Frequently Asked Questions
Last updated: 2026-05-22
Common questions about the Survivor ELO rating system, answered from the data.
Parvati Shallow holds the highest all-time SHALLOW ELO rating at 1772.6 (S-tier), first among 572 established contestants across 76 seasons of US and Australian Survivor. Ratings are recomputed after every aired episode. See the full rankings.
Parvati Shallow is the top-rated active player at 1772.6 SHALLOW ELO. Active players are those who appeared in any of the last 15 seasons of US or Australian Survivor. Career ratings carry across seasons, so the rating reflects a full body of work.
Survivor ELO rates every contestant with two independent Elo models. SHALLOW measures strategic play through pairwise matchups from tribal council votes, eliminations, jury votes, and fire-making. BEAST measures challenge performance from individual and team challenge results. All players start at 1500. Full details: SHALLOW methodology and BEAST methodology.
An Elo rating expresses relative skill from head-to-head outcomes; the system was originally built for chess. Survivor ELO converts votes, eliminations, jury votes, and challenge results into pairwise wins and losses. Beating a higher-rated player gains more points than beating a lower-rated one, so ratings account for strength of opposition.
Simon Mee holds the highest BEAST challenge rating at 1783.6. BEAST rates challenge performance only: individual wins, team wins, and duels, scored as Elo matchups. See the BEAST methodology for details.
Among established players with at least 20 tribal councils attended, Joe Hunter has the highest vote accuracy at 95.0% across 22 tribals. Vote accuracy measures how often a player voted for the person who was actually eliminated.
Tiers are assigned by z-score, a player's distance from the mean rating in standard deviations. S-tier (Sole Survivor) requires a z-score of 2.0 or higher, roughly the top 2% of all players. The remaining tiers are A (Finalist), B (Merge), C (Jury), and D (Pre-Merge).
Yes. Players carry their rating across seasons, so a returning player starts a new season with the rating they finished with previously. This makes the system a career-long measure rather than a single-season one.
968 contestants are rated across 76 seasons of US and Australian Survivor. 572 are established, meaning five or more tribal councils attended; the rest are provisional because their sample is too small for a reliable rating.
Episode-level data comes from the open-source survivoR R package, with manual patches where the source data is incomplete. Every rating is recomputed from raw vote, elimination, and challenge records after each episode.