Special Bets: 2006-10-08

X Factor Coverage Tonight On Specialbets.com;

As far as the state of play goes in terms of the popularity of X Factor contestants Statman summed that up nicely and graphically in his earlier "poll of polls" post;

Tonight we'll be doing a couple of things. JessicaInDublin has become JessicaInWembley for the evening as a guest of the show, so expect a full report from us later on on the show's backstage dynamics.

We're also going to conduct a flash poll after all the contestants have sung live to gauge the publics's perception of the all important first live performances. We will let you know the results of that before the elimination show. The comments section is open for any questions you might have. We'll be doing "live blogging" on this post of the data as it comes in to try to work out who the bottom 2 are more likely to be. Live X Factor elimination prices can be found here;

>>Live Blog

9pm
We're starting to get enough responses through to make some broad statements about your reactions tonight. The contestants you thought were the best tonight were Dionne (25% of you) and Ben - 21% of responses. In response to the question "Who Is Your Favourite X Factor Act Overall?" however, views are more split. Ray is still your favourite contestant overall despite his shaky start with 17% of responders liking Ray the best, closely followed by Nikitta, Dionne and Leona. Ben is currrently surprisingly weak, with only 6% of responses currently rating Ben your favourite overall.

Who might go tonight? The MacDonalds are the evens favourites to leave this evening but we just don't have enough data currently to choose between the unpopular end of the market.

8pm
Not a great showing for Ray tonight. Given an awful song to sing, he had difficulties with tuning. Ray has been the single most popular contestant in our polls. Similarly, the stunning Nikitta (who is top of our poll of polls analysis) wasn't given a particularly exciting song to sing. How will tonight's performances effect their popularity? Ben, the joint market favourite (3.85 on Betfair at time of writing sung a blinder as did his 3.85 odds partner Leona We'll have some preliminary results for you at about 8.30 from 2 polling sources.

Poll of Polls Update

We have a few more data points to guide us now that the fans are getting to know the "characters" that will be performing for us this evening. Here is a summary of current polls, including our own, that have a meaningful response rate:

Looking at this in chart form reveals the following:

In a snapshot, we can see that the Digispy fanbase is unsurprisingly not in sync with other polls, under-representing Ray and instead backing Ben and The Unconventionals at this stage. Nikkita's showing in realityTVpolls.com looks high when compared against the general landscape, and is the reason that she edges Ray into second in the overall total.

Notwithstanding some surprises this evening, as it currently stands the act facing an early bath this series will probably come from one of Ashley, Robert, The Macdonald Brothers, 4Sure and Dionne.

Statman

Another Poll Puts Ben's Market Favourite Status In Doubt;

The nice people over at realityTVpolls.com have just released their first X Factor poll results.

Nikitta and Ray come top, as with Special Bet's own initial poll (except we have them the other way around as with the The Internet Forum's poll.

As with our poll Dionne comes last in the RTV email poll and bookie favourite and self-confessed cocaine addict Ben is not scoring well at all - 7th place.

Who is your favourite? (RealityTVpolls.com)

Nikitta 24% Ray 18% Kerry 10% Eton Road 9% Ashley 8% Unconventionals 6% Ben 6% Robert 5% McDonald Brothers 5% Leona 4% 4Sure 2% Dionne 1%

Find live X Factor prices here; (one bookie has a very nice price on Ray)

Ray - X Factor's Early Front Runner?

We're publishing the results of our first X Factor poll (conducted 8th - 10th October) today and will be doing some analysis of the data later on. You can download the full results pdf here;

Ray was the most popular favourite in our survey with 17.2% of responders considering Ray as their favourite choice among all finalists followed by Nikitta with 14.5% and The Unconventionals at 13.9%

Dionne was the least favourite personal choice with only 1 person out of 222 surveyed choosing her as their selection. We'll put together some further analysis later on. X Factor win markets can be seen here; Elimination best prices can be viewed here; Victor Chandler are best price at time of writing on Dionne for elimination at 2/1.

Feeding On Scraps

Greetings Statfans and welcome the first voting week of this year's X Factor!

With data being my bread and butter, I’m finding myself famished at the moment. A quick tour of the data-collecting vehicles on the web has not been very rewarding, with some sites still being under construction! For what it’s worth, I found four polls attempting to measure sentiment on favourite contestant so far: The Internet Forum, X Factor Rematch, Digispy and X Factor Watch, all of which have a statistically insignificant number of responses. I thought it might be useful however to observe the aggregate of the polls, which turns out as follows:

This all needs to be taken with lashings of salt at this early stage, as any of the individual polls could have been manipulated very easily. We will be keeping an eye on these, and other polls that pop up, for any patterns that may emerge as the week unfolds.

The only conclusion I would be bold enough to make from this rather scrappy data is that there appears to be a “leading pack” emerging already, consisting of Ben, Leonna, Nikitta, Ray and The Unconventionals.

The results of our own poll will follow shortly...

Statman

Initial specialbets.com X Factor poll results;

We've been polling our survey group since Sunday on their initial thoughts of
the X Factor final 12 and will be publishing the results at 10pm this evening on
the site. Statman is also back from his "sabbatical" and may have a few words
for those of you who may have missed his geekery. Those of you who signed up to
be specialbets.com members will receive a sneak early peek at the results as
promised

The Final 12 X-Factor Contenders - Early Prices!

The final 12 were of course officially announced last night. There were not too many surprises after the papparazzi leak of 10 we publicised.

We were disappointed about Gemma's non-inclusion in Simon's group but unsurprised given she was up against two other super impressive black females and we reckoned Simon wanted a bit of balance in his artist mix.

We feel that Shaun has anxiety issues that require some psychotherapy to overcome, and Simon realised this and made a good decision.

We'll back to you soon after doing some early public opinion checks on those that did make it. Below - Betfair's early market - very open. Click through for the live market. And below, a reminder of who is who. PS there's a review from Mal over at Mal's place on the link on the right in the "Analysis" section.