The Swedish national broadcaster SVT has announced today that there will be fewer duels in the Second Chance round of Melodifestivalen.

This change is aimed to stop the uneven distribution of votes between popular candidates, and now there will be only one duel between the four last contestants.

The eight contestants will now perform their songs once in the first round and the public will vote for their favourites.

The act with the most votes will then meet number four in a duel, and numbers two and three will battle it out in another duel.

The organisers aim to prevent placing two popular candidates against each other.

As an example they give Sean Banan from 2012: His song received in total 75.000 votes more during the qualifying rounds than Top Cats, who made it to the final.

In the end he lost out to Thorsten Flinck and Revolutionsorkestern in one of the Second Chance duels.

With the new system SVT wants to have only the four most popular songs fighting for the second chance to get to the final.

The Second Chance of Melodifestivalen takes place in Karlstad on 2 March 2013

Source: svt.se