Semi Final allocation: Semi Final 2 Review & Analysis

The Semi Final allocation draw for the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest took place yesterday where the 31 participating countries (without the Big Five and host country) where divided into two groups of 16 and 15 respectively.

The allocation can have a significant impact on a country’s odds to qualify so we decided it would be a good idea to take a closer look at the two Semi Finals and guess which countries have the best shot at qualification. Today we are focusing on the Second Semi Final . For Semi 1 info click HERE

It is no secret that certain countries tend to vote for each other for different reasons which is why they were put into to six pots so not all of them would end up in the same Semi.

We came up with a ranking using the average points awarded by each country and ranked them accordingly using only the Semi Final votes.

What we did is look at all 15 countries and tallied up their votes from inception of the two Semi Final System (2008) and divided them by the number of times a country was able to vote for their “competitor”.  So if Country A was in the same Semi as Country B three times and the vote looked like this: 10 points, 8 points, 0 points. We would then divide it by three which would result in an average point count of 6. The country with the highest average count will get 12 points, the second on 10 points and so on.

So according to voting patterns, the following 10 countries will qualify in May:

1. Greece (131 Points)
2. Romania (119 Points)
3. Norway (95 Points)
4. Lithuania (88 Points)
5. Israel (82 Points)
6. Malta (79 Points)
7. Georiga (78 Points)
8. Ireland (68 Points)
9. Finland (60 Points)
10. Belarus (55 Points)
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11. Switzerland (43 Points)
12. Poland (43 Points)
13. Austria (37 Points)
14. Slovenia (36 Points)
15. FYR Macedonia (30 Points)

Based on the average points, Greece will emerge as the winner of the Second Semi beating Romania by 12 points. It is also the only country that receives 12 points from every single country. FYR Macedonia is in danger to finish last in this Semi. Israel unexpectedly ranks 5th which is quite a good result considering they suffered three non qualifications in a row.

Before you start complaining about the loopholes in this system, we are totally aware that this is all based on previous voting patterns and average points and the following factors that contribute are not taken into consideration:

1. The song “quality”. Needless to say that when a song is considered popular by the majority, it odds to qualify will increase significantly and this system is purely based on prior voting records.

2. The luck of the draw. Some countries only crossed paths once over the past six years so having only vote set of votes will skew with the ranking. So the more data we can collect over the next few years, the more accurate it will be.

3. Running order. A lot of people believe (which is also backed up by multiple studies) that performing in the second half increases the odds of gathering a few extra points. We did not consider the allocation (first vs second half) when creating the data.

So this is merely one way to look at the odds. Please let us know what you’ll think and if the Top 10 looks about right or totally off.