The Chase Australia : Who’s Best at Pushbacks?

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In the last blog we built models for The Chase game show to estimate a team’s chances of winning at various points during an episode. We did that using data from this Google document from James Spencer, which covers the entire history of Andrew O’Keefe’s reign as host from late 2015 to mid-2021.

Those models suggested that there was something special about Seat 1 in that the fate of the contestant in that Seat seemed to have particular significance for the team’s eventual fortune. Put succinctly, teams that included the contestant from Seat 1 in the final won money more often than otherwise equivalent teams without the contestant from Seat 1.

After analysing the performance data for Seat 1 contestants and finding little evidence to suggest that they were, on average, notably stronger contestants in terms of Cash Builder, Contribution, and FInal Target statistics, I hypothesised that, perhaps

  • The presence of Seat 1 in the Final Chase is enough to slightly put off the Chaser (or is a signal that he or she is not quite on his or her game in that episode)

  • Contestants in Seat 1 are, on average, better at taking advantage of pushback opportunities

Today we’ll use the Pushback data to explore these hypotheses.

In this first table we’ve analysed the data by the size of the final team and we see that larger teams tend to:

  • Set higher Final Targets

  • Receive more Pushback Opportunities

  • Convert a higher proportion of those Opportunities

Now, let’s look at the data based on which particular Seat numbers make the final.

We see that:

  • Amongst final teams of size three, those including the contestant from Seat 1 receive more Pushback Opportunities and convert them at a higher rate

  • Amongst final teams of size two, those including the contestant from Seat 1 also receive more Pushback Opportunities and convert them at a higher rate (noting that the pairing of Seats 2 and 4 converts at a slightly higher rate than the pairing of Seats 1 and 2)

  • Final teams comprising only the contestant from Seat 1, although receiving no more Pushback Opportunities than the average for teams of this size, do convert those Opportunities at the highest rate

Finally, let’s introduce some measure of pre-final ability by including the Contribution made by the contestant to the final bank.

Here we see that:

  • The higher the contestant Contribution, the larger the Final Target, the higher the Pushback Opportunities, and the higher the Pushback Conversion rate. This is true for contestants from all four Seats

  • The highest level of Pushback Opportunities and Pushback Conversion comes from those episodes where the contestant from Seat 1 made the final after having made a Contribution of $12,000 or more

  • The lowest level of Pushback Opportunities and Pushback Conversion comes from those episodes where the contestant from Seat 1 missed the final

There is, therefore, evidence to support both of the hypotheses in that episodes in which Seat 1 makes the final see

  • Chasers giving more Pushback Opportunities on average

  • final teams converting those Pushback Opportunities at a higher rate

Chasers should be worried most of all when they see Seat 1 return home having put $12,000 or more in the bank.