2025 Golden Desert Debate Tournament at UNLV
2025 — Las Vegas, NV/US
Tournament Rules and Administration
TOURNAMENT RULES AND ADMINISTRATION
RULES & TOURNAMENT ADMINISTRATION
All registration, entry, and tabulation will be done via tabroom.com. Please make sure that any judge accompanying your team has a tabroom.com account set up and linked.
Judges in the Policy debate division must have judging philosophies posted publicly on tabroom.com in order to be eligible to judge. Judges without posted judging philosophies will not count toward fulfilling a school’s judging commitment.
A novice eligible student is one who is competing in their first year in any debate event.
NSDA rules and time limits will be utilized, except for (1) prep time for NCX & VCX, teams will have 8 minutes of prep time.
LD and PF rounds will be flighted. PF will follow the NSDA flip for sides and order.
The policy debate topic is “Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income.”
The Lincoln Douglas debate topic will be the January/February NSDA topic.
The February NSDA public forum topic will be used.
All students are expected to abide by UNLV’s code of conduct, to respect UNLV property and tournament staff, and generally to behave responsibly.
Independent entries that meet the criteria listed in the section titled “Independent Entries.” Any independent entry that fails to meet the deadlines or criteria listed will not be allowed to enter or compete in the tournament. Any payment made by any independent entry that drops or fails to meet the set deadlines or criteria will not be refunded.
ENTRY LIMITS:Entries in the tournament are limited to four in varsity and novice policy and LD, and six in Public Forum. If you would like to discuss a potential exception to the entry limit, please contact me directly at jacob.thompson@unlv.edu.
Please do not enter debaters just to hold slots; be mindful of the needs of other competitors.
No double entries are allowed.
Teams and individual entries are only officially entered after receipt of fees, and once the tournament administrator has been removed them from the waitlist. Registration in each division will close when we reach our room capacity, so waitlist and pay early.