The Best Advice Comes from Biased Judges

I was using google desktop to try and find a file in the sea of unorganized word documents I have on my external hard drive and I came across some judge comments I wrote down after a decision. Hopefully some of the insights will be helpful to someone.

1. Take judge notes- you should keep a word document of comments from every judge after every time they judge you. The usefulness of this is beyond measure. Especially if you debate on the same circuit over and over again where you will have the same judges (I learned how to debate in front of Dallas Perkins by watching him praise one of my high school rivals vociferously, from that point on every single time I debated in front of Dallas I just did my best impression of that kid and it worked wonders). I cannot emphasize this enough so I will just say this: if you had the option of spending 7 weeks at camp, or getting a judge notebook from a top debater on how to debate in front of every judge you would have, I would pick the notebook every time. Lastly, most debaters are lazy and so they don't do this and it will give you a huge asymmetrical edge if you do. (most debaters don't even read written judge philosophies before the round).

2. What to write down and what not to write down- things like "thought our uniqueness evidence was better" are useless- write down WHY they thought that. You need to apply your critical thinking skills to interpreting their comments and then writing down things that will help you in a future debate. Every judge, for the most part, says they are open to things and like speed etc- but does their decision convey to you that they kept a good flow of a high speed K debate and then evaluated the issues fairly? If not, write it down.

3. Comments I wrote down that were money in the bank and why:

A. It is my general belief that while many judges will not say they are biased or have predispositions, most judges do have a certain way of evaluating issues. For example, Aarron Kall puts a heavy emphasis on evidence and will decide for himself who's cards are better based on recency and author qualifications. Jairus Grove on the other hand puts more emphasis on debaters explaining thier points and won't call for all your cards you extended in a bibliographical laundry list. Knowing basic things like that is crucial to judge adaptation.

But above and beyond that, judges have meta level ways of trying to figure out issues. This could be do they use offense/defense, do they think theory is automatically just reject argument not team etc. Those are simple examples. A more complex example might be when a certain judge thinks intervention is ok- i.e. if neither side does impact analysis, do they think its ok to do it themselves for example. Now these are much harder to decipher- you need to pay a lot of attention to see when judges are doing it.

B. The reason biased judges do the best job of giving you comments is they boil the debate down to the central problems with your arguments and explain either how you did or did not overcome them.

Enough hypothetical, onto the specific example. In the debate in question I was negative and went for a combination of the positive peace kritik and the china threat k. The connecting factor was that the Aff read an advantage about Taiwan war, and we read a piece of evidence about why focusing on the possibility of US-Taiwan war was bad because it forced Taiwan to militarize/hurt plans for peaceful integration, and that the US used Taiwan as a proxy to justify violent containment strategies against china.

The aff in the 2AC read realism good, non violence bad, fear of nuclear weapons good, deconstruction of nuclear weapons bad, and some "reps focus" bad framework arguments.


At the time I assessed that our panel was slightly neg leaning on the K, but not so neg leaning that I could get out of these sort of impact turn arguments with a song and a dance. So the 2NC both impact turned these arguments, and spent some time explaining how our K did not reject all fear or realism in the abstract, but instead questioned the idea that we had to be fearful about China- and more specifically that we should fear for Taiwan.

Now, a quick note on the 2 judges who gave particularly insightful comments. They were Dave Strauss and Will Repko. In my personal assessment, I think these judges are on a 1-10 scale, about an 8 in terms of going for the K (with strauss being a low 8 and repko being a high 8). I think this because though both of them prefer policy arguments and would probably bash the K in a discussion about it, they both believe that debate is a hyper technical game where spin often trumps truth, and they both place a heavy emphasis on quality evidence. These don't necessarily favor all K debaters, but if you are well prepared I believe those 2 favor the neg over the aff on the K.

Now, the aff adopted the exact right strategy in this debate for these judges I believe. They didn't prance around with stupid no link arguments, they got right into the meat of the issue.

I will skip any more details as this is already getting too long. We won, and here are the specific comments and how they helped me think about things.

Repko- He bought our jazz-the K isn't an indictment of all fear, just specific China reps the aff used. He said the aff "failed to win the link" to their impact turns. Similarly, he thought on framework that while the aff won generically representations K's were bad, that the specificity of our china reps key evidence trumped their generic biz.

This in and of itself is not super special.

Strauss- he though the aff won thier turns, and we won our original impact of turning US china war. He also thought we won impact calc that China war was worse. I wrote down "

Generally fearful good, representing china that way bad, that accessed Taiwan which was a bigger impact".

Anyone see the differance?

These two judges who most people (myself included at the time) gave very differant decisions due to (I believe) meta level predispositions. Repko's decision focused on the LINK whereas Strauss focussed on the IMPACT, even though they both watched the same round. Now if 2 pretty similar judges can walk away from the same debate with very differant views on what was most important, it should be obvious that judge adaptation is a very if not the most important skill you can work on improving.

And i think this distinction plays out with many judges based on age- younger judges seem to place a very high emphasis on impacts (and uniqueness) whereas older judges put a big emphasis on the link. Why is this? I have a few theories, but I think mainly its because if you are 18-27 right now when you went to debate camp the "hot"theoretical issues of the day you spent a lot of time talking about were controlling uniqueness on politics, and impact overviews about timeframe, magnitude and probability. So it makes sense that when you judge you would put heavy emphasis on those.

Back to their comments, someone who isn't paying attention could write down "Repko and strauss both said we won because we are more specific".

Someone who wants to win tournaments would right down "Repko focused on the link level as the deciding factor in his decision, whereas strauss focused on impact comparison".

One other differance in their decisions related to the Goldstein neg peace o/w pos peace card. They both thought it was a great card, but thought we weaseled out of it for differant reasons. Repko thought that while it may be generally true that we should focus on peace first, that in the context of china doing that would create a self fulfilling prophecy, and that in the context of Taiwan would not result in negative peace. Strauss thought this evidence was only a defense of the plan, and not their representations, and since he thought we won framework disregarded it.

Again- if you are paying attention these 2 ways of dealing with this card are very differant. Repko again looked at the link as a probability issue- what are the chances focusing on neative peace in the context of Taiwan would be a good vs bad idea? Strauss let us cheat, a perhaps less sophisticated but equally effective way of dealing with it.

Now, I can't be sure, but I think perhaps Repko made an argument for the aff in his head, maybe even without knowing it, that this piece of evidence IS on face a defense of representations, since you can't prioritize negative peace without discussing it. Is that judge intervention? As a debater I would of said Yes, without a doubt. But having judged more now I see that it is simply AN interpretation of evidence. Not to roll the Heidegger K, but debaters seem to assume that THEIR interpretation is not one among many, but in fact the capital T truth interpretation of that evidence. I think it is pretty reasonable for a judge to read that goldstein card and say "this is talking about reps" , I also think its reasonable for them to say the opposite.

MORE IMPORTANTLY- you as a debater need to know which judges are likely to do which, and ADAPT accordingly.