The Eurovision semi-final allocation draw takes place overnight but who does Australia want to draw in the semi-final?

On Tuesday morning (Australian time), the semi-final allocation draw takes place in Vienna ahead of the Eurovision Song Contest in May.

It’s one of the most significant events in the Eurovision calendar ahead of the actual Contest.

It’ll determine which semi-final Australia is in and which countries we are up against.

How the draw works

The semi-final allocation draw is done by pulling out nations at random from pre-decided pots of six nations.

These pots are based on previous voting patterns to avoid nations having too many “friends” in one semi-final (e.g. all the Balkan nations won’t be placed in the same semi-final).

Australia has been placed in, the Nordic (+Estonia) pot where we traditionally share votes.

We will draw three nations from each pot apart from our own (where we only draw two), plus the Big 4 and hosts Austria will also be placed into semi-finals to vote on.

How do we know who we want or don’t want?

We looked at how every country has voted for Australia at Eurovision since 2015.

Instead of just adding up the total points a country gave us, we asked a slightly smarter question:

Did they vote for Australia more or less than the average country did in the same year?

Because some years Australia does really well and gets lots of points from almost everyone, and other years we don’t.

If a country regularly gave Australia more points than the average, they’re a strong supporter.If they consistently gave less than the average, they’re not exactly on Team Australia.

This lets us see real voting patterns, not just who happened to give us a big score once or twice.

Who we do and don’t want to draw

A country’s score shows how many points above or below the Eurovision average it has voted for Australia since 2015. Positive means friendly, negative means not so much.

Pot 1

Others we’d like to draw:

Not great, but could be worse:

Pot 2

Others we’d like to draw:

Not as great, but could be worse:

Who we’d prefer not to get

Pot 3

Others that would be good to draw:

Not great, but could be worse:

Pot 4

Others we’d like to draw:

Not great, but could be worse:

Pot 5

Others we’d like to draw:

Not great, but could be worse:

Big Four + Hosts

Others we’d like to draw:

Not great, but could be worse

Overall best case scenario

Pot 2 (Australia’s pot – two only)

Big four plus host (voters)

Overall worst case scenario

Pot 2 (Australia’s pot – two only)

Big four plus host (voters)

When and where to watch

The semi-final draw will be available to watch on YouTube from 05:00am AEDT.

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