Eurovision Song Contest 2015 First Semi-Final: Our Predictions

It's finally here! The first semi-final of the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. After months of speculation, which ten entries do we think will advance to Saturday's Grand Final?<!--more-->

It's finally here! The first semi-final of the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. After months of speculation, which ten entries do we think will advance to Saturday's Grand Final?

First, let's talk about methodology. Ben, Mike, and Ryan ranked the entries three times. The first ranking was just to get a sense of what we liked and what we didn't once all the entries were selected in mid-March. This ranking did not factor into our final scores, but did help us gauge improvement (or disappointment) over time. Our second ranking was in mid-April, shortly after the Eurovision in Concert event in Amsterdam. We each compared each individual entry against the others in the field asking the question "which entry is more likely to qualify." We used this same ranking process this past weekend after watching all the rehearsal footage on the Eurovision YouTube page.

However, we are not so vain that we didn't take other people's opinions into account.((Besides, we're not in Europe, so we have very little "on the ground" information.)) We also incorporated the press center votes((Thanks to ESCXtra for posting those results)), the YouTube views of the second rehearsal videos on the Eurovision YouTube page, and the betting odds from Oddschecker.com. Then we((rather, GoogleSheets)) did some arithmetic top secret quantum analysis and determined the ten best-scoring entries.

Our official prediction for the first Eurovision Song Contest Semi Final, in alphabetical order, is:

It's safe to say that this semi-final lacks any kind of consensus as to which countries will advance. Only six of these entries were in the top ten across all categories, which means four of these picks are strictly "maybe?" Also, of the six countries which didn't make our list (Denmark, Finland, FYR Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, and Romania), five of them were in at least one category's top ten. Who knew this semi-final would be so competitive?

The first semi final of the Eurovision Song Contest airs live at 9pm CET / 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific and can be watched on the official Eurovision page. Good luck to everyone!