Leong,+Ben

I debated locally and nationally for 4 years at St. Ignatius College Prep in San Francisco from 1998-2002. Post college, I served as the Director of Forensics for my alma mater for one year and am now about to enter medical school. My background is in economics and public health and I have a relatively strong basic science foundation so if applicable to the topic do not feel obliged to spend time in rebuttals having to explain content in those areas. I am much more interested in your claim, warrant, evidence, and impact. With that said, I will point out factual or definitional errors in those areas if I catch them which can certainly impact my decision (e.g. efficiency is not the same as equality).
 * BACKGROUND**

I flow and don't mind speed as long as you are CLEAR! If you are not clear and I cannot understand, I cannot flow it and probably won't be able to take it into serious consideration. If you see that I have stopped flowing, I either cannot understand you or feel you are being repetitive. It is up to you to adjust.
 * THOUGHTS ABOUT LD**

Offering multiple responses is okay but they must be different and unique points. If you say you have five responses, they better be five clearly different responses with some sort of individual or collective impact.

Impacts are key at every point in the round especially if you are trying to capitalize on an opponent's drops.

I would say that I look for one primary factor when making my decision: the VC or a standard. You must somehow with your analysis or claims or evidence impact back to a standard and weigh them against your opponent. If you can successfully do that and do it better than your opponent, you likely will have my ballot. I would strongly advise that you take advantage of cross examination to establish a clear standard and clash in the round. By doing that you tell me what you will try to achieve and then all I have to do is assess whether you do achieve it and if your efforts are better than that of your opponents. I try very very hard to not intervene but if you give me a muddled round with no clear standard to impact back to, I just might have to.

I am fine with debate jargon, theory, disads, offcases, etc.

PLEASE DO NOT bring up new arguments in the 2AR and anything seemingly new in the 1NR should be legitimate extensions from what was presented in the 1NC (I refer to this as sliming). If you do, I will disregard them and you will be docked severely in terms of speaker points.
 * PLEASE DON'T SLIME**

I am also okay with questions after the round. I truly believe that debate is a constant learning activity and that you should take what you learn from one round into your remaining rounds at the tournament. If you are willing to wait about 5 minutes, I usually will be able to disclose. If it takes longer then 5 minutes, the round was either really good or really bad hence making my decision difficult. With regards to wanting the tournament to always run on schedule, I encourage debaters to come up to me throughout the tournament even after we have left the round. If you do that you may have to remind me of the context of your question.
 * AFTER THE ROUND**

Regarding speaker points, everybody in my mind starts at a 27 and goes up or down from there. Two things will make me dock speaker points automatically. 1) If you slime, you automatically get docked to a 25. 2) If you are mean or rude to me or your opponent (there is a difference between being mean/rude and being aggressive/forceful), your speaker points will also suffer.
 * SPEAKER POINTS**

Thanks for reading and good luck!