Last Tuesday, Guillermo Rodriguez finally went home. Five weeks of a Jimmy Kimmel Live! audience voting for a man who scored 22 out of 40 on a salsa — and the funny part, as Coach Gene Clemons put it on this week's Prediction Market Academy segment, is that he wasn't the favorite to be eliminated. Not close.
Kalshi's weekly elimination market had Tyler Cameron between 41¢ and 50¢ all day on October 13. Jackson Olson sat around 30¢. Guillermo was 13¢ to 14¢ most of the afternoon and 17¢ to 19¢ in the hour before the show. Then he was gone, and the 17¢ contract paid a dollar. He had the lowest judges' total on the show by thirty points; the market had been pricing the Jimmy Kimmel Live! audience as a shield, and the shield ran out.
"If you just voted Guillermo like, 'Yo, at some point his time's going to come' — we talked about it — you could have made a lot of money on that investment yesterday," Gene said. "Because he was super low at one point in time."
That is the whole piece in one sentence. The winner board on this show is a formality. The elimination board is where the market keeps being wrong, in a direction you can see coming.
▶ Watch on its own page, with the full transcript →
See the Dancing with the Stars winner market on Kalshi →
What the market was pricing into Dedication Night
Nobody went home. Dedication Night was a non-elimination week, and the NONE contract that opened at 50¢ bid Tuesday morning paid a dollar — the easiest money on the board was the market telling you the show's format before the show did. Every couple below carries into Horror Movie Night on October 27, where the next elimination market lists the morning after.
Here is the Week 6 elimination board as it stood at 9 p.m. ET on October 20, an hour into the broadcast. Note the first row: this week's event carries a NONE contract that began trading Tuesday morning at 50¢ bid, 66¢ ask, and climbed to the low 80s before the show. The market was pricing a real chance that nobody goes home on Dedication Night.
Read the ladder under the NONE row and you can see what five weeks of results have taught the market. Jackson Olson — the Savannah Bananas second baseman, seventh of ten on the judges' board — is the name the market now fears for. Tyler Cameron, who was 50¢ last week, is 5¢ to 8¢. Tatyana Ali, who was 40¢ to go on September 22, is 4¢ to 5¢. Connor Wood, with the lowest judges' total of anyone still standing, is 3¢ to 4¢.
The market has learned the lesson. The question is whether it has learned it too well.
The lesson: the show cuts fan bases, not dancers
"We've entered the how-good-is-your-fan-base portion of the proceedings," Gene said. "The tops are the tops."
Season 35 scoring combines the judges' totals with viewer votes, and the votes have been doing the deciding. Put the judges' cumulative score through Week 5 next to the market and the gap is the story:
| Couple | Judges' total (of 160) | Win (Kalshi) | Top 3 (Kalshi) | Eliminated this week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ezra Frech & Daniella Karagach | 122 | 57¢ / 59¢ | 88¢ / 90¢ | 0¢ / 1¢ |
| Jenna Dewan & Val Chmerkovskiy | 121 | 4¢ / 5¢ | 25¢ / 31¢ | 1¢ / 3¢ |
| Maura Higgins & Mark Ballas | 120 | 9¢ / 10¢ | 61¢ / 62¢ | 0¢ / 1¢ |
| Harry Shum Jr. & Jenna Johnson | 120 | 7¢ / 8¢ | 38¢ / 49¢ | 0¢ / 1¢ |
| Amber Glenn & Pasha Pashkov | 120 | 11¢ / 12¢ | 65¢ / 72¢ | 0¢ / 1¢ |
| Julia Stiles & Ezra Sosa | 107 | 3¢ / 4¢ | 12¢ / 38¢ | 1¢ / 2¢ |
| Jackson Olson & Emma Slater | 103 | 2¢ / 3¢ | 1¢ / 2¢ | 18¢ / 20¢ |
| Tyler Cameron & Sharna Burgess | 101 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 4¢ / 6¢ | 5¢ / 8¢ |
| Tatyana Ali & Jan Ravnik | 100 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 6¢ / 7¢ | 4¢ / 5¢ |
| Connor Wood & Rylee Arnold | 95 | 2¢ / 3¢ | 12¢ / 13¢ | 3¢ / 4¢ |
Judges' totals: Weeks 1–4 out of 30 each, Week 5 (Super Bowl Night, guest judge Joe Buck) out of 40. Kalshi bid / ask read Oct. 20, 2026, 9 p.m. ET.
Two things jump off that table.
Jenna Dewan is second on the judges' board and ninth on the winner board. She and Frech both scored 36 of 40 last week — the top marks of the night — and she is 4¢ to win. She was 22¢ on September 15. Her Top 3 contract has round-tripped from 58¢ in late September to 15¢ on October 10 and back to 25¢ bid, 31¢ ask. The market is not saying she can't dance. It is saying the dancer with the fewest votes in the top tier is the one who gets ambushed, and it has her pencilled in for the role.
Tatyana Ali is ninth on the judges' board and 4¢ to go home. Four weeks ago she was 40¢. Here is what the market priced into every show since, and what happened:
| Show | Ali to be eliminated, hour before the show | Result | Who went home |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept. 22 (Viral Hits Night) | 39¢ / 40¢ | Survived | Giada De Laurentiis |
| Sept. 29 (Yacht Rock Night) | 42¢ / 44¢ | Survived | Taylor Hanson |
| Oct. 6 (Mariah Carey Night) | 8¢ / 9¢ | Survived | Ciara Miller |
| Oct. 13 (Super Bowl Night) | 13¢ / 14¢ | Survived | Guillermo Rodriguez |
| Oct. 20 (Dedication Night) | 3¢ / 4¢ | Survived | No elimination |
Hourly closes from Kalshi's candlestick API, 6 p.m. ET each show day.
A No contract on Ali bought at 60¢ on September 22 returned a dollar. Same at 56¢ a week later. The two weeks after that paid 9¢ and 14¢ on 91¢ and 86¢ of risk — the market had already moved most of the way. By Dedication Night the No side costs 95¢ to 96¢, and the trade Gene and Nando Di Fino were describing on the September 23 live show has been priced out of existence by the people who watched it work.
Gene's explanation for why she keeps surviving a 29-of-40 salsa to Kendrick Lamar: "Her fan base, and the amount of people that she has behind her because of her social media presence, is going to continue to bully her over guys like Connor Wood and Tyler Cameron." She is doing routines the Fresh Prince cast did thirty years ago and getting the nostalgia bump, then telling the story on social media. Julia Stiles, he said, is making videos of her and her partner dancing to songs that name-check her. "That is a powerful tool."
Where the value went
So if No-on-Ali is dead at 4¢, where did the edge go? Gene's framework has three parts.
1. The fan-base phase runs three to four more weeks. "In my opinion, guys like Tyler Cameron, Connor Wood, Jackson Olson — I just don't think those people are going to be able to survive, because of the other people who are low, like Tatyana Ali, and their following." Those three are the names with real elimination risk the market has repriced down after the Guillermo miss: Cameron from 50¢ to 5¢ to 8¢, Olson from 30¢ to 18¢ to 20¢, Wood at 2¢ to 4¢ despite the lowest judges' total left. The market overreacted to one bad week on Cameron and Olson and is now underpricing the exact names its own lesson says are next. That is where Yes contracts live for the next three Tuesdays — bought the day after a show, not the hour before, when the price has already drifted.
2. Then the dancers start eating each other. "Once you get to the everybody-can-dance area — Jenna Dewan, Ezra Frech, Amber Glenn, Harry Shum, Maura Higgins — now that's going to be a fight, and that's when you'll see the percentages do this." Do this, in context, meant bounce. "Make no mistake: there's going to be a team with some really good dancers that get voted off before they should get voted off, because they don't have that follower."
His example was Shum. "I know Grey's Anatomy is big. I don't know if Grey's Anatomy people are going out of their way to vote for Harry Shum Jr." Shum is 120 on the judges' board, tied for third. His Top 3 contract is 38¢ bid, 49¢ ask — the widest spread on the board after Stiles, which is the market admitting it does not know. Dewan at 25¢ to 31¢ for Top 3 is the same uncertainty with a tighter book. When one of those two goes home in Week 8 or 9 at 10¢, that is the surprise Gene is telling you to be "there and accounted for" when it happens.
3. Julia Stiles is the Top 3 contract, not the winner contract. "Julia Stiles is not a good enough dancer to win Dancing with the Stars. She is, however, a popular figure that you could see winning." She scored 33 of 40 last week, fourth on the night, and Gene's point is that she is improving and protected — the combination that gets a non-dancer to the finale. Her winner contract is 3¢ bid, 4¢ ask. Her Top 3 contract is 12¢ bid, 38¢ ask, which is not a price, it is two people disagreeing. If you think she makes the final three, that gap is the trade; put a resting bid in the low 20s and let the market come to you.
The winner board, for the record
Frech, the Paralympic track and field champion, has the highest cumulative judges' total on the show and tied for the top score last week, and he is the one name with both the technique and the story. At 59¢ there is nothing to do but hold if you already own it; the ten asks sum to 106¢, so the board is 6¢ over fair in aggregate, and most of that fat sits on the seven names between 3¢ and 12¢ that cannot all make the final. The actionable boards are the other two.
How to use this
Three habits, if you want to trade this show the way Gene is describing it:
- Buy the day after, not the hour before. Guillermo's elimination contract sat at 13¢ to 19¢ for the 36 hours before he went home, and the only move on show day was up. The ask was there for anyone who had done the thinking; the weekly markets list the morning after each show, and that is when the fan-base read is furthest ahead of the price.
- Grade the elimination market on fan base, then check it against the judges' board. When the two disagree — a top-five judges' score with a thin following, or a bottom-three score with a social-media machine — the market has been wrong in the same direction every week.
- Size the longshots like longshots. A 17¢ contract that pays a dollar is a 5.9× return and a five-in-six chance of losing the stake. Run it through the EV calculator and the Kelly tool before you decide how many. Kalshi takes a per-contract fee on every fill, win or lose, and on the fee calculator you will see it bites hardest on contracts priced near 50¢ — one more reason the 17¢ Guillermo play was better than the 50¢ Cameron one even before the result.
"It's just survive the dance," Gene said, "and then see who you're going to come up against for the opportunity to be eliminated." On a show where the judges score the dancing and the audience scores everything else, that is the only market worth reading.
Trade the Dancing with the Stars Top 3 market on Kalshi →
The 7 Oracles' Prediction Market Academy posts weekly on YouTube. More from the culture desk on the entertainment hub: Nando's Survivor 51 board, the Big Brother 28 finale roundtable and Sydney Sweeney's two prediction markets. New to this? Start with Markets 101.
