11/29-12/6: LD & PF Tournament Results and Prep for Success: Leveraging the Wikis to Do Winning Prep
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at five bid tournaments: the Princeton Classic, the TOC Digital Speech and Debate Series 1, the La Costa Canyon Winter Classic, the Alta Silver and Black Invitational Tournament, and the Longhorn Classic.
Congratulations to Horace Greeley’s Salma Gheith and McDowell’s Judah Jones for co-championing the 2023 Princeton Classic. Additional congratulations to Lake Highland Prep’s Prateek Seela for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Lincoln East’s Benjamin Hoover for winning the 2023 TOC Digital Speech and Debate Series 1. In finals, Benjamin defeated MAST@FIU’s Denitsa Zvetkova on a 2-1 decision (Brown, Levi, Smith*). Additional congratulations to Vedh Shetty (independent) for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Peninsula’s Sterling Utovac for winning the 2023 La Costa Canyon Winter Classic. In finals, Sterling defeated Immaculate Heart’s Emma Sobel on a 2-1 decision (Gandionco, Nasar, Chanay*). Additional congratulations to Immaculate Heart’s Ava Wegmann-Gatarz for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Marlborough’s Wyeth Renwick and Hope Lee for co-championing the 2023 Alta Silver and Black Invitational Tournament. Additional congratulations to Marlborough’s Rory Baskin for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Strake Jesuit’s Nathan Wei for winning the 2023 Longhorn Classic. In finals, Nathan defeated Monta Vista’s Keshav Rastogi on a 3-0 decision (Penumetcha, Sheffield, Watt). Additional congratulations to Plano East’s Lauren Chang 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 Princeton Classic, the Alta Silver Black Invitational, the Longhorn Classic, the La Costa Canyon Winter Classic, and the TOC Digital Speech and Debate Series 1 tournament.
Congratulations to Ezekiel Ehrenberg & Alex Calder from Delbarton for championing the 2023 Princeton Classic. In finals, they defeated Connor Leo & Neil Jiang from Acton-Boxborough on a 3-0 decision (Budny, Ganguly, Lin). Additional congratulations to Ridge’s Vivian Zhu for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Alan Tai & Saanvi Goyal from Monta Vista for championing the 2023 Alta Silver Black Invitational. In finals, they defeated Alexander Wang & Ori Shi from Cranbrook on a 3-0 decision (O’Brien, Rutkowski, Serr). Additional congratulations to Fairview’s Annika Aumentado for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Arnav Mehta & David Lu from Seven Lakes and Aneesh Kondagunturi & Romeer Pillay from Westlake for co-championing the 2023 Longhorn Classic. Additional congratulations to Flower Mound’s Amey Kashyap for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Angela Wu & Ali Fehmi from Canyon Crest and Aumrita Savdharia & Stavan Shah from Fairmont Prep for co-championing the 2023 La Costa Canyon Winter Classic. Additional congratulations to Dougherty Valley’s Shaan Mehta for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Aarthi Raghavan & Leeya Chaudhuri from Eagle Independent for championing the 2023 TOC Digital Speech and Debate Series 1 tournament. In finals, they defeated Payton Shen & Zachary Apel from North Broward Prep on a 3-0 decision (Cole, Goldstone, Tommarazzo). Additional congratulations to Legacy Prep’s Joseph Nahas 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.
January Topic Previews Are Now Available
Topic Previews for the January/February LD and January PF topics are now available to our brief subscription members! The full briefs will be available shortly.
Lincoln Douglas
Resolved: The United States ought to substantially reduce its military presence in the West Asia-North Africa region.
Public Forum
Resolved: The United States federal government should repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
You can access the topic previews by logging into your account HERE and selecting the January Briefs.
Prep for Success: Leveraging the Wikis to Do Winning Prep
by Akhil Bhale
There are many pillars to a good debate team, but one of the more important ones is the prep they possess. A debater can be an excellent speaker and technically proficient, but if they don’t have the right prep, they usually won’t get too far.
However, this doesn’t mean that prep is the end-all-be-all solution to elevating your debate skills. Fundamentals like analytical thinking, warranting, and speaking will always be equally as important, if not more. Still, I feel that the approach debaters take to preparation both, in and out of round, is often misguided and inefficient. In this article I will, drawing from personal experience, dive into an underutilized approach to prepping.
HS Wikis
Prep starts right when a topic announced. The time in between the announcement of the new topic and your first tournament is extremely valuable. Debaters who come up with the “best” arguments during this period and then go on to read them at their first tournament, effectively set the meta for that topic. Assuming they have disclosed or sent out email chains in their rounds, chances are their arguments have proliferated throughout the circuit with debaters around the country reading some iteration of the arguments. This gives the debater that came up with these arguments an edge for the rest of the topic. But the more apparent benefit to being ahead of the curve is that you will do better at the first tournament of the topic, and then ones to follow.
Everyone has their prepping strategies but the one I think is underutilized is scouring wikis of other events. Debate has been around for a while and so there is bound to be some repetition and crossover of topics and argumentation across debate events. Debaters should leverage this to their benefit. When the topic first comes out, debaters should pull up a list of all past topics in LD and Policy (there quite a few websites with this information upon search), and then search these topics for keywords from the current PF topic. If there is a match, your next step should be to go to the wiki, and access the archived caselist(s) for that year by clicking the following drop-down menus in the top left:
Once you have reached the desired year and event, you should search for specific keywords on the top right:
These keywords can be anything relevant to your current PF topic. If right off the bat, you think a certain argument could be viable on the topic, you can search for it at which point you will have the option to access the wiki of certain debaters that read arguments related to what you searched for. The other and more brute force approach is to go through random schools and scour their debaters’ wikis for anything useful.
College Policy Wiki
A similar approach outside the realm of High School debate also exists: the College Policy wiki. You do everything you would do for the HS Policy and HS LD wiki, but with the College Policy wiki (https://opencaselist.com/ndtceda23). Policy debate is touted as this event that is way ahead of Public Forum. One aspect of this that is apparent is the argumentation. The meta of the PF circuit right now contains arguments that can be found on the College Policy wiki going back 10-15 years. This has its benefits; debaters are inherently lazy and so if you are able to find innovative and strategic arguments on these wikis, that’s time saved for you. But more importantly, a lot of the more squirrely and absurd arguments that excel in PF right now have been read in Policy for ages, so the cards all neatly cut are just waiting for you.
While wiki-mining can be extremely helpful, that is not to say that you shouldn’t do any research of your own. For example, many of the arguments on the wiki can be obsolete and not up-to-date, especially if you’re going back several years. Rather a strategy of wiki-mining and conducting your own research to either get inspiration or build up on existing arguments should be implemented.
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.