Game of Thrones Given 1-10 Odds To Win Best Drama Emmy

It’s seven days until the 2016 Emmy nominations are announced on July 14th, 2016. And after Game of Thrones Season 5 won the Best Drama award at the 2015 Emmys, not to mention sweeping much of the rest of the field, oddsmakers are betting on a repeat performance. According to Goldderby, which is the sort of place that does the polling and research that determines these numbers, “Seventeen out of 20 TV journalists polled are predicting it to win [Best Drama] again, giving it leading 1/10 odds.”

That’s well north of the next contender: Netflix’s House of Cards. Once upon a time, there was a sense that Emmy voters were more concerned with whose turn it was to win when it came to drama. (Unlike Comedy, where they’ve simply vote the safe choice year after year—Modern Family won that award five years in a row before Veep nabbed it in 2015.) There was a tendency to give the award to a venerated drama in its final year.

But that logic was upended last year when the eligibility to become an Emmy voter changed, partly to shake up this sort of thing. Instead of Mad Men taking the award purely by virtue of the fact that it were over and it was “their turn,” instead Game of Thrones walked off with Best Drama, and a whole lot else besides. And considering how much more impressive Season 6 was than Season 5 and how HBO timed the finale so that it would be fresh in voters’ minds, it’s no surprise that the show is being given these kinds of odds.

The Emmys announcement will be streamed live next Thursday, and we’ll be bringing you the list of just how many categories Game of Thrones finds itself nominated in this coming year. The award show itself will be held in the usual split format, with the Creative Arts Emmys on September 11th and the Primetime Emmys airing on ABC on September 18th.