PureDWTS Season 19, Week 5 – Partner Switch Predictions!

So there’s a few hours left to tweet your votes for the partner switch in week 5, but we thought we’d go ahead and try to predict who’s gonna end up with who based on the tweet counts from Topsy.  Last season, we tried using Keyhole (a much more comprehensive method of measuring the frequency of tweets), but since TPTB basically gave everyone the middle finger and did whatever they wanted with the results of the partner switch voting, we didn’t really want to spend the money to try and do that again. So Topsy will have to do for now 🙂 And while it would be great to be able to measure the switch voting being tweeted from the ABC website, there’s no really good way to do it – so for the sake of simplicity, we’re just going to assume that the voting from the ABC website is probably mirroring whatever the people manually tweeting are doing.

A quick explanation as to how the votes are tallied: they start with the highest vote-getting combination of any of the possible combinations, and begin pairing off down the list of vote totals until everyone has a partner (that isn’t their original partner, mind you).   So using this methodology, even if Janel’s highest vote-getting combo is with Mark, she may not actually end up with him if he has a higher vote total with another contestant.  Likewise, even if Betsey doesn’t have the highest vote-total with Artem, she may get him because his other high vote-getting combos have already been taken.  Make sense? We also tried to take into account any nicknames that the pros and/or celebs have, as both might count (i.e. Val and Valentin, Beth and Bethany, etc.).

Some random observations that we made when looking at the totals: like last year, a helluva lot more people seem to care about who the male pros end up with, than the female pros.  It’s a bit sad, actually – almost every single combination that had a male pro’s name in it had totals in the thousands, while only a handful of the combinations with female pros’ names in them even broke into the thousands.  I’m guessing the Ballas/Hough vs. Chmerkovskiy Entourage rivalry is fueling that one, and Rob Wade & Co. are laughing all the way to the bank.  Also interesting: if the partner switch voting has any sort of correlation with the actual voting done to keep couples in the competition, than Lea may have a lot more people voting for her than we originally assumed – likewise, assuming the same correlation, Janel may not have as many people voting for her as we may have originally assumed.  Food for thought.

Now keep in mind, someone IS getting voted off at the end of the show tonight – so that has the potential to shake things up a bit with the pairings (particularly with the male celeb/female pro combos).  So the list below is who would end up with who if nobody was sent home, and we used the current vote totals in Topsy (things could change before the voting ends – just ask the spammers).  Below that, I’ll list some possible combinations based on certain couples getting sent home.  So let’s get to it…

If the voting ended right now and nobody was sent home, these would be the pairings for next week (see handy-dandy charts for graphical representation):

partnerswitchmalepros

Bethany & Mark (over 103K votes)

Lea & Derek (over 100K votes)

Sadie & Val (over 75K votes)

Betsey & Artem (over 17K votes)

Janel & Tony (394 votes)

partnerswitchfemalepros

Alfonso & Cheryl (over 14k votes)

Jonathan & Peta (over 2k votes)

Tommy & Witney (over 1k votes)

Michael & Allison (by POE, since Emma cannot get Michael)

Antonio & Emma (by POE, since Emma cannot get Michael)

Now, as we mentioned above – somebody IS going home tonight, so some of these partnerships have the potential to change.  Based on what we’ve seen in weeks 1-3, I would say that the only celebs with a truly legitimate chance of getting sent home are the ones that have been in jeopardy/part of the last two standing – Antonio, Michael, Jonathan, & Betsey (I didn’t count Sadie because that seemed like a ruse to me – not in legit jeopardy, but just a scare tactic).  So here’s how things shake out if any of the names above get sent home:

If Antonio gets eliminated: Alfonso gets Emma; all other pairings (besides the ones including Antonio & Cheryl) remain the same

If Mike gets eliminated: Antonio gets Allison; all other pairings (besides the ones including Mike & Emma) remain the same

If Jonathan gets eliminated: Mike gets Peta; all other pairings (besides the ones including Jonathan & Allison) remain the same

If Betsey gets eliminated: Janel gets Artem; all other pairings (besides the ones including Betsey & Tony) remain the same

 

Heidi here, with a slightly different take – and on the men only, because I only have so many hours in a day and I knew the women wouldn’t be getting the votes, making them much more likely to change

I took each celeb, made a section for that celeb with that pro, and did a search on the actual hashtag (#DWTSLeaDerek), the same couple with spaces (#DWTS Lea Derek) AND the tweet that comes from the site if you use it to vote (Lea and Derek #DWTS). As Courtney mentioned, this last one is problematic, but after messing around with it a bit, I think this is as close as you’re going to get.  As Courtney also noted, TPTB didn’t seem to take the votes into consideration last year – while they said you could vote on the website or on twitter (with or without spaces) few of their selections matched the reality of what we were seeing. That got me to thinking – was it that Meryl had to travel and Derek couldn’t?? Or have they found a way to cut out the obvious SPAM??  I think option 1 is more likely – I don’t think they care about Spam at all. Maybe we will see tonight.

Speaking of Spam, yesterday when I looked at the numbers, Sadie was more than 100,000 total votes behind Bethany. Now she’s only a few thousand behind Bethany. And I’ve seen some serious spammers going to town and I’ve got one thing to say to you people: GO OUTSIDE!!  It’s nice. It’s fall! LIVE!  Sad and pathetic and made little difference in the end, according to my chart. In case you’re wondering, in that same period of time, the total votes for Betsey doubled and Janel is still getting no love.  I have NO idea what the goal was here, but it appears that some fans are trying (and failing) to get Val to win with every celebrity. Um, sorry – it should be an easy win, seeing as how there are double the ways to vote for him, but no.

Anyway, I plugged the numbers into an excel spreadsheet and let it do all the math. When you know how excel works, none of this takes that much time. Basically, I added all the votes for a female celeb and started with the highest – Lea. What do you get?

Lea – Derek
Bethany – Mark
Sadie – Val
Betsey – Artem
Janel – Tony

No love for Janel. Here’s my spreadsheet for the TOTALS:

You will note that, despite doing it very differently, Courtney and I got the exact same results. This is telling. If you only count “Valentin” as Val’s name, you get this:

Which is:
Lea – Derek
Bethany – Mark
Sadie – TONY
Betsey – Val
Artem – Janel

Don’t panic. They aren’t likely to do it this way, but you will note that by using only Valentin, it does change the result to third being Sadie – Tony. If they use only the website??

Again, don’t panic – I don’t think they’ll do it this way, but it comes out to this:

Sadie – Tony
Lea – Derek
Bethany – Mark
Betsey – Val
Artem – Janel

And finally, exploring all possibilities…what if they use the website and only tweets with the spaces between the names, like on the show??

It results in, as you can see:

Lea – Derek
Sadie – Val
Bethany – Mark
Betsey – Artem
Janel – Tony

What’s the moral of this story?? Even if they’ve found a way to get rid of Spam, Derek should end up with Lea and Bethany with Mark. The rest are flexible, but those two don’t appear to be. And I would bet that we see Sadie with Val. If those first two combinations don’t become reality?? Cry foul even more than last season.