The Duel

The Duel is the seventeenth season of the RSF Franchise, and is based off of the Duel format of the reality television series The Challenge (formerly known as the Real World/Road Rules Challenge). The season followed The Amazing Race.

This season saw the players compete as individuals in challenges to earn safety. All players would then send lists ranking all other players from most to least want to save. The challenge winner would save the person they want to keep then that person would save someone and so on and so forth until one person remained. That player would face the Duel. They would then choose any other player besides the challenge winner to be their opponent in the Duel. From there it is simple, winner stays while loser goes home.

This season incorporated a new activity rule in the RSF Franchise that was only used in this season. When a player either did not participate in a challenge (without prior notification), send in a duel selection list, or compete in a Duel they were meant to be a prt of, they would receive one inactivity strike. When a player received 3 Inactivity Strikes, that player would be disqualified from the game and removed from the competition. This occurred 4 times during the season with 4 players being disqualified.

In addition, this season was the only one to incorporate a fallback rule in that if a player who was meant to participate in a Duel did not show up then another player could play in their place and compete for them. That player is determined based on the Duel Selection list with the person they most wanted to save able to take their place. If this occurred then the person who played in their place would receive an advantage in the next challenge regardless if they won or lost. This occurred twice in Round 10 and 12.

During the 9th round of competition a sudden death challenge occurred where all the eliminated players competed in a challenge to re-enter the game. cheese98 won that challenge and re-entered the game.

This season also marked the 1st instance where a player who made the finals was banned (from Tengaged temporarily) before the Final Challenge and thus was not able to participate in the Final Challenge and finished the season in 3rd place. This occurred to splozojames50

In the end, ofl1998 defeated Millzipede and splozojames50 (who was banned) in the Final Challenge in order to earn the title of RSF Champion.

Production
Applications for The Duel opened on September 28, 2012 and were open for roughly a week. 31 people (14 Rookies, 17 Veterans) applied for the season and 19 were initially cast with 1 spot left open for the Last Chance Poll.

All players who applied and were not cast participated in the Last Chance Poll where the player who received the most votes in the poll would become the final player of the season. After 52 votes were cast, the winner of the Last Chance Polls with 11 votes was:

The season occurred from early October 2012 to early November 2012.

Notable Snubs
The following players applied for the season but were not cast and would either make a future appearance in the RSF Franchise or had previously been a competitor on a former RSF Season:

Subsequent Seasons

 * Bold indicates the contestant was a finalist on this RSF/RSFSSS Season.