American Idol Algebra

I ran into a little coincidence last week. There was a news story about an American Idol staffer claiming that the fix was in, and that the final four contestants had already been chosen. At the time, there were 11 contestants remaining on the show. Maybe the staffer just made this up - what are the odds that they could just guess the correct final four? The number we want is the number of ways to choose 4 people from a group of 11, and this is just the same calculation as was done in my Arby's Algebra post a few weeks ago. There are 330 possible final fours from a pool of 11 contestants, so the odds of guessing correctly are 1 in 330, or about 0.3%.

Of course, this quick calculation ignores the fact that not all contestants are equal, as some are known to be popular and so on.