Erin Andrews and Maks Chmerkovskiy were relaxed loose, had fun and it all paid off on Monday night’s “Dancing with the Stars”.

The frisky pair are joint leaders with Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, and her partner Derek Hough, in with a chance of winning the Mirrorball Trophy on Tuesday night.

Monday’s show was made up of two dances from each of the three couples. The first was the “Redemption Round”, a dance chosen by the judges allowing the couples to focus on where the judges felt the dancers had fallen down (excuse the pun) during the competition.

“The most important thing for me tonight is letting all my nerves go” said Erin during the credits of the show and she certainly achieved that.

Bruno Tonioli attended Erin and Maks rehearsal this week to offer some words of wisdom. He said “You can win this you just have to get it into your head.”

Erin soon realized that he was right. She said “I need to go out there and sell it. Hello! What week it is? I need to suck it up.”

Erin and Maks were last on the leader board last week but their sizzling samba proved that they’re definitely in the running to win the competition.

The couple danced a sassy sexy samba and seemed very relaxed. The cheeky pair even dancing their way up to the judges table; so Maks could give Len Goodman a kiss.

“I always wanted to be kissed by a man with a beard,” said Len. Jokingly thanking Maks for keeping his clothes on this week.

Len continued “The improvement since the last time you danced the samba is fantastic.”

Bruno was equally excited for the duo saying “You were hotter than midday in the tropics.”

Carrie Ann Inaba couldn’t believe the improvement. She said “You moved yourself up three notches. That was just fun!”

Their final score for the samba was 29.

Maks was really pleased with the results. He said “I’m ecstatic. Thank you so much.”

Erin said “I just wanted to be able to shake my ass as well as Maks. I wanted Bruno to teach me to walk in heels but that didn’t happen”

Evan Lysacek, and his partner Anna Trebunskaya, had to dance the Viennese Waltz for the “Redemption Round” and scored a respectable 28 from the judges.

Nicole Scherzinger, and her partner Derek Hough, have broken a “Dancing with the Stars” record. So far in the series they had scored 365 points which is the highest score achieved by a couple at this point in the series.

The couple, who have been the favorites to win for a number of weeks, danced a fiery Rumba and scored 28.

Next up came the freestyle round. This is notoriously where finale couples fall down. All rules are off and often they couples just don’t impress the judges.

Thankfully this wasn’t true of Erin and Maks contemporary interpretative dance. As Maks said “It’s very passionate, very emotional and it will tell the story of Erin and I.”

The audience loved it. As did the judges.

Len said “You took an enormous risk and in parts it paid off.”

Bruno called the dance a “psycho drama unfolding”. He said “Some of the steps you pulled off were quite exceptional.”

They scored a 26 on their freestyle dance bringing their total up to 55.

Evan and Anna’s freestyle dance to the theme song from “Footloose” but their performance failed to impress and they scored just 24.

Nicole and Derek danced a high energy mixture of every considerably type of dance. They rocked their dance to Elvis’ “Little Less Conversation” and walked away with 27 points.

This left Erin and Nicole in the lead with 55 points and Evan lagging three points behind in second place.

The final three will have another unprecedented two dances to perform to see who will win the Mirror Ball Trophy.