‘Big Brother 18’ finale review: Was Paul Abrahamian or Nicole Franzel to winner? (Live updates)

Tonight, “Big Brother 18” had a finale that can be described in one way: Stressful. We wanted to see craziness, and we certainly had that. However, at the same time we also had some nervousness that the best overall player would not win this season.

What complicates that is how you define “best overall player,” since there are a multitude of different ways in which you can look at it. Nicole Franzel was probably the best strategist of the season, continuously making moves with logic in mind to give her a good shot of making it far. However, she was pretty terrible socially other than Corey, who she spent almost all of her time with over the course of the season.

On the flip side, we had a guy in Paul who was an excellent social player, incredibly persuasive, and someone who became a great player over time after coming into the game with almost zero knowledge of it. To us, what he did was much more impressive. Paul won the final Head of Household, and opted to evict James over Nicole. From our vantage point, that was a poor decision.

However, we then got to the jury arguments and we started to wonder whether it was a poor choice at all. Da’Vonne suddenly seemed to be completely game to vote for Paul, and we think he far and away delivered the better performance. While he didn’t do a great job justifying his crass behavior to Natalie, at the same time he also explained how hard he fought in the game to make it to the end and seemed to have more of their respect as a whole. This was INTENSE, and we hoped that Paul had the votes after this.

Well … Nicole is the winner. Ugh. Da’Vonne was the deciding vote, and this one’s going to leave a frustrating taste in the mouths of many for a little while. We’re going to cover everything in the backyard as the night goes on, so hopefully we can get to the bottom of this. We do think that Paul made a mistake taking her, but after this jury performance we were rather disappointed that she was rewarded over him.

Oh, and Victor won America’s Favorite Houseguest. Nicole’s not a terrible winner by any means, but she just wasn’t in our mind the best overall player down the stretch.

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