The most historical annual poll for the Eurovision Song Contest, the Big Poll, run continuously since 2002, has officially one more sister poll. Journalists who cover the contest, people who were somehow involved with the contest and Artists are what we would simply call Eurovision Experts. During the last few weeks, we invited them to share their expertise and predict the outcome of the semi-finals.

Eurovision Semi-final 2 results

But first, what is Big Poll? Back in 2002, there was a conceptual poll started by Sietse Bakker (nowadays Event Supervisor for the Eurovision Song Contest). His idea was to create a poll which would accurately predict the result of the Eurovision Song Contest. Taking over his idea, every year Big Poll aims to become a poll with the highest accuracy. And who votes? Of course our readers! Big Poll is not a favourites poll, hence we are asking you to cast your predictions according to how you believe your country will vote on each show. While submitting your vote, a system fetches the origin of the vote and submits the prediction to the database. Given the fact that our systems can track (and as of this year, easier) the country every vote is coming from, we can cancel out the incorrect votes and only keep those who follow the Eurovision rules.

Read more and vote at Big Poll 2015 here

Big Poll experts!

This year, we asked a number of 31 experts from all over Europe. Being so honored to host such a great panel of experts, we would like to thank each and every one of them for their time and  support! Our good friends who accepted to answer our poll for the first semi-final are: Aija Medinika, Alessandro Banti, Alon Amir, Ana Marija Simovic, Andras Kallay Saunders, Bea De Vrind, Chris Melville, Daaria Partas, Dejan Kukric, Gary Speirs, Jeremy Levine, Jody West, Jose Luka, Kath Locket, Ketth Mills, Margit Randla, Markos Markakis, Maryna Skomorokhova, Meelis Kompus, Miroslav Kodis, Nearxos Evangeliou, Nelly Takis, Nikos Partsolis, Olivier Van Houte, Robert Roškar, Samantha Ross, Soren Bygbjerg, Turab Rzayev, Viktor Szucs, Vlad Yakolev, Zenon Zindilis

Right before the rehearsal kicks off in Wiener Stadthalle today, here are the results of the first semi-final. The 10 countries that proceed to the final according to what the BigPoll Experts team has predicted are:
[table]
,Country,,Country
[Azerbaijan],Azerbaijan,[Cyprus],Cyprus
[Iceland],Iceland,[Ireland],Ireland
[Israel],Israel,[Latvia],Latvia
[Lithuania],Lithuania,[Norway],Norway
[Slovenia],Slovenia,[Sweden],Sweden
[/table]

What do you think about the results? Share your prediction with us