The odd events in Saturday's final result were handy since they let us glimpse past the unknowable "In no particular order". I sat down with a pen and paper to work it all out.

My wife reads this forum and pointed me to it as the best place to show my results. I can't paste the tables as that would require a lot of playing around but I've chucked my journal entry as a link at the end.

Patsy being in the bottom two gave us a let in to the populraity contest and as the audience score wins, it gives a minimum score for each contestant below her to beat her. Since once you've used a set of audience points up you can't use them a second time you end up playing with very few numbers.

If you place Patsy in last place with the Audience then Will couldn't have scored better than sixth and Bill came third.

If you move her up a notch then there is enough slack that Will could still be knocked out by only coming 4th but it gets difficult to give Zoe and Colin enough audience figures since you've raised the bar for the other three behind her so You need to knock some points off him anyway to make the audience table look more credible.

Move her up to 5th and you run out of options. It means that Bill won the audience vote and Will had to lose it. That is about the only way I can get her into the bottom two. There are only 3 places she could have come since if she'd been any higher Bill would have had to score 8 points.

Anyone placing bets on the next one out could bear looking at the tables I knocked out.

Warwick
http://www.affordable-afpers.co.uk/strictly.php

Thanks for sharing your tables Warwick! And yay for Bill! But I do disagree that he is getting the sympathy vote; I think he is getting the fan vote for entertainment.
I hope you do the same thing next week!

That is fantastic!

Thank you so much for taking the time to work that out and also to post it here.
I'm sure loads of people will want to see that.
It'll shut a few up too

Becks

That is really, really interesting. A bit too mathematically complex for me, though, seeing as I struggle to add single digit numbers together at the best of times, but I got the jist.

Thanks for letting us see that!

I'm not likely to get an in like that again. It took some odd voting to allow any analysis of the figures. It probably won't happen again until we're down to 4.

Brilliant! I'd worked out the probablitity of the top couple with the judges being disqualified on the audience vote (which you know is very straightforward) but I'm not enough of a mathematician to get much beyond that. Very interesting that Zoe and Colin would both have to get top audience marks, unless Bill got the most votes. That means that the audience is behind them, even though we haven't had a chance to really see that in action yet.

Fascinating stuff!

Ah, but you can nudge some of the figures a couple of points either way. There's enough slack in there if you lower the leader's points to raise someone else a couple of places with the audience. The only real sets of possible points are for Bill James, Darren and Patsy and they vary by 3 across the tables. Of course ounce you made sure they match Patsy and Will gets one less, then you only have two numbers to play with. There's less slack, the more points you give Patsy.

They're 'minimum' votes. You can lower the top two and have points left to play with and give to your favoured dancer.

I worked out of the top dancers Colin must have had the lowest public vote. As for the 2 bottom couples I read somewhere the other couple left is actually just random and for drama and not actually 2nd lowest score at all. This must be right or else Patsy would have 1 phone vote and Bill 7 which I think is impossible given Antons fan base alone which raised 7 thou texts in a few minutes on ITT the other night for his night fever dance. I also dont think Bill would have beaten Darren in popularity either

As I've posted on other threads, Bill is VERY popular with lots of people - not just is madly obsessed fans! Him & Karen are very entertaining. I think it's quite likely that he would have got the maximum number of audience votes.

But would they actually be legally allowed to state that the other couple is the second lowest if it weren't true?

I've spent far too much time studying Legal Reasoning tonight...I realy need to go to bed.

Haha, nice to see there's another numbers junkie around! I did just what you did, but didn't have an easy way to share it online.

It's worth remembering that there's often a rebound effect, where fans of a couple who've had a scare one week vote in greater numbers the following week.

Many fans support more than one couple. If they support Patsy and a couple who came lower in the judges' ranking, they would have likely thought that Patsy was almost certainly safe at #3, and voted for the lower-ranked couple.

My webpage doesn't make it clear that the leaderboards I knocked out were minimum Audience points. The only one I couldn't make come out another way easily was the one where Bill was top with the audience (Patsy 5th). With the first one, you can Make Darren or James come top and drop Zoe and Colin into their position with the audience and still get Saturday's result.

My own instinct says that Patsy came either 5th or 7th just looking at the data.

5th.. Bill is well liked and is probably getting a huge sympathy vote too. He did the Children in Need thing the night before and the dancing was mentioned on that. If he did pullin the voters that hard it would mean that Colin got a high vote from annoyed viewers that he didn't score higher, that people didn't bother to vote for the 'safe' leader Zoe. On the other hand Will seemed popular with viewers and judges.

Put Patsy last and you have lots more room to move around your preferred dancer. and it means that Will could have scored above Patsy. Patsy's attitude hasn't endeared her to me as a voter so her being last feels right. Bill could still have won the audience vote if you'd like. You just nudge Colin and Zoe down a point.

The information is more a thing of interest than a solid fact.

After all 90% of statistics...

Warwick

Great work Warwick and like the format...the objectivity of the tables was refreshing...as far as why people are voting it's impossible to say without the old sweeping generalisations creeping in

However... mad fans that we are here some of us beat you to it and did the maths on Saturday night in the wee small hours...not sure which thread it's on now but you may find it interesting to read

And i love the title!

I did the maths shortly after the results show. It took a while for the forum registration to go through. I work in systems security so I quietly waited until the moderators let me in feeling quite refreshed and pleased about how well they had decided to handle things. Verification, Captcha and moderation must be pretty unique. As I said, my wife pointed me here.

I know what you mean its just I dont remember such emphasis put on 2 lowest before now. Also are there draws like in dancing and do they refer to public scores or both ohh I think Ill stop now I might need help ahhh

Yeah, I'm not expecting to get another in on the numbers for a couple of weeks when anyone can work it out. I expect this will make sure that the preferences even out unless the viewers really do dislike a dancer more than the judges by a fair amount on Saturday.

Bills attitude hasnt endeared the other half of voters though and lots on the forums find Zoe obnoxious and Colin boring. All we can really tell therfore is that lots havent bothered voting yet

I'm not sure that's true Geeny (and I speak as a fellow Anton fan)... the majority of people on here like all the remaining couples and if they have any niggles, they relate to the judges using custard tactics rather than the couples themselves

Fully agree with you on this one. Colin's dancing is quite brilliant(good at both ballroom and latin), but there seems to be something missing in the interest stakes. Whilst Bill's dancing is quite appalling, but he's really entertaining to watch as a whole. My fear is that Colin will go before his time unless he starts to raise his profile, maybe more 'action Jackson'stuff will help !!!!!!!!!!!! Quite fed up now of Zoe and I know it must be really tempting to constantly hug, kiss and constantly throw yourself at Ian, but for heavens sake it's getting tiring to watch...........I think he looks quite uncomfortable with it at times.
My vote goes to Darren, who has the right approach and is entertaining to watch in every aspect .........

Now I could well be wrong here, often am but the way I see it to have received the result we did there are actually only a few combinations that could have been had. For example, for Bill and James to get out of the bottom two they had to score higher than Patsy and Will in the public vote, obvious I know but bear with me! So... the lowest possible score is 6 (judge plus public added together) Patsy received 5 so if she got the lowest public score she would have had a total of 6, Will scored 3 with the judges but couldnt have got more than 2 with the public or he would have stayed in (public vote in a tie is what counts)

Therefore for Bill and James to have got higher that Patsy's 6 they must have come 1,2 or third with the public.

Darren and Lilia must have come at least fourth with the public or they would have been in the bottom.

So... by my calculations either Zoe or Colin scored poorly with the public, could the judges be scoring Zoe so high as she isnt popular with the voters and they are keeping Colin in second to make sure their fave Zoe doesn't leave??

Oooh, you have been busy!! That's interesting! I tried to work it out but it was making my brain hurt!

You're forgetting that in the case of a draw, then the audience's vote counts more.

That means that if (for example) Patsy, James and Bill were all drawn at 6 points, then Patsy would be 2nd last with 5 points.

Assuming that Patsy was, in fact, 2nd bottom, then we can conclude the following about the audience's vote:

Patsy MUST have been in the bottom 3
Will MUST have been in the bottom 3

Bill MUST have been in the top 3
James MUST have been in the top 4
Darren MUST have been in the top 5
Colin MUST have been in the top 5

Of all the possible combinations of audience votes, there are only two that put Zoe in the bottom two:
A) Will 7th; Zoe 6th; Patsy 5th (with Bill first, and James second)
B) Zoe 7th; Patsy 6th; Will 5th (with Bill in the top 2, and James in the top 3)
There are lots of other combinations that give far more plausible voting patterns. If I had to bet on a particular one, I would go for
1st/2nd: Colin/Zoe (in some order); 3rd Bill; 4th James; 5th Darren; 6th Will; 7th Patsy.

Wow all you people are so brainy! I'd never be able to work out something like that!

I understand what you are trying to say but I'm not sure I agree with some of this.

Colin could have been in the bottom 3.

Patsy had to score at least 6, she got 5 from the judges and even if she came lost she would have added another point, therefore, Bill and James had to score at least 6 points two, thus making them safe because of having more votes even if they had the same combined score.

therefore, Bill must have been top 2, James must have been top 3, so either Colin or Zoe scored poorly with the public, especially when you consider Darren and Lilia must have come at least fourth.