Bibas,+Mark

Debate history: I debated 4 years at Pine Crest School. I qualified to the TOC my senior year and was competitive on the national circuit. That being said, I did not continue to debate in college and have lost a little bit of touch with the activity. I haven’t judged many debates at all on the topic, so you’ll have to maybe explain and go deeper into certain arguments I may not be familiar with. Obviously don’t treat me as if I was a volunteer lay judge, but don’t assume I know the lingo and vocabulary specific to the topic.


 * Topicality **: If the affirmative meets a good interpretation of the topic, you’ll have a hard time persuading me that they need to meet the best possible interpretation of the topic. Impact T well - if the debate gets too muddled I find myself voting aff in these debates. I haven’t judged many debates on this topic so articulate things very well specifically in these debates.


 * Disads **: Love them. I encourage you to read them. Big fan of the politics disad. Impact Calculus is super important - I need something to weigh at the end of the round.


 * Counterplans **: I would much rather teams read this over a Kritik, but that is up for debate. When it comes to theory, I generally believe most CP theory is a reason to reject the argument and not the team, except for conditionality and a few other exceptions to this rule. You need to tell me why I should reject the team, and a blippy “no neg fiat is a VI” that is accidentally dropped will not get my ballot.


 * Kritik **: I never read them in high school so if you are going to read them you need to do a few things really well.

 1. Explain your alt - what kind of world do you endorse, how does that resolve your impacts 2. Framework – if you do not win a lens through which the round should be evaluated, you will probably lose to the big impact aff that you are debating. I also need more explanation than the normal tagline extension of “reps key to policymaking – that’s Jourde”. Even if you win framework, you may not win the debate 3. Link level arguments – how does your K turn the aff? Are their assumptions wrong? Try to contextualize your K to the aff, or else the perm will probably beat you

If you are aff, smart arguments about the alt combined with case outweighs is good. Make sure to answer their framework arguments. A lot of them are stupid, like fiat illusory. The perm also is a pretty good strategy, especially if they’re not explaining their links well. I particularly like the classic double bind.


 * Clarity: **Speed is fine, but I value clarity a lot. If you’re not being clear, I’ll shout out “clear”. If you continue to be unclear, it will hurt your speaker points.

Things that will boost them: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">-Clarity <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">-Good line-by-line
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">Speaker Points: **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;"> -Good CX

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;"> -Funny jokes