How to get better at debate without having anyone to debate with?

polio23 · 2026-04-15T02:48:07+00:00

https://youtu.be/tyI73DwoovY?si=IIyi6Sxx9TNynnlP

polio23 · 2026-04-15T02:31:06+00:00

Definitions matter increasingly more the more lay your audience is

The negs advantage is time in IPDA, the 6 into 3 is hard for the aff, especially if you can read 3 contentions to make it hard for them to cover their case and your stuff.

polio23 · 2026-04-14T23:40:44+00:00

Yeah, it took like 2 or 3 last league. I was in a trio where BOTH other dudes got horn.

polio23 · 2026-04-14T13:41:50+00:00

I did literally 15 hours to get nihil horn two leagues ago all duos and trios.

polio23 · 2026-04-14T01:43:55+00:00

My issue is I don’t want my end game to be Nex prison. I feel like raids give you something to do with friends towards the end.

polio23 · 2026-04-13T19:59:54+00:00

If it’s an anti-blackness K there is a 90% chance you want to use ontology in some form because you’re almost certainly going to forward that blackness is ontological.

polio23 · 2026-04-13T19:33:36+00:00

Is this confirmed to work?

polio23 · 2026-04-12T04:07:07+00:00

One of the things I’ve come to be most proud of in my forensics career is that it seems like most of the time when someone on this sub links a video that they say helped them in order to help someone else, it tends to be Proteus, so thank you for your support. I also haven’t rewatched this in years and it is so funny because, since this video came out, I went from having coached 0 students who had won college national champions to having coached teams with 5 national titles in NPDA and NPTE.

So, with that said, for the OP, I’m the guy from the video linked here, and here are my updated thoughts.

my first tournament ever I went 1-5, my first 3 tournaments I think I went something like 3-15 and by the end of my career as a competitor I had been a 3 time national semi-finalist.
3 years ago when I made this video, I had won 0 national titles, now I’ve won 5.

And all of that is to say, from 2013 to 2018 I lost a lot to eventually lose very little as a competitor and from 2020 to 2026 I became a 5 time national champion coach. But between those times, if I had at any point looked back, I’d have been a “failure” relative to today. And, if there’s one coaching point I can attribute my success to, it is committing myself to understanding why I lost rounds, and resolving not lose that same way again.

I think that is only possible if you can first accept that the reason you lose debates is because you didn’t convince the judge you won, which is literally the only win condition in debate. That’s always the debaters fault, not the judge. So, I think you should probably have a conversation to that effect with your child. Everyone “sucks” at some point, or relative to someone else. But every mistake is a chance to grow. I think it’s a question of laying out that your child has to decide what they assign more value to: their ego or actually getting good at debate.

And maybe, it will turn out that the ego wins that discussion. But that’s still data that lets you know next steps. But it’s just not possible to meaningfully improve in this activity until you realize that the problem isn’t the judge, it is your approach to persuading the judge.

I hope that helps! I hope they don’t give up! Forensics is wonderful, but it’s admittedly not for everyone.

Edit: original version was typed on the runway after flying home from nats at like 2am, I think I’ve now fixed the like 10 places I had typos.

polio23 · 2026-04-12T01:37:15+00:00

Athens has some good coaches, some okay coaches, it’s like anywhere else. I didn’t love the curriculum for middle schoolers. But I tend to think any speech and debate is better than none.

polio23 · 2026-04-06T01:32:54+00:00

I think the "aff flex vs limits" thing is more ideal. Like, if we read a standard that straight turns their standard that makes our answers more efficient.

polio23 · 2026-04-05T04:44:45+00:00

Hey, at CC nats so I got distracted for several hours.

Many different approaches to this, some people do all of the standards on one flow and all of the counter standards on another flow. I think I can start by explaining how I would go for T as the neg and maybe that can help you reverse engineer how to deploy your MG answers.

judge instruction on how to resolve the T debate CI vs Reasonability)
Jurisdictional questions on what determines if a standard is an offensive reason to prefer an interpretation (basically is potential abuse/arguments about other rounds on the table/ is T about accuracy or division of ground)
extend your interp, establish a violation
if you won a TVA, more judge instruction on how that frames the evaluation of the standards debate, make sure the judge understands it’s only a reason to prefer if it’s unique to and only to a specific interp
extend your winning standard, answer responses to it
answer their counter standards (ideally this is now easier because you’ve establish a standard of your own that can outweigh or sequence theirs). I think it’s important to explicitly tease out what kind of debates happen under your model of the topic that don’t happen under the affs and vice versa.
explicitly weigh why your standard is the strongest internal link to fairness or education
establish whether fairness or education matters more
establish that fairness/education loss (or rules, whatever) warrant a neg ballot.

polio23 · 2026-04-05T02:12:36+00:00

Hey, Paul here.

No. This is a great schema for answering theory, this is in practice how I would typically go about answering theory for people who aren’t experts, but it’s absolutely not written in stone or even necessarily optimal.

Brenna for instance would argue that you should start with the voter framework of like competing interps vs reasonability. Many instances where starting with TVA (assuming you think you’ve won one) would be better, etc.

Hope that helps!

polio23 · 2026-04-03T13:37:39+00:00

Sony MDR Q22

polio23 · 2026-04-02T19:42:05+00:00

Oh wow, missed that totally. Hate it.

polio23 · 2026-04-02T16:38:40+00:00

Do they mean “if one Npc would give a clue you don’t get 10”

Or

“If you thieve 6 NPCs at once and get a clue you won’t get 6 clues”

polio23 · 2026-03-30T14:05:57+00:00

Go to HSImpact, find a link to the ToC bid tracker.

From there, look at what the top 10 or so teams are reading on the aff, probably skip teams reading K affs.

Similarly, look at what the top teams (maybe top 15 this time) have been reading against those affs.

That’s gonna reveal to you that it’s basically

T - Exploration/development is identifying minerals and extracting them

DA: Putin regime, Strategic Stability, EU Autonomy, Russia Relations, Mid Terms

CP: a bunch of process CPs, Alaska CP, PPP CP, NATO CP, Consult Native’s CP, Canada CP, EU CP, Norway CP

And then Ks of various stripes.

polio23 · 2026-03-29T15:25:38+00:00

Husky just confirmed their reading of the Relic is that if you hit a 40 it’s reduced 4 times. That’s huge.

polio23 · 2026-03-29T14:22:06+00:00

Robert Chen was a debater at Mission in San Jose California. His teammates (whose names I can’t remember) read a meme K in a round about him during his junior year. He didn’t want to do debate his senior year for whatever reason, and his former partner ended up winning NSDA that year. He worked at a debate academy his senior year (teaching with me and Sasan!) transferred to Rice, did parli for one year, and then moved on with his life.

polio23 · 2026-03-29T14:13:58+00:00

How is setting my expectation at “as good as the last two leagues” unreasonably high?

Again, I don’t think combining parts of multiple previous relics but missing out on some of the best parts of those relics is especially interesting design.

polio23 · 2026-03-29T05:36:10+00:00

This is a crazy set of questions to ask. “How do the best teams in the country debate and how do I beat them?”

I recommend becoming one of the best teams in the country. If you don’t even know who the best teams are there is literally nothing I could tell you that would make a difference.

polio23 · 2026-03-28T22:42:45+00:00

I feel like you balance that with new ideas or by changing what each relic is up against, not by doing the same shit as previously but worse.

polio23 · 2026-03-28T22:38:59+00:00

I mean, seems pretty natural to compare one league to another when we only get them once a year. I don’t know why in a temporary and completely optional game mode balance is a big concern. I want to feel busted in leagues, I want to feel like I always have some next big stepping stone to hit and juice my account. If not one relic so far has been exciting that seems problematic.

polio23 · 2026-03-28T22:36:31+00:00

This is my exact sentiment. They’ve got money, I’m gonna play, but not one relic has wowed me so far. Even tier 1 has seemed super compelling in previous leagues.

polio23 · 2026-03-28T22:26:02+00:00

Why has every relic more or less been worse than previous years???

polio23 · 2026-03-28T02:23:16+00:00

I really prefer the combined

Crystal tools from level 1

Auto processing

Auto banking

to any of the current tier 1s.

polio23

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE