At the end of the day’s debating, the St Andrean rankings are as follows:
Team A, James and Lee: 8 points (3+3+2)
Team B, Ed and Duncan: 4 points (1+3+0)
Team C, Maddy and Farhan: 6 points (0+3+3)
At midnight on December 31st, the break to octo-finals will be announced: most, but not all, the teams which have by that time have accrued 18 points or more will make it to the break. There are nine rounds; as I mentioned before, the optimum score in any given round is 3 points (equivalent to first place).
Maddy and Farhan are to be congratulated on their spectacular comeback; I’m confident Ed and Duncan will pull off a similar coup tomorrow (they’ve already shown they’re eminently capable of taking first place). As for James and Lee, we hear that they narrowly missed out on the top spot in R3, which would have given them a day of straight firsts and propelled them to the joint top of the leaderboard. As it is, they’re in a very strong position going into Day Two of the tourney.
Excellent work, one and all…
As might not surprise you, I am considerably less happy with the adjudication in the last round than in the previous. From the feedback it sounds as though an unnamed judge of our acquaintance used his influence from the wings to give us a 4th because we didn’t run the motion he would have. Similarly, the perennial problem debaters have with the concept of incentivization reared it’s ugly head again. ‘X would incentivize Y to do Z’ ‘But not all Ys will Z’ ‘I… know… that’s how incentives work’. ‘I’ve changed my mind; no Ys would do Z!’ ‘No, some would. People are just like that. We’ve learned this’. And so on. I’d not have been chuffed with a 3rd, but I’d have understood it. 4th was a bad call and you can be sure my judge feedback reflects this!
Ed and I were 1st opp in round 1, and 1st prop in round three.
Don’t be disheartened Duncan: the fightback begins now! We’ll consider that your statutory ‘Awkward Adjudication’ round. You’ve got it out of the way now…
Thanks for keeping in touch, I hope you get some rest before tomorrow.
I don’t have Marhan’s result yet.
We took a close 2nd as 1st Opp in R4: THW Prohibit High Ranking Members of the Sri Lankan Military and Tamil Tigers from participating in elections. The chair apparently didn’t like Ed’s speech (felt it was generic) and one wing felt I missed a decent point from 1st prop (sovereign immunity). They gave the first to the generic speeches from Cornell which hardly responded to any of our material. I suspect if we’d had a stronger team further down the table the result might have been different. Our feedback was mixed, as I felt the call was reasonable but Ed was particularly unchuffed with the explanation.
James and Lee took another 1st as 1st prop. They were 1st opp in the first round, BTW.