BIGGEST LAY JUDGE THERE IS

be good debaters

champed BSD invitational (so i'm decently fine)

i'm an old senior age pf debater who's been circulating around the circuit for a few years now. i am strictly pf. if i am judging another event please tell me what certain terms mean. if i don't know something and it is never explained i will cry

please come to round with cut cards for ur case and anything else u read, if ur opponents call for a card and we hv to wait more than 2 min for a card i'll get angry n maybe dock speaks or smth idk yet

clarenceguo2005@gmail.com <- email chain or google dox (i prefer docs)

don't be any of the -isms and we'll be fine

I try to be a tabula rasa, or blank slate, judge, meaning that I attempt not to have any preconceived notions about how I should evaluate the round. Instead, I hope teams engage in the theory debate, at minimum telling me why they think they should win the round (not just that they should win). Of course, truly blank slate judges don't exist. So, here are some of my biases: I truly believe all aspects of debate are themselves debatable, including the purpose of debate. But, unless you argue convincingly otherwise, I typically don't think winning a theory argument is itself a reason you should win. The abuse has to be very specific to the round, not an extension of a generic shell. Instead, my bias is that the theory debate should provide a framework for the debaters and the judges to understand and evaluate the rest of the round's content.

If neither team argues for a preferred evaluation framework, I will mostly default to what you might call a "hypothesis tester" framework. In general, this means that I assume the affirmative/pro case is true on its merits first, then look to see if any of the negative/con arguments have successfully disproven the affirmative/pro's case. In the absence of any arguments from the teams about how to approach this, I'll try to take the easiest possible route to disprove the aff case, which is typically impact-based analysis.

All of this should add up to mean that I am open to all types of arguments. But there's a huge caveat: I was a pretty serious policy debater in high school, but I haven't been exposed to much of it for 15 years, so I'm quite rusty, especially when it comes to technical aspects. I think it's best practice anyway, but you shouldn't assume that I'm up to speed on any frameworks or terminology or resolutions in LD, policy or PF debate, and instead help me by explaining how your arguments should function and what any technical terms mean.