Updated Vegas Odds at Bodog after Performance Round

I noticed the American Idol betting odds numbers on Bodog.com have changed so I added them to my bar graph to note the differences. At the top not much has changed except Scotty actually improved to tie James for second place with 7/2 odds. Lauren also improved a tad to remain in fourth place but now at 9/2 odds. Casey now slipped to 8/1 so he is now behind Jacob at 15/2, which I find difficult to believe. Paul's odds slipped a little from 15/1 to 20/1 but he remains in 7th on the list. There is now a three way tie for 8th as Thia dropped to 25/1 to match Stefano and Haley improved to match the others. Since Haley performed last and is on an upward swing I feel she is pretty safe tonight, unlike Thia and Stefano. Finally at the bottom is Naima who fell back down to a 75/1 longshot where she was March 18, having improved since then. We will see tonight how accurate the Las Vegas odds pickers are.

WhatNotToSing Ratings and more on last night...

Preliminary numbers from WhatNotToSing.com are now available, and their rankings have been very accurate in predicting who is in the Bottom 3 and eliminated recently. For some reason Paul always seems immune from being in the bottom 3, so I am betting tonight's bottom 3 will be Stefano, Thia and Naima. If Stefano is lucky his fans will push him past Jacob, to make put Jacob in the bottom. Most likely the two leaving will be Thia and Naima, which would mean since the top 13 were selected, the first four who leave would all be female!

That would leave Pia, Lauren and Haley as the remaining women, and frankly, between those three I may now have to select Haley as the one to best succeed. Lauren's personality is still too immature and uncouth for my tastes, and Pia is the exact opposite, too poised and pageant perfect. I still have hope for Pia breaking it out and showing some real personality on stage, but if I had to pick between the three of them I would go with Haley if she just tamed down her growling a little (not completely, but stop overusing it!)

Between the guys I've had enough with Paul, Jacob and Stefano, and now even Casey has lost luster as a "winner" in my book. I think it will be Scotty and James duking it out for the final unless:

1) Pia can show some personality and versatility, or
2) Haley can continue to improve to be a worthy contender, or
3) Lauren can stop acting like a backwards teenager (that she rightfully is) or
4) Casey can again show that he is a capable pop "idol".

Here is my latest WhatNotToSing graph with the contestants sorted by WNTS score. You can notice Haley's yellow line having a nice increasing arc, to contrast Pia's green line in a slow descent. Lauren (dark blue) is also recovering from her Top 13 performance, and James (orange) and Scotty (light blue) continue to be very consistent, and Casey (dark red) is coming back up to join them.

My Post Performance Analysis on Where to Cast My Votes

After tonight's performances I truly wish we could pick who we want eliminated instead of who we want to stay! That would make it so much easier. Instead I must check DialIdol.com and also the Idol Chatter blog to see what worthy contestant is in most need of my votes. I was a little surprised on the Idol Chatter vote to see Naima Adedapo strongly picked as the person in most danger of going home. Although I was not overly enamored with her performance, at least she took a bit of a risk and tried something interesting, unlike so many others (Thia Megia, Paul McDonald, Stefano Langone, Pia Toscano.) However, if we look at the current DialIdol rankings, Naima is situated safely in the middle and nowhere near the bottom:

She actually has a higher DialIdol score than James Durbin or Lauren Alaina. Personally, I would rather watch Naima perform her unusual takes on classic songs than have to watch Jacob Lusk oversing himself through anything. At least most of the other performers are just boring so they are not so irritating. I cannot believe Jacob is safely in the green on DialIdol. The other contestant I am tired of listening to is Paul McDonald. I actually like Paul as a person but cannot stand his voice. At least he is pegged at the bottom of DialIdol along with two of the snoozier performers, Thia and Stefano. Lauren Alaina is the opposite of Paul to me in that I think her performances are actually not too bad, but I cannot stand to listen to her when she is not performing and just being herself. And then there is Pia who I watch and listen to and see so much potential, and then she just stays safely in her rut. I find Haley interesting but I get tired of all her growling. It did not work for Casey and she overdoes it way too much. If she were to just tone it down a little I think I could actually enjoy her performances. I was even underwhelmed by Casey tonight who played it a little too safe, after his near elimination last week.

So who should I vote for tonight? I have already voted for James a few times, but I really do not think he needs it. I even voted for Naima a few times since even though I was not overwhelmed by her performance, I believe she deserves to stay more than many others. I voted for Pia a few times just for her potential, and I voted for Scotty too since he just seems like such a nice guy who performs because he loves it. I cannot think of anyone else I feel compelled to cast a vote for tonight. In any case, I believe I will be happy to see the crowd thinned by two people tomorrow, but I have no idea who it might be.  I think 5 contestants are pretty safe (Casey, Scotty, James, Pia and Lauren), but of the other six, it is hard to decide who will be in the bottom 3 and which 2 will be leaving.

Pre-Performance Odds Check

Since tonight is a performance night (Elton John night!), I thought I would check bodog.com to see if the Vegas odds had changed for anybody since Friday. March 25. There have been some slight changes but not too much. Pia Toscano's odds have actually gone down as the front runner from 5/2 last Friday to just 2/1 right now. I am not sure what has happened to make her an even stronger favorite at the moment. The overall rankings by the odds makers have not changed, but Naima Adedapo seems to have lost her edge over Haley Reinhart as they are both now 50/1 long shots. The only other change since Friday is for Scotty McCreery whose odds changed slightly from 4/1 to 9/2, but still keeps him as the sole 3rd favorite. Here are the Vegas odds in my bar chart:

My next statistic to check are Twitter and Facebook numbers, but instead of the just taking the absolute numbers of total followers and fans, I will find the net gain since I last grabbed the numbers on March 14. This should show how many new people in the last 2 1/2 weeks decided to follow the contestants which should demonstrate their current popularity. The most amazing statistic here is that Scotty continues to dominate in both the total number of new Twitter followers (22,719) and the total number of new Facebook fans (17,659). Scotty had over 40,000 new followers and fans in the past 16 days which is more than four of the other contestants have in total (Stefano, Jacob, Haley and Naima.)

 It will be interesting to see how the numbers will change after tonights performances. The folks at the bottom of the odds and the social media counts will have to make some great performances to stay out of the bottom. With no saves available and two folks leaving tomorrow, it is all on the line now!

What a Difference a Day Makes! American Idol Season 10 Odds

Like many other people, my predictions for the American Idol Bottom 3 were not very good. I only picked one of the 3 bottom dwellers, Thia Megia, and guessed Stefano Langone and Casey Abrams would both have enough votes to be safe. Obviously the Vegas oddmakers were not predicting it either as they had Casey as a 50/1 longshot to be eliminated last night. They have updated the odds to win on bodog.com now, and Casey's odds have dropped from 6/1 to 15/2 to tie him with Jacob Lusk. Lauren Alaina has also dropped a bit from 9/2 to 5/1 which puts her at the 4th position, instead of being tied with Scotty McCreery for 3rd as she was yesterday. Thia has seen her odds drop slowly and landing in the bottom 3 last night lowered her odds to 20/1 instead of 16/1. The big winner last night? Haley Reinhart, of course, who was not in the bottom 3 and saw her Vegas odds raise from 100/1 to 75/1. She is still the biggest longshot, but she is still there and going on tour too! James Durbin also has seen steady improvements in his odds, dropping from 11/2 to 5/1 to 4/1 to 7/2 today to be safely established as the #2 favorite behind Pia Toscano. There are now only four gents who have never been in the bottom three (James, Scotty, Jacob and Paul), and only two ladies (Pia and Lauren.)

The WhatNotToSing.com scores for the week are in now, and they again support well the bottom three picks. Now that we have 4 weeks of data, the bar graph can demonstrate the trends for each contestant pretty well. Again I have the contestants sorted by their rating for this week. Sure enough, the bottom 3 in WNTS scores for the week were Casey, Thia and Stefano. Over the 4 week period Casey and Thia have seen the most dramatic dropoffs, and Pia and James have been the most consistently good. I also have a simple graph of the average scores over the past 4 weeks for all the remaining contestants (removing the wild card performances):

Thia and Casey's averages would be significantly lower without the Top 24 weeks included. If we just look at the past 3 weeks, the graph changes a bit, and everybody's rank shifts slightly except for the Top 2:

Casey drops from #5 to #7 when averaging scores over the past 3 weeks instead of 4 weeks, and Thia drops from #9 to dead last. Nobody else moves either up or down by more than a single position except Naima who moved up 2 from #10 to #8. If we look at the bottom 5 for both bar graphs, we see that all of the contestants who fall in the bottom five have been in the declared "Bottom 3" on a results night except for one person: Paul McDonald. His scores have never been that good but he continues to be called safe, which means he has a lot of voting fans somewhere.

Who will be Bottom 3 and Going Home Tonight?

Tonight they reduce the group down to just 10, and I think this night's picks are a bit tougher than previous weeks. Conventional wisdom would say the bottom 3 will be Naima, Haley and some unfortunate soul, but I thought both Naima and Haley did fairly well last night. It might be easier to see who is definitely safe. If we check DialIdol.com they have 5 contestants they say are safe: Scotty, James, Jacob, Pia and probably Stefano. Interestingly the next 2 on their ranking are last weeks bottom 3 dwellers, Naima and Haley, followed by Thia, Paul, Lauren and then Casey. The problem with the bottom dwellers here is they are actually among the more popular contestants, so I bet they have a lot of voters power voting for them. I will have to check another source for more numbers.

 Another place to check is by looking at who people thought performed the worst last night, so I will use the poll on the USA Today Idol Chatter blog which has almost 5,000 votes. There most think Haley performed worst, followed by Stefano, Thia, Casey and then Naima. There is not much correlation between the bottom of the DialIdol ranks and the worst performances as picked on that poll.

 Now I will check the actual Las Vegas odds on Bodog.com to see who they have as the most likely to leave tonight. They have Haley as the odds on person to leave tonight at 1/2 odds, with Naima behind her at 2/1. They are followed by Stefano at 7/1, Paul and Thia at 10/1 and then Jacob at 25/1. They have five contestants all put at long shots to be eliminated tonight at 50/1: Casey, James, Lauren, Pia and Scotty. So I think it is safe to say the contestants most likely to be in the bottom 3 tonight are: Haley, Naima, Stefano, Paul and Thia.

So now it is time for my predictions. I am predicting it will again be an all female bottom 3 since I think both Paul and Stefano have enough avid female voters to sustain them. It should be Haley, Naima and Thia. Of those three Thia is definitely safe, and I am guessing Haley will probably leave. I do not think the judges will use the save on her either.

I also have the latest bar graph on the Vegas odds on who will win from the bodog.com site. Haley has now grown to be a 100/1 longshot. That would be quite a payout if she won. James has also moved in front of Lauren and Scotty to at 4/1 odds, only behind Pia who has dropped to 5/2.

Post Elimination Betting Odds Update from Bodog

Well, Karen had a sweet voice and a similarly sweet personality, but she just was not interesting enough to win enough votes to stay on the show. That means we are down to 11 contestants, with only one more to remove before the Top 10 for the tour are determined. It looks like the odds are good that the tour this year will be 6 guys and 4 gals, the question is who is the girl to get cut next week, Haley or Naima. One way to check is with the American Idol betting odds at bodog.com, but they have them both set at 75/1 long shots. Here are the odds which they updated last night compared to the ones before this week's competition so we can see the difference:

Since the beginning of the week there have been some order changes as Casey has dropped from being tied with Lauren as the second favorite to being the 5th seed. Scotty has moved up from being tied with James for 4th to being tied with Lauren for 2nd. Paul and Jacob are now tied at 6th position, where Paul had an edge over Jacob and Thia just a few days ago, and Thia and Stefano are now tied at position #8 (an increase for Stefano.) In fact Stefano saw the best drop in odds from the start of the week from 18/1 to 16/1, with the only others who saw improvements being the leading 4 favorites, Pia from 7/2 to 11/4, Lauren from 9/2 to 7/2, Scotty from 11/2 to 7/2 and James from 11/2 to 5/1. 

The WhatNotToSing.com web rating scores continue to predict the bottom three and who gets eliminated fairly well, with #9 Haley, #11 Karen and #12 Naima being in the bottom 3 and then Karen leaving. It will be very interesting to see who will be in the bottom 3 next week. Naima and Haley are very likely candidates but there will have to be someone else too! Will it be Paul, Thia, Jacob or who else? Stefano seems to have momentum, but I thought Paul and Thia have some large fan bases, and I am not sure about Jacob. We will have to see how they all perform to see who the bottom three will be, but most likely either Haley or Naima will be going home.

Latest "What Not To Sing" scores mean new Bar Charts!

The preliminary scores are in from WhatNotToSing.com so I had to update my bar chart to see how the latest trends look. If you look at the bar chart in general it looks like everybody on average is actually getting worse! Even Pia Toscano, "Ms. Consistency", has seen her scores slip slightly over the past three weeks, but others like Jacob Lusk and Casey Abrams have seen some very dramatic drops. The only person breaking this trend is Stefano who went from a wild card contestant who was almost eliminated to one of the top two performances last night. Lauren Alaina also is up this week from last week, but still not back up to her top score back in the Top 24 week. I guess back in Top 24 week there were a lot more mediocre and bad performers to compare against, and now half of the contestants from then have been eliminated. Another way to look at the data is to look at the difference between the three weeks for the 12 contestants to see how they have increased or decreased in score.

The third column is for Lauren. I am not sure why her name did not make it to my bar graph. From here it is easy to see that nobody has shown any real improvement but Stefano. Thia has a slight score increase over last week, but her Week 1 to 2 drop was the largest of anybody, about 50 points.

Last week the WhatNotToSing.com scores were quite accurate at predicting the bottom 3 and who was eliminated with #7 Haley, #12 Karen and #13 Ashthon being in the bottom 3 and then #13 (Ashthon) being eliminated. If that holds true again this week it would be Naima, Karen and Paul in the bottom 3, but I think Paul has lots of crazed fans, so it should be Naima, Karen and Haley. Yes, three ladies again with another one going home, probably either Karen or Naima. After Thia's pretty but boring performance last night, I have pretty much given up on her being able to win the competition, and I think the only two ladies with a chance of winning are Pia or Lauren.

Casting American Idol Season 10 for the characters in Glee

This really isn't a numerical issue, but it was still fun to do, so I am posting it anyway. I thought I would try to cast the 12 remaining American Idol Season 10 contestants into the cast of "Glee". There are some strikingly easy matches here and some that are not so easy. I will start with the easy ones and work my way down:

Scotty McCreery = Finn Hudson: The all-American wholesome high school athlete. The kind of guy every mom wants their daughter to date (but the daughter may not agree).
James Durbin = Noah "Puck" Puckerman: The edgy rocker with a mohawk. Looks like a tough guy but is a softy inside.
Lauren Alaina = Rachel Berry: The bubbly star on stage who is not so likable off stage. You love to watch her perform, but you don't want to hang out with her.
Pia Toscano = Quinn Fabray: The gorgeous girl everybody wants, but who always seems to be competing in a beauty pageant or popularity contest, even when there isn't one going on.
Casey Abrams = Artie Abrams: (Yes, the last names even match!) A talented, clever, extremely likable guy who everybody loves but who has some health issues. He may not be good looking in a typical fashion, but he is "sexy" in his own way.
Haley Reinhart = Brittany Pierce: The smiling, blonde sex kitten. Funny and witty, but she may not all be there in her head.
Thia Megia = Tina Cohen Chang:  The talented and cute, but bland Asian girl. She could be a star but is overshadowed by others because she refuses to shine.
Stefano Langone = Sam Evans: Cute guy with a big mouth and a pleasant but not so interesting personality. Like Thia/Tina, he could be a star but is overshadowed by others.
Jacob Lusk = Mercedes Jones: The gospel diva with the big voice and slightly too much personality. The gender difference is not that big of an issue in my book.
Paul McDonald = Will Schuester: Funky, older dude with a big smile but some outdated style and weird hair. Will definitely dances better, but they are both quirky, skinny dudes who are not afraid to speak their minds and do their own thing.
Karen Rodriguez = Emma Pillsbury: Always smiling, always pretty, always gracious, always not very interesting. I could have paired Karen with Santana due to ethnicity, but Santana is always so sulking and moody and Karen always seems so happy. She would make a much better Ms. Pillsbury.

I was having the hardest time with Naima Adedapo, but I have given her the best role of all as Sue Sylvester. They both are thin and athletic looking with a very distinctive style in clothes, and an off-beat personality that sets them apart from the rest of the pack. I could see Sue performing "Umbrella" more like Naima did compared to how Will and New Directions performed it. Unfortunately Brett Loewenstern was eliminated from American Idol so he cannot play Kurt, but you know he would get that part.

Facebook Fans / Twitter Followers comparisons

In my never ending search for more graphs to create, I have taken the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers for each contestant (using their official AI sanctioned accounts) and put them into a stacked bar graph sorted by the total of both of them. The numbers seem fairly indicative of total votes since the two remaining contestants who were in the bottom 3 last week (Karen Rodriguez and Haley Reinhart) have two of the three lowest counts for Facebook fans and Twitter followers, with the third being Naima Adedapo. All three of them have less than 10,000 Twitter followers and 3,000 or less Facebook fans. It will be interesting to see if they are the bottom three for this week. And as expected the top four contestants in terms of online fans are all male, specifically Scotty McCreery, Casey Abrams, Paul McDonald and James Durbin. James is unusual because he has the second highest number of FaceBook fans behind Scotty, but is actually #7 in terms of Twitter behind not only Scotty, Casey and Paul, but also behind the top three ladies. He seems to have a FaceBook heavy fan base with only twice as many Twitter followers as Facebook fans, whereas most contestants have 3 or 4 times as many Twitter followers. The other unusual contestant is Scotty who leads the pack in both categories and with a whopping 22,000 FaceBook fans. The top three ladies, Lauren Alaina, Thia Megia and Pia Toscano, all have very similar numbers, which bodes well for them all getting into the Top 10, but cracking past any of the top 4 guys will be a challenge.

Estimating the Height Ranking of the American Idol Season 10 Top 12

Since I was looking for more numbers to analyze, I noticed some people were wondering how much taller James Durbin was than Adam Lambert, since they had their pictures taken together last night. In seems that James must be pretty tall since Adam is supposed to be 6'1". So James must be about 6'3" or 6'4" depending on what shoes they were wearing last night. So that made me wonder about the heights of all the contestants. The easiest way to guess is to look at pictures of all of them standing and check what footwear they have, especially the ladies and compare them. The photo on top is a good one since it shows all of them pretty much standing in a line. Already in this one you can see James is the tallest as he is a full head over Stefano, who is definitely the shortest guy there. Haley and Thia appear to be the shortest over all, and they are both wearing heels. Let's look at some more standing photos.

After James, it seems like Jacob is the next tallest and then Scotty and then Paul. Casey seems a little shorter then Paul but definitely still a bit taller than Stefano. Casey misses a lot of photo shoots! Lauren, Naima and Karen seem to be about the same height with Pia just slightly shorter than those three. And then Haley and Thia are definitely the shortest. The photo below with all the ladies standing in the back shows that Thia is the shortest, probably 1 or 2 inches shorter than Haley

So using these four photos I will take my best guess as to the rankings of the Americal Idol Finalists, Tallest to Shortest:
Guys: 1) James, 2) Jacob, 3) Scotty, 4) Paul, 5) Casey, 6) Stefano
Gals: 1) Naima, 2) Karen, 3) Lauren, 4) Pia, 5) Haley, 6) Thia
Putting the guys and gals together is difficult due to the shoe heel issue, but I will assume everyone is wearing dress shoes in this ranking:

1. James
2. Jacob
3. Scotty
4. Paul
5. Naima
6. Karen
7. Lauren
8. Casey
9. Pia
10. Stefano
11. Haley
12. Thia

I could be completely wrong but it was fun trying to figure it out, and at least it is a ranking people cannot complain about.

New theme week, New bar graph!

They just reported that the newly named Top 12 will be performing songs from the year they were born. That means I should generate a bar graph of the years they were born with the genders separated by color based on their birthyears. Here are their years as I copied from MJ's Big Blog:

• Casey Abrams – 1991
• Haley Reinhart – 1991
• Jacob Lusk – 1987
• James Durbin – 1989
• Karen Rodriguez – 1989
• Lauren Alaina – 1994
• Naima Adedapo – 1984
• Paul McDonald – 1984
• Pia Toscano – 1988
• Scotty McCreery - 1993
• Stefano Langone – 1989
• Thia Megia – 1995

So there is an 11 year time span here with Paul McDonald and Naima Adedapo both being born in 1984 and then nobody until 1987 with Jacob Lusk, then Pia Toscano in 1988, and three in 1989 (James Durbin, Karen Rodriguez and Stefano Langone) to round out the 1980's. There are then two contestants who turn 20 this year, Casey Abrams and Haley Reinhart , and then the three teens, Scotty McCreery, Lauren Alaina and Thia Megia. So we have seven from the eighties and five from the nineties. The guys are on average older (average male birth year = 1988.8, median = 1989) since Lauren and Thia skew the women younger (average female birth year = 1990.2, median = 1990). This may well play into the results since two of the female favorites are the two youngest contestants here, Lauren and Thia. Both of them appear to have a lot of talent, but I am not sure if they have the maturity and poise to make it through the competition. Scotty is the youngest male contestant but seems much more composed, although he has not received any negative comments as of yet. However, with his very polite, low key personality I can see him taking negative criticism well. He is a pitcher on a high school baseball team and I bet he has been yelled at negatively by his coaches (and the other teams) plenty, so I bet that helps!

I was also looking online for the latest betting odds, and just found updated numbers on BODOG.

I had a feeling the Vegas odds on Lauren and Thia may have fallen, more so for how they act when they are not performing as to when they are. Whereas they both had lackluster performances on Wednesday, their responses to their critiques affected my opinion of them much more. And Lauren's reactions last night did not help her any either. Lauren is no longer the odds on favorite but remains high on the list being tied with Casey at 9/2. Pia has taken over as the favorite at 7/2 now but she needs to show more versatility and more personality herself if she wants to hold that position. James and Scotty are both at 11/2 so it is very close among the current top 5. Here is a lovely sorted bar graph of the current odds:

WhatNotToSing.com confirms my suspicions - It's Pia vs the Guys!

My favorite American Idol statistics site, WhatNotToSing.com has preliminary numbers up after last night, and I have posted them above as an image. If you rank the contestants by score, there is Pia Toscano and then James Durbin, Casey Abrams, Scotty McCreery, Jacob Lusk, Stefano and then Haley Reinhart. So the top 6 are Pia and five guys. It is surprising too, that the second highest gal in the list is Haley. I have made a lovely bar graph of the scores for the Top 13 sorted by this week's rank in red with last week's rank in blue (generated via LibreOffice Calc 3.)

Last week both Lauren Alaina and Thia Megia had scores well over 70 and Haley, Naima and Karen broke 50, but this week Pia is the only female over 50. On the flip side, all the males except Paul broke 50 this week. Four guys have been over 60 both weeks: James, Casey, Scotty and Jacob. My guess is that tonight's elimination will be a lady as well, with the most likely candidates being Ashthon, Naima or Karen. Maybe the judges should have selected three female wild cards (Lauren Turner, Kendra Chantelle, even Julie Zorrilla, where are you?) Maybe this will be another "4 guys and a gal in the Top 5" year after all. Allison, Crystal and Pia can form a club...

Yikes, Who Do I Vote for Now?

Well, I was hoping this season to use my online votes to help the deserving female contestants who have to compete against guys who have lots of crazed AT&T texting fans voting for them. After watching tonight I was a bit scared for the ladies since most of the guys performed really well (Casey, James and Scotty especially) and the only gal who I thought was exceptional tonight was Pia Toscano. And frankly, after two great power ballad performances by Pia, I believe she has to do some other types of songs in the next few weeks or she may not make it to the top three. She had performed well in Hollywood Week singing other types of songs so I know she can do it. I had thought Lauren Alaina or Thia Megia might have a shot at the Top 3, but now I am not so sure. Lauren has great stage presence, but the last two weeks her vocals were not spectacular, and I just do not like her personality. Thia is almost exactly the opposite displaying for two straight weeks her gorgeous voice, but almost no stage presence nor personality at all. At least her personality is not a negative, she just does not show much, so she still has some hope since Thia should last a few more weeks. Now I see Pia as the only viable gal who might consistently excel this year against all these talented guys. I thought it was interesting that Naima scored so well on DialIdol, placing right after Pia. I actually find Naima one of the more likable remaining female contestants. Lauren Turner was really likable but she is no longer on the show! And I am surprised Stefano is #6 since I did not think his performance was that stellar. Casey Abrams is ranked #12 and Paul is #13 which seems rather surprising. I was not overly impressed with Paul this week but I thought Casey did pretty well with the Joe Cocker song and I thought he had a ton of fans. I am now torn how I should use my votes. The only contestants I want to vote for are Pia, Scotty, James and Casey and they are all very safe this week. Just for fun I went to AmericanIdol.com and threw in some votes for Pia, Scotty and Casey. Hey, it's my democratic duty!

Gender and Winning American Idol - Can a Female Win Season 10?

Now that we a few strong ladies in the playing field, I thought I would go back in time to see how many ladies have shown up in the top 5 of American Idol over the years. I could remember Seasons 9 and 8 pretty easily since there was only one female in each one of those seasons in the Top 5 (Crystal last year and Allison in Season 8). I had to check Wikipedia to tally up the other seasons. You have to go back to Season 6 (when Jordin won) to where the ladies had a majority in the Top 5, and there were only two other seasons where the ladies were in a majority of the Top 5, Season 1 when Kelly won and Season 3 when Fantasia won. It is surprising that in those three seasons where the females held the majority, a lady also won the title? The only other woman to win was Carrie in Season 4 when it was just her and Vonzell Solomon, representing the ladies in the top 5. Season 3 was definitely the "ladies year" when 4 of the top 5 were female, and the top 4 were all women. The last three years have definitely been male dominated with only Crystal, Allison, Syesha Mercado and Brooke White representing women in the top 5, and with Crystal being the only female to end up in the final two over the past three seasons.

So now the question is, can any of the women in the top 13 win over the guys this year? If you look at the ladies there are really only three that have a shot of winning the whole thing, Lauren, Thia or Pia. I do not think either wildcard choice (Naima or Ashthon) has much of a fan base, or they would have been in the top 5, and I don't think Haley nor Karen have broad enough appeal to win over the guys. Okay, I am not even sure how Haley made it in the top 5 ladies, but she did. We will have to see how the season progresses, but with three strong ladies in the top 13 we have a chance of it happening.

Hurray! WhatNotToSing.com is back!

One of the things I love most about American Idol is tracking all the numbers generated by WhatNotToSing.com. Now that the Top 24 have completed their performances they have the numbers up for both the guys and the gals. And I just love analyzing numbers to no end. What I was most surprised of was that the difference in average rank between the guys and the gals was so small. As a whole I thought the ladies sang quite a bit better than the gents, but WNTS has the girls up by only 0.1 (52.8 vs 52.7) When  you sort all 24 contestants by average rating you actually find 5 guys and 5 gals if you grab the top 10, and most of the top contestants are who you would expect:

My biggest surprise there, and a pleasant one at that, is that Lauren Turner is at #6 ahead of such popular folks at Lauren Alaina, Paul or Scotty. I thought she actually sang quite well, but was afraid that her image and personality was not as likable as some of the others. I was also surprised Karen ended up #10 since I thought she performed an okay rendition of "Hero" but it only made me want to hear Mariah sing it! I had thought Kendra or Naima might rank a bit higher than her.

I find it not very useful to listen to Steven Tyler and J-Lo as judges since they do not do much judging, and are primarily just "praisers" except when the performers really stink it up. I guess Randy now has to be the "new Simon" who actually critiques people. I want to see how some of the overly praised contestants react when they have to take some negative feedback or constructive criticism (especially Lauren A and Thia.) I think that would be interesting to watch.

Top 12 Ladies Night... and current DialIdol scores

Incredibly I checked DialIdol.com tonight to see who I should vote for, and I was shocked to see Tatynisa Wilson (aka Ta-Tynisa) way out in the lead on the DialIdol voting. She definitely did not perform all that well tonight and does not deserve a spot in the Top 5.  I could understand Lauren Alaina being in the Top 3, but was surprised Julie Zorilla was scoring above her, since I like Julie but did not think she performed as well as many others did tonight. Hopefully Pia Toscano will still be safe enough to still be in the Top 5 with her "pimp spot" performance. Who I was worried for most was Lauren Turner who I thought did very well tonight but who may not win as many votes as more popular contestants (i.e. Lauren A, Thia or Pia). So I have been using my 50 online votes primarily for Lauren Turner since she is #10 on the DialIdol score right now and  #11 by "Busy Percent" ranking. I am surprised that Karen Rodriguez is at the bottom of the rankings for both DialIdol score and "Busy Percent" since I thought she did alright even if her performance was not spectacular.

Actually now that I have looked at the DialIdol numbers some more, why Ta-Tynisa may be ranking so high is because hardly anybody used DiadIdol to vote for her. Right now (10pm central time) there have been about 30,000 votes cast via DialIdol and a total of 136 votes have been cast for her out of 155 attempts (19 busy signals.) In comparison Lauren Alaina, Pia Toscano and Thia Megia each have over 4,000 votes cast for them. So because she has so few total votes, her early busy signals may be skewing Ta-Tynisa's overall score. Hopefully with only 5 top spots for the ladies, they will not be using one up on her.

It looks like Lauren A, Thia and Pia are probably locks for 3 of the 5 top spots. The other two spots are definitely up for grabs.

And now for Season 10...Time to Start Voting!!

Now that Lee DeWyze's "Live It Up" has been off the BillBoard 200 for about a month (even though Crystal Bowersox's "Farmer's Daughter" continues to rack up consistent sales, breaking 160,000 in total sales this week), it is time to start looking at American Idol Season 10. Now that we are down to the Top 24 and can start voting, real numbers for the contestants will start emerging. I find it interesting how they are changing the voting this year. It seems that after this week there will be a top 12 which consists of the top 5 guys with the most votes, the top 5 ladies with the top votes and two "judges picks". I am not sure if it will definitely be one guy and one gal or if it could be two of the same gender. If we follow the DialIdol scores from last night, the top 5 vote getters will be Scotty McCreery, Jacob Lusk, James Durbin, Stefano Langone and Paul McDonald. I personally would go for 4 of the 5 there, and would replace Stefano with Casey Abrams, but that is the first sign this season that votes are about popularity and not talent. Using DialIdol rankings both Jordan Dorsey and Tim Halperin received more votes than Casey which seems out of sync with the performances last night.

I am also curious how the 50 online votes each Facebook user can have will play. I know I tried voting online last night, and I could not actually vote until well after an hour after the telecast ended here in St. Louis. I tried logging in using both my Facebook account and my americanidol.com account and neither would let me vote for that time period. Now there are three ways for people to vote, via phone calls, AT&T text messaging (Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and US Cellular users are still all out of luck) and online. I would think the fastest and easiest way would still be text messaging, especially since the Web based voting requires you to enter in a 6 character "captcha" type code every time to keep people from running automated voting scripts. Anyone with AT&T text messaging can easily vote more than 50 times in just a few minutes compared to the 10 seconds or so it took me to vote each time with my browser. I wonder if they limit the number of text messages or phone calls from the same number. They definitely should if they are limiting online voting. I am not sure if the 10 or so online votes I sent in for Casey Abrams can really help him out very much. DialIdol is definitely a good tool to use, though, to see how to best utilize your votes to try to help out talented folks who are not ranking so well. With half the contestants disappearing by the end of the week, those votes could be important. Will one web vote count the same as one text message vote? In my voting algorithm I would count the online votes more since they are limited and take more time, but I have no idea how American Idol does it. Plus giving preference to people using AT&T's unlimited text messaging plans is just plain wrong. I do not see why everybody from any carrier cannot vote using text messaging if they allow AT&T subscribers to do it.