3/6-3/13: LD & PF Tournament Results and Responding to Theory Arguments
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at the TOC Digital Speech & Debate Series 3.
Congratulations to Harvard-Westlake’s Kaison Maruyama for championing the 2024 TOC Digital Speech & Debate Series 3. In finals, Kaison defeated Monta Vista’s Ethan Yang on a 2-1 decision (Fleming, St-Germain, Hunter*). Additional congratulations to Walt Whitman’s Sahaj Chahal 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 TOC Digital Speech & Debate Series 3.
Congratulations to Megan McCranie & Emerson Cortazar from Myers Park for championing the 2024 TOC Digital Speech & Debate Series 3. In finals, they defeated Atharva Makode & Abhay Sankar from MSTW Independent on a 2-1 decision (Barreiro*, Do, Tommarazzo). Additional congratulations to Fairmont Prep’s Willie Tsai 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 Ella Huang.
Ella Huang debated for four years at St. Agnes Academy. Some of her accomplishments include acquiring 8 bids to the TOC, reaching quarters of Greenhill, Nano Nagle, Apple Valley, and Harvard-Westlake, semis of Strake, finals of TFA State, and championing U of H. She also received top speaker at Glenbrooks and 3rd speaker at TOC. Her debate interests include policy-style arguments and the cap K. Ella's excited to teach at VBI this summer!
Responding to Theory Arguments
by Cherie Wang
When structured arguments like theory are introduced in round, it can be hard to respond if you don’t know how to follow the ‘structure’ necessary. A lot of debaters understand to read a counter interpretation, but have a hard time winning against theory because it gets a little more complicated than that. Especially when hit with a shell you’ve never debated before, it can be really hard to strategize around theory. Here’s a few basic ways to respond:
Drop the argument
Reasonability
RVIs and a counterinterp
Uplayer with a new shell
If you read prefiat offense, weigh it over theory
Drop the argument: If you really want to cut down the amount of time you’re spending on theory, a quick strategy to responding is arguing that if the judge agrees with the shell, they should punish you just by dropping the argument from the flow instead of giving you the loss. This only works if dropping the argument still leaves substance for you to win on; i.e. the theory shell doesn’t respond to all your contentions and you can win on one of them or the other team read substance arguments that you can turn and generate offense on. Potentially, you can even read DTA, nuke all other layers of the flow, and win on presumption.
Reasonability: not all interps or violations are equal. Some of them would probably not be considered round ending issues by most people, in which case it could be a good strategy to ask the judge to throw out the shell because it’s “unreasonable.” In this case, you would argue that reasonability responses are sufficient and you do not need to read a counterinterp, respond to no RVIs, then make reasonability responses. Reasons for preferring reasonability responses over counterinterps could be that it discourages frivolous theory that takes away from in round education or that it’s somehow a stronger representation of the real world. Then all you have to do is prove their interpretation or your violation is “not reasonable” (not a big enough deal to justify punishing you in round) rather than providing your own interpretation of debate and proving that it’s better.
RVIs and counterinterp: this is the standard way to respond and also probably the most time consuming. For this, you respond to no RVIs and give reasons why winning the theory shell wins you the round, then read a counterinterp (your own rule for how debate should work as opposed to what your opponent proposed). You ideally have at least one counterstandard generating offense for you and read defense to their shell showing how yours solves as well or better than theirs and is a better interp for some reason. This method is typically easiest to apply and will likely work best if the other team reads a common shell or a shell that you can easily give yourself ground on. If you read an offensive counterinterp (they violate; eg debaters must not disclose in response to disclosure), you can avoid the RVIs debate altogether.
Uplayer: to uplayer, you read your own shell about something different that operates on a higher layer than their shell. For example, if they read a disclosure shell, you could read a shell critiquing the way they read the disclosure shell (eg can’t read shells that you don’t have disclosed on the wiki) and crossapply their underviews (no RVIs, DTD, counterinterp>reasonability), and explain why your shell comes first. Then all you have to do is win your shell, which you are hopefully a lot more familiar with. This lets you avoid a shell you might not be good at responding to and skip the RVIs debate.
Prefiat weighing: if you read a k or another argument with some kind of prefiat impact and really do not want to engage with the theory, you can do weighing so that you only need to win your prefiat offense to win the round, even if you lose the shell.
In general, you should probably employ more than just one of these strategies. Even if your opponents read a goofy shell that doesn’t seem like a big deal, you should give it an effective response rather than risk not having read enough responses to it by the time it’s too late to add more. A lot of these routes pair well together and should be read in conjunction when initially responding to theory, even if in the end you can only fully go for one of these paths to the ballot. It’s always refreshing to hear and try different kinds of responses to theory instead of having the same debate every single time. Just like a normal substance debate, there are many ways to win the round and you wouldn’t stake your win on only one of them.
Cherie Wang debated at Westlake High School in Texas for 4 years, where she was captain her junior and senior year. Throughout her career, she has earned 3 bids to the Tournament of Champions and reached quarterfinals of Plano West, Apple Valley, and TFA State and co-championed James Logan and Grapevine.