Katy Cats Swing TFA
2025 — Katy, TX/US
CX - Online Paradigm List
All Paradigms: Show HidePut me on the email chain: dustyn.beutelspacher@gmail.com
*For high school - please add greenhilldocscx@gmail.com
Affiliations: Debated at Niles West in high school, UTD in college. Now coach for UTD and Greenhill school
TL;DR:
Go for what you want to go for, if you got a K aff, make sure you can beat framework, if you go for a process cp, make sure you can beat theory, etc, etc, I will try my hardest to adapt and judge the round as objectively as possible.
I love line-by-line. The more you engage with your opponent's arguments, the more likely you are to win and the higher your speaks will be.
I have a higher threshold for dismissing an arg for being new than most judges, the exception being the 2ar
1 good card > 10 bad cards.
I won't vote on things that happened out of round or in other debates.
You can insert rehighlightings of the other team's evidence, text of a card only needs to be read once for it to be evaluated.
No racism/sexism/etc, be nice. Don't do that thing where you delete tags or read new affs on paper or stuff like that to make your speech harder to read.
I don’t mind when people call me judge.
Longer:
I've become more willing to comb through evidence over the years, but it's mostly out of curiosity since debaters seem to be getting better at spinning ev, obviously I have my limits, but the debate includes the debate over the evidence.
I think conditionality is good, it seems to be necessary in this day and age when topics are very broad. I've become more neg biased recently but maybe it's just my disillusion with one unwarranted sentence of condo bad somehow becoming an entire 2ar. Condo in general seems to have gotten significantly more shallow. There probably is some point at which condo becomes bad, but I can't truthfully see myself voting for condo bad absent some egregious neg strategy or technical error.
Since it has come up more than once, my stance on judge kick is that I will presume judge kick if nothing has been said on theory, if the aff wants to win no judge kick, then you must at least make the arg in the 1ar.
I have become a bit jaded on many process counterplans. I think they can be some of the most well researched, interesting, and topic and aff germane arguments in debate. That being said, there are also counterplans that have been recycled verbatim for the past few years, which I am personally not a fan of. I think theory/competition arguments which make this distinction would be very persuasive to me.
I like Ks the more specific the link analysis is. I tend to think of Ks as one or multiple thesis statements that, if won, should theoretically disprove the aff. This means the more you pull warrants from cards, explain the aff in the terms of your K, etc, the more likely it is that you beat the perm since that explanation makes links a lot more salient. That's a lot more persuasive than big aff/neg framework pushes to me
FW/T vs K affs. Since this is the only portion of a paradigm that matters for most pref sheets, yes I will vote on framework, yes I will vote against it. These debates seem to come down to impact comparison, as usually it seems hard to win either topical affs are necessary to prevent the entire collapse of this activity, versus framework is genocide, which makes winning as much of your impact quite important. Fairness impact seem to make intrinsic sense to me if debate is a game, but im not sure why that is a catch-all win if the aff wins debate rounds have impacts.