Warning: This story contains spoilers for Season 10 of “Big Brother Canada.”
Toronto native Kevin Jacobs once dreamed of playing “Big Brother Canada” and now he holds the crown as the winner of the show’s 10th season.
The moment the votes were being read and Jacobs — a sales engineer from Toronto — realized he won the game, he had no idea how to react.
“I was in complete shock, I didn’t understand,” Jacobs told the Star. “I’m a processor, I often don’t feel emotions right at the moment. When that happened I was completely overwhelmed. I don’t know if I went blank or I was just too confused to feel anything.
“I’m so happy, I’m so grateful. I feel so amazing. Yesterday that was just genuine shock.”
“Big Brother Canada” is a game show that features a group of contestants who live in a makeshift home under constant video surveillance. Each week, they compete to win power and safety inside the house until someone is eliminated by a vote of the contestants.
On Thursday, Jacobs became the first ever player to overcome being nominated for eviction in the first week of the show and end up winning the game. Some fans are calling him the greatest winner the series has ever seen. That’s after he secured the victory in an 8-1 jury vote against fellow contestant Josh Nash of Vancouver.
“I’m thankful that anyone could think that,” said Jacobs. “I look up to so many of these players, I have idolized them, I’ve studied their games, and just to be mentioned in the same sentence is so incredible.”
The 28-year-old takes home the grand prize of $100,000, a wardrobe worth $10,000 from Winners and a travel experience provided by Expedia. Jacobs said he’ll invest a lot of the money he won and also plans to donate $10,000 of his winnings from him.
Known as a strategic force this season, Jacobs said playing the game was the most fun he’s had in his life. He said he learned how resilient he was as a person, and hopes to take his experience from him inside the “Big Brother” house and apply it to his daily life.
“I think in the last couple years of my life, I’ve lost some of the fun and, as soon as I walked through that door, all the rules and cultural norms of regular life kind of went out the window,” said Jacobs . “It was like, if you want to scream, scream; if you want to cry, cry. For a while, I thought I could only do that in the house.
“I’m so happy that I found that little kid again and let him out.”
Nash earned $20,000 for his second-place finish and Canada’s favorite house guest Martin “Marty” Frenette, a fraud investigator from New Brunswick, won $10,000.
Jacobs also became the second player in both the Canadian and US versions of the show to not win a single head of the household designation but still manage to win the game. The last person to do that was US contestant Dr. Will Kirby, who won the game in 2001.
“Day one when I met him, I knew he was an evil genius,” said runner-up Nash of Jacobs. “He definitely deserves this and he’s played such an amazing game. He really was the strategy behind a lot of the moves being made in the game.”
Jacobs thinks his style of game play could potentially influence future contestants and how they approach the game, as it reminds people you don’t need to win a ton of competitions to win it all.
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