Monday, April 16, 2012

Dance Duels

Dancing With The Stars decided to implement something new this week and going forward for the next couple weeks. Instead of eliminating the lowest combined scoring couple they're going to make the two lowest scorers do a second dance at the same time with the judges picking the worst one from those extra dances to go home.

I don't know that you can trust the judges to be perfectly logical beings but it got me thinking about how to game the system assuming you could count on the judges to properly score the dance duel. Ideally you'd want to do well enough in your main dance to land yourself above the bottom two. But what if you felt like that wasn't super likely? Why not write off your primary dance entirely. Do terribly and place in the bottom two for sure... But all that time the other teams spent during the week preparing their main dance you'd spend preparing an awesome bonus dance. Presumably if you spend 5 days working on the dance duel and they spend 1 day on it you should have a pretty big advantage.

Doing that in actuality would probably be looked upon as making a mockery of the system and I'd think the judges would be a little biased in the marking of the dance duel. Personally I don't see it as making a mockery of the system so much as I think the system itself is fatally flawed. As set up two couples end up putting a lot of effort into a main dance which is worthless when it comes to determining who gets eliminated. My plan just removes some of the uncertainty surrounding who those two couples would be.

1 comment:

Sthenno said...

I think when a system is fatally flawed and you act the way the system actually rewards instead of acting the way you are expected to, that is definitely making a mockery of the system. The point that it may be a system worth mocking doesn't change that you are mocking it.