Why Yam Yam’s Survivor strategy failed on Juego de Villanos—but The Traitors helped

Survivor 44 winner Yam Yam Arocho started the year being dragged out of a banquet hall in Scottish castle screaming that Lisa Rinna murdered him, and he’s ending it in a lavish Columbian villa laughing: “I have a champion’s experience and a villain’s wicked streak,” he says in his introduction on Juego de Villanos.

This is Telemundo’s version of House of Villains. It airs a two-hour episode every night from Monday to Saturday, all of which are subtitled on Peacock for those of us who aren’t fluent in Spanish. The season goes from Oct. 20 to Dec. 7, so there’s far more time for villainy than in the English-language version.

But wait: Is Yam Yam actually a villain? That’s the first thing I asked him. When he got the call, he said he asked his Survivor 44 alliance member and friend Carolyn Wiger the same thing.

Carolyn told him, “Of course you’re a villain! You’re such a bully.” Her evidence was his near-unanimous win, and his seven votes to her zero. Yam Yam told me, “Strategic-wise, I know how to pull my strings in a villainous way. And if I need to come on top, that makes me a villain. I am a villain of a story not told the right way.”

Unlike The Traitors’ gathering of reality TV contestants and Survivor players—including Rob Cesternino, who blames Yam Yam for his exit—Yam Yam said “I did not know anyone. I was like the new kid on the block.”

“It’s the fun part of me joining this huge cast—’cause it’s 18 people, villains of Spanish TV, reality TV, telenovelas, real-life villains,” he told me, adding that he was the only person from an English-language show. “It was quite the challenge, being one of 18 people and being the most unknown one to them.”

They weren’t just known toe each other, but they came in with alliances. “The part that was challenging: How do I make them want to break their past relationship?” Yam Yam said, “Because these people have known each other for 30, 20 years, 10 years. Some of them are like each other, godfathers [to each others’ children], and some of them are giving jobs to each other.”

“They have this kind of loyalties that go before the game starts, which I have none. So how do I make them play … that’s gonna be fun for me and successful for me?” You’ll have to watch to find out how he did that.

Yam Yam didn’t want to be underestimated by his new competitors. “Remember, out of all of you, I’m the only person that has played on two Emmy-nominated reality TV shows—one of them, I won. So don’t be mistaken that even though I’m the new meat on the block, on the pack, I don’t know what I’m doing,” he told me.

Still, his approach on Juego de Villanos was initially going to be the same as his previous two competitions. “On Survivor and Traitors, I tried to fly a little bit under the radar, and be a little bit of a non-threat—a Cirie Fields kind of game, which inspired me on my Survivor journey.”

“I was gonna play the whole card—You don’t know me, I’m here because I’m funny, and all that kind of stuff—because that works,” Yam Yam said. But politician and reality star Sergio Mayer had other plans.

Hours into their first day, Sergio asked Yam Yam about Survivor 40: Winners at War—which Yam Yam clocked immediately. “I know exactly what he was going for he was going for; I’m a winner, blah blah blah. “I said, well, that’s the winner season, but I play Survivor 44 so I play after that. I knew what he was trying to do: paint a target on my winning.”

Juego de Villanos added game elements to House of Villains’ format. (It also changed the name from House of to Game of.)

That made it tough to prepare. “I did my little homework with House of Villains, but this specific format, because it’s way longer, it’s way more episodes, it’s a lot more content,” Yam Yam told me. “They have a second supervillain, which is called a double power villain that has the power to nominate one extra person. And that throws a little bit of a wrench into the format of the original game. It makes it way more dangerous to play. It makes it way more riskier.”

“Being a gamer from the US formats, it’s a lot more like Big Brother,” he said. But other players weren’t approaching Juego de Villanos like he wanted to.

“I feel like I was talking a different language with people, because some of these people were here to play a certain way, and I was there to play strategic,” Yam Yam told me. “But that’s part of the game, right? And I have little following or teammates—let’s call them not following because they were not following me at all!—but we were teammates.”

The result of this expanded game and cast was “so much fun. They’re so fucking bonkers—they’re crazy.” That’s accurate. In the first episode, claiming beds creates immediate drama, as one cast member hurls another’s suitcases out a window into the yard.

“Everybody here wanted TV time,” Yam Yam told me. “Everybody here is a fame whore. Everybody’s super hamming it up—even me.”

And some were also using that as an excuse. Those who are actors and play villains would “say that their villainous moves were part of their character, but I feel like it’s just a cover and an excuse to do whatever they wanted,” Yam Yam said. I’m me, 100 percent—you like me or you don’t like me, I am who I am. I don’t have a character to hide behind.”

The Traitors experience helped Yam Yam deal with other players. “You’re dealing with celebrities. I do not consider myself a celebrity, because—you know, from Survivor, we’re regular people that come out of the obscurity of life and they put us into the spotlight like this. But dealing with these celebrities—you’re dealing with their ego, right?”

“I did learn from that on Traitors because you want them to like you, but they cannot feel threatened by your presence because they need to feel like they’re still like you have a bigger spotlight than you. So it’s how you speed up and you slow down when you’re competing against these people [who] want to be the protagonist.”

Was everyone always at 10 with their characters and personalities, or were they different during downtime? “90 percent of them were like level 110,000 percent,” he said.

Yam Yam has a theory about that. “I’m going to say people are used to being more chaotic in Spanish. In English, people behave a certain way—I’m not saying they’re the most well-behaved in English[-language shows], but I’m saying the majority of people normally have some kind of way about how they play. Here, it’s balls to the wall everything,” he said.

I’d asked about recent criticism of The Traitors and how some players, especially Housewives, are accused of being there just for the screen time. But despite the Juego de Villanos cast being fame whores, they were also competitors.

Yam Yam said, “What complicates it [is], unlike the Housewives that maybe don’t care about the prize money, these people do care about the money. They’re in it for the crown, in it for the price, which is what makes it so so vicious.”

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