Season 9 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race All Stars has concluded. No spoilers here if you don’t know who the winner was just yet. I want to talk about the maths. (Cue countless bored drag fans making an early exit.)
Drag Race has always loved a twist, but working out the potential finalists for this season has been particularly tricky. The finalists who “Lip Sync For Their Charity” were always meant to be the three queens with the most ‘Beautiful Benefactress’ badges, which are awarded for winning challenges. Across most of the season, the top queen each week could block another queen from winning a badge the following week.
At various points challenges have also been worth extra badges, or queens have had the ability to give badges away. “Math be mathing”, as many a queen complained in the confessionals.
Coming into the final episode, this was how many badges each contestant had. (First names only, we’re being informal.)
| Queen | Badges |
|---|---|
| Angeria | 4 |
| Gottmik | 2 |
| Jorgeous | 4 |
| Nina | 2 |
| Plastique | 4 |
| Roxxxy | 5 |
| Shannel | 3 |
| Vanjie | 3 |
But then things got fiddly. We knew that the two winners of the talent show challenge in this episode would each win three badges. After those were awarded, we also knew one queen would have their total count doubled by winning the ‘Double Diamond’ award, which was voted on by all their competitors.
So each queen had 4 possible scoring scenarios:
- Don’t win the talent show and don’t win the Double Diamond (initial score unchanged)
- Don’t win the talent show and win the Double Diamond (initial score doubled)
- Win the talent show and don’t win the Double Diamond (initial score increases by 3)
- Win the talent show and win the Double Diamond (initial score increases by 3 and is then doubled)
That leads to a lot of total possible outcomes: 448 in fact (8 times 7 times 8). But that didn’t mean that every queen was equally likely to get into the top 3 (leaving aside how good their performances and runways turned out to be).
To work through the possibilities in more depth, I asked ChatGPT to knock up a quick Python script to map out all the possible score combinations, with every pairing of queens winning combined with every possible queen winning the Double Diamond.
Analysing this data, we can see some (un-sequinned) patterns.
- The possible final badge counts queens could have achieved were 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16. But scores of 7 and under were far more likely. (No spoilers, but that proved to be the case.)
- As the first place-holder going into the episode, Roxxxy had an 86.6% chance of being in the final 3. (That figure includes scenarios where more than one queen in the top 3 had 5 points, resulting in ties, since we don’t know how those would have been resolved.)
- Roxxxy’s 4 possible scores were 5 (no win and no Double Diamond), 8 (a win), 10 (no win but a Double Diamond) and 16 (a win and a double Diamond)
- A consequence of Roxxxy’s score going into the final episode: there was no way that either Gottmik or Nina, the two queens with the lowest scores at the start of the episode, could ever be in the top 3 if Roxxy wasn’t in it.
Will Drag Race ever make life this mathematically complicated again? We may not have to wait long to find out, with Global All Stars due on August 17 (down under – the US gets it August 16, dammit).
For more excessive pop culture maths, check out the maximum possible score on Yahtzee and practice the Countdown numbers game.
Main image: Drag Race/World of Wonder
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