1/10-1/17: LD & PF Tournament Results and Answering Soft Left Positions
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at three bid tournaments: the Cavalier Invitational at Durham Academy, the Harvard Westlake Debates, and the Lexington Winter Invitational.
Congratulations to Cary Academy’s Riley Ro for championing the 2024 Cavalier Invitational at Durham Academy. In finals, Riley defeated Isidore Newman’s Jackson Dirks on a 3-0 decision (Anchaliya, Lamberson, Nails). Additional congratulations to Harrison’s Jack Gessner for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Harker’s Ansh Sheth and Sofia Shah for co-championing the 2024 Harvard Westlake Debates. Additional congratulations to Ansh for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Lake Highland Prep’s Prateek Seela and Harris Layson for co-championing the 2024 Lexington Winter Invitational. Additional congratulations to Lake Highland Prep’s Suchita Vennam for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to American Heritage Palm Beach’s Chloe Wolf for championing the 2024 Sunvite tournament. In finals, Chloe defeated Ardsley’s Kevin Khitrov on a 3-0 decision (Bishop, Leclair, Massa). Additional congratulations to Christopher Columbus’s Matthew Moreno for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at five bid tournaments: the Sunvite tournament, the Cavalier Invitational at Durham Academy, the James Logan MLK Invitational, the Lexington Winter Invitational, and the Mount Vernon Invitational.
Congratulations to Daniel Guo & Jason Zhao from Strake Jesuit for championing the 2024 Sunvite tournament. In finals, they defeated Payton Shen & Zachary Apel from North Broward Prep on a 3-2 decision (Kim*, Norman*, Riofrio, Fernandez, Dean). Additional congratulations to Bishop Moore Catholic’s Aidangelly Lezcano for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Stella Wu & Brendon Chen from Taipei American for championing the 2024 Cavalier Invitational at Durham Academy. In finals, they defeated Ezekiel Ehrenberg & Alex Calder from Delbarton on a 4-1 decision (Coltrain*, Balle, Brent-Levenstein, Daswani, Musti).
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Ahmad Elassaad & Max Wolff-Merovick from College Prep and Allen Liu & Gaurav Rao from Leland for co-championing the 2024 James Logan MLK Invitational. Additional congratulations to Davidson Academy Online’s Nathan Klapach for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Connor Leo & Neil Jiang from Acton-Boxborough and Aaron Tian & Ishan Puri from Thomas S. Wootton for co-championing the 2024 Lexington Winter Invitational. Additional congratulations to Lincoln-Sudbury’s Farhan Khan for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Ved Anand & Ruikuan Zhu from Overlake and Clarence Guo & Daniel Jung from Interlake for co-championing the 2024 Mount Vernon Invitational. Additional congratulations to Eastside Prep’s Raelin Engrav for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Best of luck to everyone competing next weekend! Stay tuned for future tournament results.
VBI 2024 Staff Announcement
We are so excited to start announcing our instructors for VBI 2024! Every week, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the talented staff working at VBI this summer. This week’s staff feature is LD instructor Joshua Adegoke.
Joshua debated for Challenge Early College High School, which has an extremely small and underfunded debate program, but managed to make a name for himself on the circuit. He has been part of the activity for a while and loves to give back to the community. He has made it to a few bid rounds, including octofinals at the 2023 Emory & Stanford tournaments. He has also qualified for the TFA (Texas Forensic Association) State tournament twice and finished his 2023 season as an octofinalist. He specializes in any form of the K, primarily focusing on Non-T and T Afropess, Afro Optimism, Afro-futurism, Security, and the Cap K. Excluding debate, he loves to research and learn new things/do new activities.
Answering Soft-Left Positions
by Akhil Bhale
A category of arguments that is becoming increasingly popular across the circuit in PF is “soft-left”. Soft-left arguments represent a move away from circuit norms of reading big-stick/extinction impacts to instead prioritizing impacts concerning ongoing violence. While these arguments are sometimes read with a framework, the premise of these arguments is that they are high-probability impacts that affect some marginalized group.
In this article, I’ll discuss some strategies to answer such arguments.
Link-ins
This is the most intuitive answer and often times the best one to make. To make a link-in argument you would simply explain why your scenario/argument results in the same impact that is outlined by the soft-left position. Admittedly, a link-in argument isn’t truly an “answer” to the a soft-left framing argument, but it’s an argument as to why you link to their impact calculus/framework. Absent a link-in argument, the team reading the soft left argument will attempt to frame you out of the round. They will make arguments as to why your impacts come second to their impacts. Link-in arguments put your scenario and it’s accompanying impacts at the same level as your opponent’s.
From here, the round breaks down to a relatively normal debate. You could make weighing arguments as to why your scenario links into their framing better than they link into their framing.
It’s worth mentioning under this section that if your strategy against a soft-left position is to just spam link defense, you're better off coupling that with some link-in arguments. That way you have more outs in the back-half of the debate as opposed to hedging your strategy on defense.
Extinction outweighs
This is probably the second most intuitive answer. Extinction outweighs is a weighing argument that argues that extinction far outweighs the impacts of the soft left position. A good extinction outweighs argument will make arguments about the preclusion of the possibility of life. Moreover, because soft-left arguments are inherently high probability, extinction outweighs arguments will need to answer a lot of the probability indicts the opposing team will make. You’ll need to make arguments about why even the tiniest shred of probability of extinction is far deadlier and more important.
As the team reading extinction outweighs, you’ll also need to answer the argument that extinction outweighs rhetoric bad. I think that a lot of this comes down to how you phrase your weighing argument and the ways in which you compare extinction to the soft left position.
Theory/Commodification
A lot of soft-left positions will also make pre-fiat arguments as to why the reading of their framework/impacts is a reason to vote for them, independent of the resolution. A way of answering this is making the argument that prefiat frameworks are a voting issue because they encourage the commodification of the argument. For example, if teams can win the round solely off the reading of their arguments and not have to defend their argument post-fiat, it encourages other teams who may not care about the issues of the soft-left position to read the argument anyway, just because it gets them a win.
However, don’t assume anything. To be safe, you should take flex prep/cross to explicitly ask if the soft-left position is a pre-fiat reason to vote for them. From the answer you receive, you should accordingly craft your strategy for the rest of the round.
This just one of the many theory arguments you can make. Another one that is relatively common is “Must not specify a certain group”. While I don’t think that this particular theory argument is very good, reading theory does give you advantages that you can later leverage and use to weigh against the education arguments the team reading soft-left argument will go for.
Akhil Bhale debated for Westwood High School in Austin, Texas for 3 years. In his career, he qualified to the TOC twice and earned 8 career bids. Serving as PF captain for two years, his notable achievements include getting 7 bids his senior year, winning the Longhorn Classic at UT Austin, winning the Kandi King round robin, semi-finaling the Palm Classic at Stanford, and finaling the Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley. He made elimination rounds at Bellaire, Plano West, Blue Key, Emory and Churchill and was the 1st seed and an octofinalist at TFA state his junior year. Overall, Akhil was ranked #3 in the nation and #1 in Texas his senior year.