1/3-1/10: LD & PF Tournament Results and Three Common Impact Calculus Mistakes
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at five bid tournaments: the Newark Invitational, the Arizona State HDSHC Invitational, the University of Houston Cougar Classic, the Churchill Classic, and the Puget Sound tournament.
Congratulations to Collegiate’s Niranjan Deshpande for championing the 2024 Newark Invitational. In finals, Niranjan defeated Acton Boxborough’s Neel Kannambadi on a 3-2 decision (Burch, Crossan, Johnson, Beckford*, Fakorede*). Additional congratulations to Niranjan for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Peninsula’s Alex Borgas and Aaron Yi for co-championing the 2024 Arizona State HDSHC Invitational. Additional congratulations to Brophy’s Timothy Jiang for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Carnegie Vanguard’s Laura Huang and Memorial’s David Xu for co-championing the 2024 University of Houston Cougar Classic. Additional congratulations to Seven Lakes’ Vishal Surya for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Westlake’s Miller Roberts and Strake’s Kelvin Meng for co-championing the 2024 Churchill Classic. Additional congratulations to Miller for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Newport’s Brandon Luo and Amador Valley’s Ella Min for co-championing the 2024 the Puget Sound tournament. Additional congratulations to Brandon for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at four bid tournaments: the Arizona State HDSHC Invitational, the University of Houston Cougar Classic, the Churchill Classic, and the Puget Sound tournament.
Congratulations to Rejul Guru & Sudeep Vattikuti from BASIS Peoria for championing the 2024 Arizona State HDSHC Invitational. In finals, they defeated Sadie Wolf & Caroline Izmirly from Independent NYC on a 2-1 decision (Yellen*, List, Billings). Additional congratulations to Archbishop Mitty’s Atharv Mahajan for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Raj Trivedi & Ethan Wan and Mac Stratton & Ethan Zhao from Strake Jesuit for co-championing the 2024 University of Houston Cougar Classic. Additional congratulations to Langley’s Connor Chun for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Esha Venkat & Ava Dasari from Westwood and Joshua Kou & Shikhar Kaul from Westlake for co-championing the 2024 Churchill Classic. Additional congratulations to Bellaire’s Mingyi Chen for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Luke Scott & Vihaan Venna from Mount Si for championing the 2024 Puget Sound tournament. In finals, they defeated Ellis Adamson & Logan Thoms from Gig Harbor on a 2-1 decision (Pittser*, Zhou, Chummun). Additional congratulations to Gig Harbor’s Greyden Ferguson 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 Alice Waters.
Alice competed at Heights High school for four years in policy and LD and qualified to TFA state and the TOC. She was also a Houston Urban Debate League debater! Now, she is an assistant LD coach at The Harker School. Her debate interests include settler colonialism, topicality, and policy debates, and she is excited to work at VBI this summer!
Three Common Impact Calculus Mistakes
by Lawrence Zhou
Perhaps one of the most common pieces of feedback that judges give at the end of debates is that debaters should weigh more. This is often taken to mean that debaters should do more impact calculus, a term so popular that it somehow has its own Wikipedia page. Here, impact calculus will simply mean determining which impact matters more.
Impact calculus is a difficult skill to master because it not only requires technical expertise as well lots of content knowledge about common impacts, but also because it requires debaters to transcend their own limited perspective on the round and understand how to convince a third-party about the relative importance of their arguments. Consequently, it is the subject of many long camp lectures (here is one by Stephen Weil that is excellent as well as this more recent one by Nick Lepp). This short essay is not going to cover every intricacy of impact calculus—instead, we will look at three common mistakes that debaters make when trying to do impact calculus.
Mistake 1: Doing impact calculus at the bottom of the flow.
In general, it is a common tendency for more traditional LDers and PFers to do their weighing or impact calculus at the end of their speeches, often in a discrete section of the flow. This is often reflected in their off-time roadmaps, where debaters will say “Affirmative Case, Negative Case, Weighing” or “Negative Case, Affirmative Case, Voting Issues.”
This is a mistake, for a few reasons.
First, this almost always results in duplicative or repetitive speeches. I have yet to witness a speech where the impact calculus or weighing is done at the bottom (or end) of a speech and doesn’t end up unnecessarily repeating content previously mentioned in the speech. The reason for this is simple—to explain why one’s impact is more important almost always requires a debater to explain the central thrust of their argument.
Second, this doesn’t properly set up a win-condition. There is ultimately very little point in winning a major source of offense (e.g., a contention, disadvantage, etc.) if it doesn’t aid in securing your ultimate victory. Explain to the judge why you’re even bothering to extend a position before you expend that speech time. Explain to the judge why winning this position helps you win the debate. This also helps your judge understand what your ultimate objective in the debate is and gives them a framework for understanding the rest of your speech.
Third, this signals a misplaced priority. Impact calculus is arguably the most important of the debate, so you shouldn’t leave it for the bottom—it should be the opening of your speech, where you start on a powerful note.
Mistake 2: Making impact calculus descriptive, not comparative.
Perhaps the most common mistake that debaters make is to merely describe their impacts without meaningfully comparing them. As this article from 2014 notes, “But much of what debaters consider impact comparison is really impact description. Instead of comparing the relative importance of each side’s impacts, debaters present sales pitches for their own impacts.”
For any judge, there is a massive difference between “My impact is important” and “My impact is more important.” “My impact happens fast” is far less helpful to a judge than “My impact is faster.”
It is extremely important for debaters to get beyond reading scripted blocks that simply say meaningless phrases like “The DA outweighs the case on magnitude—full-scale war with Russia kills everyone.” That is not at all helpful (for more reasons than one) because it does not tell the judge why your impact is more important than whatever the opponent mentions.
Instead, you should spend more time being interactive and comparative. Spend more time explaining why your specific impact is more important than (or turns) the other side’s impact. Instead of just saying “War is bad,” you need to be able to explain how war is worse than whatever impact your opponent talks about.
Mistake 3: Not “turning” the other side’s arguments.
One way to make your arguments matter more is to demonstrate that winning your impact also implicates or worsens the impact your opponent is going for. This alleviates the need to win specific defense to the impacts your opponent is going for (although you should, of course, still win defense to your opponent’s impacts).
For example, on the current LD topic concerning military presence in WANA, a common affirmative argument is that military presence in the region causes terrorism (e.g., for blowback related reasons). The negative might argue that military presence is crucial to assuring allies like Saudi Arabia, who might be likely to develop their own nuclear deterrent if they fear that the US does not have their back. The negative could argue that “proliferation turns the case” because if Saudi Arabia developed a nuclear weapon, it could spawn even more terrorism in the region.
While I think most “turns case/the DA” style arguments are somewhat worthless (oh, a nuclear war with Russia would make the economy worse, no way?!?), failing to include them at all would be a grave mistake given that (A) many judges expect and want it, and (B) it helps reduce risk in debate since winning “turns case/the DA” mitigates the need to respond to every argument the other side makes.
Other resources
If you’re interested in learning more about effective impact calculus, then I strongly recommend reading a few articles like this one by Matt Liu that succinctly summarizes a lot of what impact calculus should look like in a policy debate, this older one by Scott Phillips that identifies a lot of issues with impact calculus that remain to this day, and this one on HSImpact and its follow-up about bad impact calculus in policy. There is lots to learn about impact calculus, especially by watching lots of debate rounds!
Lawrence Zhou is the former Director of Lincoln‐Douglas Debate and Director of Publishing at Victory Briefs. He debated at Bartlesville HS where he was the 2014 NSDA Lincoln‐Douglas national champion. He is formerly a Fulbright Taiwan Debate Trainer, the Debate League Director at the National High School Debate League of China, a graduate assistant at the University of Wyoming, head coach of Team Wyoming, a CEDA octofinalist and Ethics Bowl finalist while debating at the University of Oklahoma, and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School and The Harker School. His students have advanced to late outrounds at numerous regional and national invitational tournaments, including finals appearances at the NSDA National Tournament and semifinals appearances at the Tournament of Champions.