Who gets it right?
The World is already counting hours to the next edition of TISC, which will be held in Kaunas, Lithuania this weekend. Nations from all around the World are gathering as we speak. Some are hoping for a win, some are hoping to get as many points as possible and break their personal bests, while some others are mostly here to enjoy the show.
As we approach the Grand Final, we've been wondering which nations usually give points to the winner, and how many points each nation usually gives to the top 3 finishers. To sum it up - we want to see which nations get it right.
We start by looking at how often each country gives at least one point to the eventual winner. If you are looking to get a win, you should keep an eye on votes of Canada, Denmark, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Tunisia and Turkey. These 7 nations have always given points to the winner. Denmark, Italy and Lithuania competed in every edition of TISC, which makes their ability to pick the winner even more amazing. Which nations are on the opposite end of the scale? Indonesia, USA and Romania. Indonesia never gave any points to the winner, however they competed only once. USA on the other hand competed in every edition, but they gave points to the winner only once out of six times! That was at the 2015 Annual contest, when USA interestingly gave maximum 12 points to the winning Irish song. Romania gave points to the winner only once in four participations.
This map shows tendencies of each nation to pick the winner. Dark blue nations usually don't award points to winner, light blue nations are around 50-50 in that respect, light red nations give points to the winner most of the times, while red nations always do. Only nations competing in this edition are shown on the map.
The second criteria we look at is how many points each nation usually gives to the top 3 finishers. Note: if a nation finished in top 3 at some contest, then a nation that finished 4th at that contest counts as a top 3 finisher. Switzerland (two-time participant) is on the top of the list with an average of 25.00 (33 is the maximum, 12+11+10). They are followed by Denmark (22.83), Italy (22.67), Australia (20.50), Egypt (20.20) and Russia (19.75). Nations that usually give the least number of points to the top 3 finishers are Algeria (4.00), United States (5.83), Portugal (9.50), Colombia (10.67) and Croatia (11.00).
Following map shows tendencies of each nation regarding the average number of points that they give to the top 3 finishers. All nations are included. Nations in dark red tend to give considerable amount of points to the top 3 finishers, those in light red usually give a good number of points, those in light blue tend not to give that many points while those in dark blue don't give many points to the top 3 finishers. Note that whole South America as a continent doesn't really give that many points to the highest ranked finishers. Also, Portugal seems to be quite an exception in predominantly red Europe.
However, if we have to choose one nation that gets it right the most, then that would be Denmark. Apart from the fact that they gave points to each of the previous winners, they also usually give a lot of points to the eventual top 3 finishers, making Denmark the ultimate TISC trend setter.
Special thanks goes to @OlympicIRL who provided most of the data