Warning: this post contains spoilers for season 8, episode 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race was Snatch Game! For those who haven’t seen Drag Race, Snatch Game is played once every season since season 2. The queens are challenged to impersonate a celebrity playing a parody version of the Match Game. RuPaul acts as host and the episode’s guest judges act as contestants. Snatch Game is one of the most anticipated challenges by both the viewers of the show and the queens participating. You can view previous years’ Snatch Games on YouTube:
Season 2 Snatch Game
Season 3 Snatch Game
Season 4 Snatch Game
Season 5 Snatch Game
Season 6 Snatch Game
Season 7 Snatch Game
Snatch Game
This season saw celebrity impressions of Michael Jackson, “Kimmy” Jong-Un, Eartha Kitt and Britney Spears (again). While Thorgy Thor was praised for her Michael Jackson, Bob the Drag Queen took the win for her double impersonation, first of Uzo Aduba and then halfway through the game, switching to a hilarious Carol Channing.
Robbie Turner felt the pressure of his Seattle sisters’ wins on previous seasons (Jinkx Monsoon won season 5 with her Little Edie, and Ben De La Creme won season 6 with her Maggie Smith), but failed to deliver with her former editor-in-chief of Vogue, Diana Vreeland, and found herself in the bottom three. Acid Betty did a terrible version of Nancy Grace and found herself lip syncing for her life. Naomi Smalls’ impression of reality TV star Tiffany Pollard fell flat, and joined Acid Betty on the lip sync stage. In the end, Naomi won the lip sync and Acid Betty sashayed away.
Machine Learning Predictions
How did the algorithms do? Well, last week they predicted Naomi Smalls was going home, and while she did have to lip sync for her life, she got to stay. Acid Betty was a top pick for winning the season for three algorithms, so her going home this week is a big upset. After feeding the algorithms data updated with this week’s episode, they are still Acid Betty fans. This was an unexpected elimination. This week was Bob’s second win of the season, which really improved her predicted rankings among the algorithms. She’s got a pretty big lead over Kim Chi. Naomi Smalls is still predicted to be the next one to go home.
| Actual | Support Vector Machines | Gaussian Naive Bayes | Random Forest Classifier | Random Forest Regressor | Neural Network | Average Predicted Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bob the Drag Queen | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1.44 | |
| Kim Chi | 12 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3.09 | |
| Derrick Barry | 3 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 3.97 | |
| Acid Betty | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 6 | 3.98 |
| Chi Chi DeVayne | 8 | 8 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 4.02 | |
| Robbie Turner | 3 | 8 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4.02 | |
| Thorgy Thor | 8 | 1 | 6 | 3 | 6 | 4.59 | |
| Naomi Smalls | 2 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 6.95 | |
| Naysha Lopez | 9 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 9 | 8.09 |
| Dax ExclamationPoint | 11 | 3 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 9.34 |
| Laila McQueen | 11 | 11 | 11 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9.69 |
| Cynthia Lee Fontaine | 10 | 8 | 6 | 12 | 12 | 9 | 9.83 |
Further Reading:
- The original Library is Open post
- My github where the data and Python code for running the predictions can be found