Just minutes into the Deal or No Deal Island season 2 finale, viewers learned that David Genat was the winner. The real drama began later in the episode, which aired Tuesday, March 25, when he faced the banker, revealed to be Chrissy Teigen.
Genat, 45, knew he had his late father by his side as he played the riskiest game in the show’s history. He ultimately walked away with $5.8 million — the most money one player has ever won on network TV.
“I’m quite a spiritual person. I believe in God and I definitely feel like there was something special there that was happening for me and for my family,” Genat told Us Weekly exclusively. “I felt really connected to my dad the whole time I was in Panama.”
That connection filled him with confidence in a game in which he rejected seven offers — four in the seven figures — before finally accepting his record-setting total. He had that confidence before he even began the final game.
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“I was being held before the big final case game and I [was] really meditating and getting in the zone. I’m praying. I was talking to my dad, who passed a few years ago, and I was like, ‘Dad, if this is gonna go well, just give me a sign,’” he recalled. “I look up and there was a tree canopy, there was no open sky.”
So Genat had to plead with a DONDI staffer to take him somewhere he could look up.
“I was like, ‘I have to see it, I have to see it,’” he said. “So she takes me to this little clearing and I look up in the sky and [there’s] this shooting star, and I was like, ‘Oh, there he is.’”
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Though Genat insists he knew which case had the $12.2 million the players had banked throughout the season, he still had to think carefully over each offer as they slowly grew from $230,000 to the final one he rejected, $3,870,018.
“Turning that one down, that wasn’t me playing anymore,” he said. “I just gave it up and I was like, ‘All right, we’re either going to make one of the greatest television history moments or one of the worst, and it was the greatest.”
Finally, faced with either accepting the $5.8 million or playing the game through to the end, he relented. Had he continued, he would have had a 50/50 shot of winning the $12.2 million — but he also could have gone home with only $75.
“I’d been getting real clear signs about which cases to pick, and at that point I was just kind of jumbled,” he admitted. “I was like, ‘Well, look, $5.8 million is so much money, it’s life-changing money. That’s when I decided to accept.”
Added to his Survivor Australia winnings, Genat has now made $6.3 million on reality TV. He might have a chance for more, too, as the so-called Survivor Golden God is a rumored contestant on Survivor: Australia vs. the World, airing later this year.
