RANT: Why I hated the Stanford Invitational

[RANT]

If none of you already know, I’m a debater, a lot of you probably are too, but I went to the Stanford Invitiational (it didn’t count as a travel tournament b/c I live 20 mins away lol)

But basically I’m doing LD debate (Lincoln-Douglas debate) and the topic was the Jan-Feb topic propsed by the NFL (sorry dudes, the National Forensics League :stuck_out_tongue: Basically the National SpeechandDebate league) so we had 6 prelims.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t break (make it to the elimination rounds), I think I went either 2-4 or 3-3.

The thing that pisses me off is WHY I lost some of those rounds. In one of them, my opponent failed to respond to most of my arguments and dropped a lot of the rebuttles I made on her case. And you know why the judge dropped me? (Why she said I lost) She said that ‘you’re too smart for your own good’ and that ‘you’re too smart for me’. She said I needed to be less responsive and not put so much in.

I got so mad at this I felt like chucking my pen in her face. JUST BECAUSE SHE DIDNT UNDERSTAND ANYTHING, ITS NOT MY PROBLEM! My opponent understood it all, or if she didn’t she clarified in cross-examination!

Another one of the rounds that the judge disclosed who won or lost was that the reason I lost was because I wasn’t “concise” enough. I was responding good and the judge would love to vote for me but can’t because I was all over the place and I was “rambling.”

I swear, Stanford is now one of my least favorite places to debate. If any of you have been to it, share your experiences.

Any debaters @ Kirupa ? (Apart from Kirupa, but he did policy (team debate). I wanna talk to LD debaters.

[/RANT]