1/17-1/24: LD & PF Tournament Results and Tips for Perfecting Your Conditionality 2AR
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at the Peninsula Invitational. Congratulations to Orange County School of the Arts’ Iva Liu for championing the tournament. In finals, Iva defeated American Heritage Broward’s Spencer Swickle on a 3-0 decision (Antonelli, Omidvar, White). Additional congratulations to Spencer for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at the Peninsula Invitational.
Congratulations to Ara Mehran & Roy Kapoor from Fairmont Prep for championing the 2024 Peninsula Invitational. In finals, they defeated Mackenzie Mauldin & Joshua Lee from Astor Redhead on a 3-0 decision (Krauss, Michalak, Tseng). Additional congratulations to Fairmont Prep’s Stavan Shah 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 Elizabeth Elliot.
Elizabeth Elliott is currently studying Political Science and Anthropology at Wake Forest where she debates. In high school, she did LD at Isidore Newman School where she consistently reached elimination rounds of major national tournaments. Notable results each year include reaching the top fourteen at NSDA nationals as a sophomore, championing Heritage Hall her junior year, and reaching finals of Blake her senior year. She has qualified to and cleared at the TOC twice. In addition, she received ten round-robin invitations and ten career bids. Her interests in the debate include topicality, process counterplans, creative AFF writing, impact turns, and kritiks. This is her second year teaching at VBI, and she is so excited to work with students again this summer.
The Order is Condo: Tips for Perfecting Your Conditionality 2AR
by Lizzie Su
As 2AR prep begins, you realize your time-crunched 1AR was not actually able to handle 6 minutes of 2NR sandbagging. Luckily, your judge is somewhat receptive to theory and your 1AR was able to establish that conditional advocacies are a voting issue for strategy skew and clash!
“Conditionality bad,” “condo bad,” or simply “condo” all refer to a theoretical argument about the illegitimacy of negative advocacies (usually counterplans or kritikal alternatives) that are read conditionally—the 2NR can decide whether or not to extend the advocacy, regardless of the arguments the 1AR has made.
Here’s a few tips for perfecting the condo 2AR!
“Answering arguments is hard!”
If it weren’t 7 minutes of conditional counterplans, it’d be 7 minutes of something else. Debaters going for condo often explain their abuse story as “it was hard to answer conditional arguments, because the 2NR could kick them.” This explanation is slightly off the mark, because the 2NR can kick disads, theory shells, and phil NCs as well—why are conditional advocacies uniquely bad? The simplest answer is that it’s hard to generate offense against them. You can straight turn a disadvantage, read an RVI against a shell, and straight ref philosophical offense, but link turning a kritik or impact turning an internal net benefit to a counterplan does not guarantee you will always have that offense as a 2AR out. Being able to explain the disadvantage that conditional advocacies create via different uniqueness conditions will help take your 2AR explanation to a higher level.
Understand the most common 2NR arguments
There’s no secret sauce. Most 2NRs contain a version of negative flexibility, real-world/ policy making education, dogmatism, logic, etc. Once you familiarize yourself with the typical ‘condo good’ justifications and figure out the best answers, there’s nothing to be afraid of (aside from judges that are strong proponents of “negative terrorism”).
Always ask for the status in cross-examination
Don’t forget! Make it the first question in CX! Teams that forget to ask may be caught off-guard when the 2NR only spends 5 seconds on your shell explaining how they meet your interpretation because all of their advocacies were dispositional!
Watch out for preempts
Negative teams will occasionally justify conditionality in their 1NC. This is most likely to be done at the bottom of a counterplan or K page. Instead of saying “conditionality’s good,” they may also disguise it by saying “the status quo is always an option.” Usually, these preempts act as a deterrent to 1ARs because it’s (slightly) harder to get through a shell and answer all of their preemptive arguments. 1ARs should ask themselves if reading “condo bad” is the best option: should you use the extra time to make another permutation, or is there another 1AR theory argument they didn’t preempt?
Limit your prep time for practice speeches
Sometimes, infinite prep drills are helpful when it comes to answering unfamiliar arguments or redo-ing the perfect 2NR. However, these drills don’t simulate a real debate round well at all. Especially when it comes to a 2AR drill (where 95% of debaters will have less than four minutes of time to prepare), it’s most helpful to practice with strict limits on preparation.
Know your judge
Some judges will never vote on “condo bad,” while others have a lower threshold. Some judges may vote on “conditionality comes before topicality,” and others would most certainly not. It’s hard to tell whether your 2AR did just enough to win the ballot, but that’s true of every round. Minimize the risk by learning about your judge’s preferences: ask before round, read their paradigm, etc.
Be correct!
You don’t have to read 4 arguments against every single one of the 2NR’s standards. As they say, there’s no 3NR for the negative to do line-by-line! Instead, prioritize making 1-2 true responses to each negative argument.
What are common 2NR mistakes to look out for?
Dropping the shell
Some of the judges that seem the least likely to vote on ‘conditionality is bad’ may be persuaded to do so if the 2NR fails to answer it completely. This does not mean the 2AR can blitz through an extension or re-read their 1AR block to win the round, though. The aff should spend a decent amount of time explaining their standard and, more importantly, the impact to their standard and why it should outweigh any other offense in the round.
Ensure that you answer any arguments the 2NR made that the judge could cross-apply to the conditionality flow. Examples would include paradigm issues and defense from the 2NR’s answer to any other shells. This may be done easily with a healthy degree of grandstanding about why doing work for the 2NR counts as intervention!
Conceding dispo solves
“Dispo solves” is a strategic argument to include in your 1AR shell and 2AR extension.
Because most counterinterpretations to “conditionality is bad” include general reasons why reading a lot of counterplans is good, dispositionality is a counterplan status that could offer the benefits of conditionality (real world education, in-depth testing of the plan, etc.) without a massive strategic disadvantage for the 1AR.
If the 2NR does not provide reasons why dispositional counterplans are worse than conditional ones, the 2AR can use this concession to prove the negative’s offense is not unique to their counterinterpretation. At the end of the round, only the aff will have unique offense about why conditionality is bad.
Not answering the aff standards
Oftentimes, debaters will speed through their “AT: Condo Bad” backfiles and overlook the importance of interacting with the 1AR’s specific standards (strategy skew, clash, time skew, etc.) by reading defense (“there’s no impact to strat skew because all arguments skew your strategy”) or turns (“conditionality is better for clash because it allows us to engage with the aff from multiple angles”). In this instance, a quick 2AR extension of your favorite standard and in-depth weighing between aff and neg offense will put the 2AR in a great spot for proving they have a better model of debate.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Su debated for Mountain House High School. During her senior year, she broke at the Tournament of Champions and reached late elimination rounds at several national tournaments. She taught at both sessions of VBI this past summer and is currently coaching the DebateDrills Club Team.