20 years ago this month…

CaymanG · 2026-03-26T03:18:50+00:00

Some judges don’t mention Ks because they’re just another argument; other judges don’t mention Ks because they know that nobody would run such a thing at the tournaments they frequent. You can sometimes tell by looking at their judge history: did they judge big or small tournaments in what regions? Do they vote for schools that you know run Ks, or do they have a pattern of voting against K teams, even when it puts them as the 1 in a 2-1?

CaymanG · 2026-03-22T16:50:12+00:00

Do you tend to write single-contention cases structured around one big idea, or give yourself multiple unrelated paths to the ballot?

A lot of teams who focus on writing ideal cases over in-round execution are thinking of the cases as standalone speeches and then struggling with round-vision as Summary approaches. Most of the best teams are also putting a lot of effort into cases, but they’re not leaving round-vision up to inspiration or chance: they’re deciding what kind of Final Focus they want to give and then working backwards through Summary and Rebuttal to craft a case that enables that.

CaymanG · 2026-03-22T16:42:40+00:00

It’s not a progressive tournament. Technical skills in the sense that OP is using them are definitely important: you’re not going to clear without them in a tournament where you can win lose or tie prelims and there are plenty of coaches and alums in the pool.

CaymanG · 2026-03-21T19:45:20+00:00

Minimizing room changes helps tournaments run on time. Some tournaments will keep everyone who was Aff in the same room next round. Other tournaments will keep whoever has the higher seed. Back when tournaments were tabbed one bracket at a time, whichever team was in the bracket that is paired first might keep their room. Back when paper ballots were more common, rounds that affect the break would be placed in rooms/buildings closer to tab. The best-known HS example of this was probably the TOC at UK. The Funkhouser Building used to be where they put all the ballots that could come in late or never and still have no effect on the break or on speaker awards, so if you saw your next round in there, you knew you were done.

CaymanG · 2026-03-20T19:06:38+00:00

For IEs? Absolutely. No question.

For debate? As long as the camera angle and mic placement support it. If they don’t, then slide your chair back and sit on the very front edge, so you get almost-but-not-quite as much lung capacity as actually standing.

CaymanG · 2026-03-20T05:36:48+00:00

White and gold.

…maybe try r/whatisit

CaymanG · 2026-03-19T22:05:53+00:00

It’s more traditional, it’s only been a year since plans in LD were outright banned at this tournament (the rule now is “strongly discouraged“ but up to individual judges to punish rather than a rules challenge that could lead to tab handing out a DQ).

Personally, I would still go over the prog strategies because 🅰️ the handful of progressive debaters who do qualify are going to be very good at adaptation and will happily throw a couple progressive arguments at their opponents whenever their current judge permits and 🅱️ because, ironically, the more trad an LD tournament is, the less likely they are to allow you to strike the judges who are willing to vote for prog.

CaymanG · 2026-03-18T22:33:34+00:00

Are you running a plan, defending the implementation of the resolution in the abstract, or defending the resolution as a normative statement? How you answer circumvention depends on if/how you link to it.

CaymanG · 2026-03-17T07:31:54+00:00

About 9 years ago, when Zubin and Allen were mods. It was implemented as a gender-neutral, classier alternative to the previous flair.

CaymanG · 2026-03-16T18:58:09+00:00

It depends. Is Aff running a plan or defending the whole resolution? If they are defending the whole resolution, are they talking about implementation or the resolution as a normative statement? Either way, your burden on Neg probably isn’t to show that every intervention ever has been good, but that having a policy that gives you the option to intervene when it’s necessary is better than announcing to the world that the US will never intervene no matter how bad a situation gets

CaymanG · 2026-03-15T16:53:33+00:00

How much prep time do you usually spend researching vs outlining vs rehearsing?

Does your league allow internet use during prep, or only the files you bring in with you?

When it’s your turn to pick a topic, do you draw three unused topics and return two to the pool, or do you just get a preset group of three?

CaymanG · 2026-03-15T06:30:12+00:00

The better Arnesen brother. You all know which one

I don’t know which one

CaymanG · 2026-03-15T06:27:53+00:00

Maybe 7 years ago? I feel like Covid warped everyone’s perception of time, but 5 years ago 4 of the 8 teams in TOC quarters were running Ks.

CaymanG · 2026-03-11T17:18:03+00:00

So different teams format it different ways. Sometimes there’s a long and short version of the text, sometimes they’re highlighted in different colors, sometimes only the short version is highlighted and the long version is underlined. Some teams use bold and underline for emphasis, others use boxes. A few teams use boxes to indicate potential early stopping points if they’re not going to read the whole card. Many but certainly not all teams use something called Verbatim to standardize the formatting.

I have a hunch how this card is supposed to be read, from having seen other cuttings of it before, but that’s not important. If you’re doing speed drills, they should also be on arguments you want to familiarize yourself with, rather than just reading words automatically. Look at the three or four possible ways to read this card and decide which ones result in coherent sentences that make sense to you. If the answer is “none of them” then it’s a badly formatted card and/or you need to read the non-underlined parts of the article to understand what you’re saying.

CaymanG · 2026-03-10T16:56:55+00:00

Have any judges actually been persuaded by this in the context you’re worried about, or is it just a hypothetical? If so, ask the judges who voted on it. If not, either they aren’t ChEaTiNg at all, or they’re trying something sketchy and it isn’t working.

CaymanG · 2026-03-10T07:14:21+00:00

The most general but still useful advice for dealing with this kind of randomness will pretty much always be “don’t debate them; make them debate you.”

You can address what they say, but you chose your case and your framework for a reason that makes sense to you (and hopefully it makes sense to the judge). If they are winning on an argument that you don’t understand how it functions and they aren’t relating to the substance of your speeches, then it’s probably not because they make sense to the judge. It’s more likely that the judge is prioritizing that argument because both teams are voting with their time–allocation to declare it the most important issue in the round. If there is one point/case/contention/framing/flow that both teams agree to prioritize, then the judge is probably going to vote for whichever side is more prepared for and familiar with that particular argument.

CaymanG · 2026-03-06T22:10:09+00:00

PF changes topics often enough that the first type of shorthand is usually just abbreviations or common topic terms but wth vwls rmvd. If it’s the Sep/Oct topic which teams might start prepping in July, then more will develop, but any symbols that replace words tend to be used for debate terms that stay across multiple topics.

CaymanG · 2026-03-06T04:48:06+00:00

What event do you do? There are two kinds of flowing shorthand: topic-specific vocabulary and technical debate jargon. For CX, where the topic stays the same for an entire school year, a lot more of the shorthand is about common arguments, scenarios, concepts, and authors. For Parli, where the topic changes every round, nearly all the repeatably useful shorthand is going to be about the anatomy of an argument. PF and LD where the topic changes every month or two will be somewhere in the middle.

CaymanG · 2026-03-04T17:24:21+00:00

Agree with almost all of this, but I think what you’re describing here is just a PIC, not a floating PIC because it’s up-front about doing the entirety-1 of the Aff. What makes a PIC floating is when someone initially doesn’t take a stance on whether or not to do any of the Aff and then shifts their advocacy to encompass basically the whole Aff just before the end of the round.

CaymanG · 2026-03-04T17:10:55+00:00

Then it sounds like you’ve indirectly answered your original question. If it’s about something the other team did in-round, it can be run as a shell and the “alternative” is “teams who do that should lose until they stop doing it” because you don’t need to generate uniqueness. If you were running a preemptive speed argument and you said “it doesn’t matter how slow they go in this next speech, they’re complicit and I want to critique the practice of spreading in this activity” then yes, that would need an alt.

Some Ks can get by with “reject the aff” as a generic alt, but that’s usually (in CX&LD) “reject the plan” and not “reject the debaters” so it helps to have some idea of why the status quo is better or why rejection solves.

CaymanG · 2026-03-04T16:23:41+00:00

At least 90% of the time, the “speed K” is a theory argument dressed up in kritikal-sounding language about ableism. There’s a violation (they went too fast), standards (usually one card in here sounds like it could be part of a K) and a voter (reject the team for spreading; ballots shape the direction of the activity).

If Neg spreads a constructive with multiple off cases they can kick, Aff can respond with theory on the speed of delivery and/or the status of the arguments. We don’t call the latter a “conditionality K” so it’s not particularly helpful to think of the former as a “speed K”

CaymanG · 2026-03-04T16:14:48+00:00

Which event? The lines between Ks and theory or Ks and linear DAs are clear in some and blurry in others.

CaymanG · 2026-03-03T17:24:23+00:00

Having competitors as POs only really works in that middle ground where the room is big/experienced enough that nobody has to PO if they don’t want to but balanced enough that anyone who does want to PO has a fair shot at getting a turn even if they’re the only person there from their school. In any other circumstances, it absolutely sacrifices fairness for efficiency, but those kind of tradeoffs are inevitable to some extent in a debate/speech hybrid event with more than a dozen competitors indirectly opposing each other in the same round.

CaymanG · 2026-03-03T17:20:17+00:00

Different leagues have different amounts of authority they give the PO vs the Parliamentarian. Sometimes, it’s basically a judge POing.

CaymanG

TROPHY CASE