On Debate.org debates, there is, on balance, a net Contender advantage.

I will address my opponent's arguments, but I will focus mostly on summarizing. First things first. F-16, Roy, and Danielle, each provided a list of random debates to test my formula. I'm happy to say that it still remains fairly accurate. Of their 215 listed debates, 158 have winners, 64 of them were instigators. The average ELO of the instigator was 2487.8 and the average ELO of the contender was 2863.4, this would predict a 42.3% win rate for the instigators. What we saw was 40.5% (1.8% off, not bad at all). Of the three, Roy turned out to be the closest, being off by less than 0.3%. However, this is really moot, since my opponent claimed that these ELO score are meaningless, and that they don't take consideration of the "contender advantage. " As I pointed out in a previous round, ELO is used for many many things (this cannot be viewed as a new argument, because I brought it up last round). My opponent only addresses Chess, however, ELO is used for things from Starcraft to College Football. And we can certainly see that there are advantages to different races in Starcraft, and different stadiums have different degrees of "home field advantage. " So in these cases, the advantage is not evened out (as it is in Chess), yet ELO still remains highly accurate in those. There is no reason to believe that it would not maintain its high accuracy here for Debates on DDO. As for the specific examples, my opponent seems to think that simply because one can challenge things before accepting a debate, that the advantage is neutralized. This is clearly false, like I said previously, the instigator can say "no" and not change things. My opponent then brings up, probably the most damning piece against himself. He says, "it's considerably likely that he will point out that he meant something completely different to what I refuted. He would then clarify, and I would be powerless to respond. If such an event should occur, it would be a Trailing Argument Contender Advantage. " Then follows with, "any Contender advantage cannot be prevented by the Instigator, as it takes place in the last round without forewarning, so it is essentially impossible to prepare for the Contender advantage except by not instigating debates at all. " In one breath, my opponent completely defeats my advantage, because if I take advantage of it, I will lose conduct and those arguments with be dropped by most voters (for argument abuse), yet in the next, he has he [as instigator] is powerless to stop the advantage. But he just did the paragraph before. My opponent has negated himself. In summary. My opponent needed to show that there is, on balance, a net contender advantage. What has been shown through this debate is that the contender advantage can be stopped (as my opponent pre-empted and stopped my own last word advantage). ELO is an accurate measure of skill, even in cases where there may be an advantage (such as Starcraft and Football). Skill plays a far greater role in determining a winner of a debate, and even though the raw data seems to show that there is a contender advantage, it is actually because there is an imbalance of skill between instigators and contenders, not some inherent advantage. But mostly, since my opponent refuted his own argument, even if you don't buy the ELO argument (hint: you shouldn't), my opponent has not met his BoP (because he refuted himself). Thank you.