of room for strategy and exploration,” Jack reflected.
He continued, “It makes it tough to make alliances, and you’ve got to be underhanded and deceitful. That’s kind of forced if you want to really play, so I think it’s a super cool game.”
How Jack Usher took his L like a champ
At the end of Episode 8, Jack was one of three players at risk for elimination. Once DANI confirmed Jack was the eliminated player, he looked like he got hit by a truck. He screamed like it, too.
According to Jack, part of that big reaction came from the sheer shock of elimination. He was holding out hope up until the final moment.
“It was definitely blindsiding. I was maintaining hope that it just wasn’t going to be me,” Jack admitted. “I also thought I’d’ done a good job at making sure that most people if they’d been The Anonymous, would not have picked me to be eliminated.”
He added, “Unfortunately, maybe the one person that would eliminate me did become The Anonymous. That’s the game. That’s how it goes.”
Just to be clear: don’t mistake Jack’s emotions for him being a sore loser. He’s a gamer through and through. He knows that losing is part of the territory. He was able to brush this off and learn from the experience.
Jack shared, “The thing I say to people who get really frustrated when they lose and they want to get better at games is, ‘I’ve played and lost more games than you’ve played at all.””
“You’ve got to play. You’ve got to get rep to get better at games,” Jack continued. “So to me, this game is just like that. I got to play, I got to flex on them, but we took an L ultimately. I think, in a sense, you learn more from the L’s than you do the W’s.”
Revisiting Jack’s (almost) flawless game
If there were a scoreboard for The Anonymous, Jack would have been at the top right up until his elimination. He won the power to eliminate more than anyone else, and he masterminded so much chaos in Anonymous Mode that everyone seemed genuinely gagged when he revealed his handles.
“Would I change anything? Yes, I would have tried to win and played a little differently,” Jack joked. “But I’m very happy with how it turned out and the game that I played.”
When Jack walked out the door, he said that he felt “no regrets” about his time in the competition. For the most part, that’s still the case, but hindsight is 20/20 for everyone. Jack admitted that watching the show back, he picked up on two moments that might have been slightly regrettable.
“In the second iteration, I would have been much less vocal about who I wanted to get out of the game because obviously, that came and bit me in the butt,” Jack said of his gameplay after the handle refresh.
The other moment Jack felt strong opinions about was that horrible math challenge everyone flopped at during Episode 6. While Xavier regretted not fighting harder for an easier puzzle, Jack told us that he regretted partnering up with the Big Brother alum in the first place.
“At that moment I didn’t want to play for safety because I had just gotten safety,” Jack recalled.
He clarified that he didn’t want to rub the other players the wrong way by trying to prioritize his own safety. Why even waste time adding $50 to the prize pot when the grand prize is supposed to be $100,000? That felt like adding nothing at all.
“I thought, ‘What does that say to the other players about the type of player you are?’ I wasn’t ready to come off as that, but I think Xavier distrusted me because I pushed back on what he wanted to do,” Jack recalled.
“He kind of did need to play for safety in that moment,” Jack admitted. “So, I could have avoided the whole thing by just not partnering with him.”
Why the remaining players “impressed” Jack
When chatting with a mastermind like Jack, we simply couldn’t let him get away without hearing his thoughts on the remaining players. After being able to watch the show back, he said he felt genuinely impressed with how everyone was playing their game. Yes, even Victoria.
“I think that everybody is developing as a player over the course of the game,” Jack shared. “I think I came in with a strategy that really worked off the jump, but I think as we can see, everybody is starting to play more and more. In a sense, everyone is impressing me, and no one is shying away from it.”
Specifically, Jack saluted Lilly Jenkins, who has managed to stay afloat in the game despite her rough start. He said her gameplay shifted in a major way after she assumed the Robot handle.
Jack explained, “In the second iteration as Robot, she’s really going for it. She’s putting Nina [Twine] at risk and as a player, I respect that. She’s playing, and I love that for her.”
Then, there’s Jack’s dear pal Andy King. Despite double-crossing him throughout most of the competition, Jack gave props to Andy for making some bold moves over the last few episodes. Perhaps Fyre Fest Andy is the one to watch?
Jack gushed, “Andy put himself at risk. What a cool move! He didn’t have to do that at all. He almost got The Anonymous from it. That’s impressive!”
One player who Jack felt confident that everyone should take notes from is Nina. He said her gameplay has been “genius,” and she’s a pro at spilling tea in a way that works.
He explained, “I already knew she was Sandra [Diaz-Twine]’s daughter, but getting to watch back some of the moves she made, you know, they’re not in Anonymous Mode. They’re in the house.”
“Some of the ways where she’s able to spill the tea, and it doesn’t come back for her at all? It’s amazing to me,” Jack confessed.
A lesson learned from Nina
Jack noted that another thing Nina had going for her was the fact that she’d played Survivor before. He said that just like any game, getting more “reps” can help you make it to the finish line. Practice does make perfect in any gaming scenario.
“I learned that you don’t have to do too much. Doing too much can blow up in your face, and I think there’s an element of it that had mental fatigue from how long of an experience it had been, and sending people home, and going back and forth to the seat, and all of that.” Jack explained.
“I think it got in my head, and I started seeing the finish line and doing too much,” he continued. “That’s something where I think experience is a huge benefit. That’s the type of mistake that Nina would avoid potentially because she’s seen it. She’s been in it.”
The Anonymous continues with new episodes at a new time of 10/9c, Mondays on USA Network.
TELL US – WERE YOU DISAPPOINTED BY JACK’S ELIMINATION? HOW WOULD YOU RATE HIS GAMEPLAY? DO YOU THINK HE COULD THRIVE ON ANOTHER REALITY COMPETITION SHOW?
