Elias,+James

4 years HS debate at Rufus King in Milwaukee, WI; 2nd year debater at Gonzaga University

TL;DR – I’m a critic of argument, win yours and tell me why it matters in the broader context of the round. Tell me what to vote on and why in the rebuttals

Prep time stops when the debater stops prepping unless flashing begins to take an obscene amount of time

Technological error happens: if there's a computer problem, let me know and we can suspend the round to figure out what's going on and resolve the problem

The specifics:

Aff – 1AC should be strategic. You get the first speech and infinite prep for a reason, it should probably be used in the round on various flows or you’re doing something wrong

Speed – go for it. You get 3 warnings of “clear” before I give up trying to flow you

Kritik – love ‘em, ran them all the time, go for them, just know your lit base. Don’t assume I know your lit base, I’m not debating and I won’t do the work for you. I listen for link contextualization, impact comparison and some sort of explanation of the world of the alt AKA give me the story of the K if you want the ballot

Disads – yup. They exist and win so use them

Counterplans – go for them. They also win rounds. In the rebuttal, a reminder of what the CP does and a comparison of it with the aff is really nice [not long, maybe 10 or 15 seconds combined]

Topicality – I hate T debates, but I’ll vote for you if you go for T. Remember while T isn't a DA, it's kind of like one. You have your definition, your violation [link] and your voters [impact].This means a good 2nr on T extends the violation by contextualizing the definition with the affirmative plan text and then extend the voters in an offensive way. Just saying T is a voter for education and fairness doesn't get my ballot. Give me some warrants as to why this is actually true

Case – negatives should probably argue against it in some way and do warrant comparison and explain how the case argument implicates the whole advantage/case

Theory – I have what most people would call a “high threshold” on theory. I don’t like it, like topicality. I will generally default to reasonability and rejecting the arg, not the team unless told otherwise. I’ll vote for you on theory, but remember that it actually has an impact [fairness and education] like every other argument, so you’re going to need to impact that out for me

Performance/Non-Trad – My judging experience in these rounds isn't super extensive, but I’ve debated in a lot more than I've judged. They’re like any other round, debate the opponent and tell me why your arguments matter. Tell me what my ballot does if I vote for you and why voting for you is such a good idea. Also, relate somehow to the topic. Whatever relation means is up to debate, but I'm becoming more persuaded by the argument that being negative is almost impossible if you don't say at least something about the topic. If you’re the team against a performative/non-trad team, I find the substantive portion of framework a whole lot more persuasive than the theoretical portion. Engage the aff on multiple levels, I was taught most of my framework skills by Pointer which means that things like framework is a question of method, not fairness. Read a K or two against them, provide me a counterproposal or even read a DA against their topic relation. 8 minutes of framework will just make me a very sad judge

Most of all have fun and do you