Hungary Selection Format Unchanged

Broadcaster MTVA seem to taken the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentally heading into Lisbon 2018. A few days after they have confirmed they will indeed be competing in Portugal, they followed it up saying their recent selection formula - A Dal will be returning also, with unchanged rules.

A Dal was first introduced back in 2012, which was won by band Compact Disco, every year the A Dal format has been used to select the Hungarian entry, the entry has qualified for the Grand Final. the submission window will be open from now until November 15th, from the submission which have been submitted, 30 songs will be brought forward to compete in the live shows, the show lasts over six weeks and works out as followed:

Weeks one, two and three will be the heats, 10 songs will compete per heat, with six advancing, the top five decided on a combination of jury and televote scores will advance, the remaining five songs will face the public vote once again and the winner of the second voting round will advance.

Weeks four and five will see the 18 successful songs from the heats return and compete in two groups of nine songs, this time the top three from the jury and public score will advance to the grand final, again the remaining five entries will have an anxious wait as the public again will select a final entry from that group to advance to the final.

The final of A Dal will see the final eight songs compete head to head in one show, broke into two rounds. Round one the jurors alone with select their top four, awarding the songs 10, 8, 6 and 4 points, once all the jury points have been added together, the top four will advance to the second round, where the public will vote for their favourite, the winner of that is then crowned the winner of A Dal and Hungary's entry for Eurovision.

Despite the format working for Hungary in the past it has received some negativity, mostly coming from the overwhelming swing the jury has. Where the jurors give each performance a score out of 10 based solely on what they think and no conferring with other jurors, the televote score is decided by a means of averages, during the performance the public can vote via their phone app or online with a mark out of a ten, all the scores are combined and divided to find the average whole number and that is added to the jurors total to give a final score of the night, this way of voting came under heavy scrutiny in 2017 when Gina Kanizsa won the second semi final with her song "Fall Like Rain" she wowed the jury scoring a perfect 40 out of 40 but scored a mere 5 in the public - the lowest public score of the night, with led people claiming it was "unfair" and she was protected by the jury and should not advance. However the reverse of that is band "Soulwave" placed dead last in their heat and were not in the top three of their semi final either, but thanks to the public advanced through the flash vote both rounds and made the final.

A Dal will run every Saturday, commencing on January 10th, with it's climax on February 24th 2018