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

I) General Trends I must question his removing of certain debates from the 3k v 3k. Several issues arise, in both his method for choosing which debates to cut, and how he counted. For one, he said that debate 3563 [1], should be thrown out of the Instigator win column because of "naivety. " The problem with this is that debate 3563 is not an Instigator win to begin with, it is a contender win. Therefore, you cannot discard it from the instigator win category. Another issue is the discarding of "partial forfeits" such as 4095 [2]. We can see that the contender did forfeit 1 round, of which the instigator also skipped his round out of courtesy. Through the other rounds, a quality debate was able to take place, and as such, voting should be considered legit. Now, my opponent brings up concerns of vote bombing. It should be known that prior to 2010 (I think it was Feb 2010 that it was opened, but not sure, I just remember that it was shortly after I joined), the voting tab was closed, so vote bombing likely occurred, a lot. And there is virtually no way to prove it. The only ways are when people admit it, were caught in a lie about their vote (see debate 8543 or the Danielle one that Mongeese has in his photos), or the IP addresses are matched up against voting records (we've only been able to dig into that recently). As such, it is impossible to accurately say that one debate was VB'd and another one wasn't. This is why I separated out the pre-2010 and post-2010 debates. While vote bombing did not completely stop, it certainly was greatly reduced (and reduced again with RFD's). If we exclude the debates that have a high chance of vote bombing, we still find that the instigator won 4 – 3 (if we toss out 10565, which was the only complete forfeit). Of course, then we find our sampling to be very small. If we go to the 4k+, we find 121 debates (There was not enough room to make a source link for that many, since each debate takes up about 90 characters, and the limit is 8,000), now for these, if we limit them to the open tab era, we find 29 of them [3]. With these, we see 12 instigator wins (41.4%) and the ELO difference (5199 – 5798) would estimate a 44.2% win ratio (2.8% variance). For more evidence, I've gone through (several times now) and randomly selected a handful of debates to test my ELO win predictor. In the group that I did, I had the following debates [5]. We had 60 debates. The average Instigator ELO was 2255.52, the average contender was 2885.08. This yields a predicted instigator win rate of 36.04% (which would be 22 wins), we find that 23 of the 60 were instigator wins, a 38.33%. The prediction was off by only 1 win, and it under-estimated (many of the past samplings, like the 3k v 3k and 4k+ it was slightly over estimating). However, I realize that I cannot prove that this is a true random sampling, as such, I've presented a request in the comments that anyone (though I specifically asked F-16, since he was the last to post a comment) please offer up 50 - 80 random numbers from 1 - 13591 so that I can do this test for them all. I. a) Questioning the ELO Gods? ! Okay, so referencing the ELO Gods is just a joke, however, my opponent does bring up a legitimate point. ELO is based on a person's wins, so it presents the risk of circular reasoning. However, I'd like to point out an issue. Any measure of skill is going to be dependent upon the results (in this case, one's debate skills are dependent upon the debate results), ELO has proven to be a very accurate measuring tool in countless applications [4], from Chess, to college football, to Battlenet. While, of course, any system is going to be imperfect, ELO has shown itself to be one of the most effective measuring tools available. And it's accuracy is only enhanced by the fact that the simple prediction tool I made in the last round was still effective in the post-2010 4k+ (off by 2.8%). II) Specific examples. Moving on to the Instigator advantages, there are of course limits. Just like with contender advantages. The contender has the advantage of the last word, but if they abuse this and post a bunch of new arguments (19025), that will actually work against them. Likewise, the same can happen with definitions (10398), if the instigator presents wiki definitions and the contender presents medical definitions, the advantage can be negated. It is the simple that it you push any advantage too far, it will swing back and bite you. Some cases where definitions are presented and hold for true advantage are 10982 and 15819. We can also see this used in many religious debates (where the instigator defines "God"), such as 17753, 17901, etc. Of course, failure to define allows definitions to be passed to the contender (as seen on 16910, and so many semantic victories), thus passing on the advantage. But the instigator has the first pick and first right to that advantage. My opponent tries to negate these advantages by saying that if someone walks into a trap, it is their own naivety. While that is so, one could place the same naivety upon any instigator. Everyone that starts a debate knows that their opponent will have the last word, therefore, if they are not prepared for that, we can claim that it is their own naivety. But just because they are being "naï¿½ve" (which is a subjective value anyway) does not mean that there is no advantage. As such, there are many advantages and powers that both sides have (from last word, to setting definitions, to setting the BoP, to negotiating, etc), but simply pointing out one advantage over another does not show any kind of NET, ON BALANCE, ADVANTAGE. [1] . http://www.debate.org... [2] . http://www.debate.org... [3] 10982, 11353, 11937, 12249, 12301, 12409, 12486, 12517, 12616, 13115, 13130, 13260, 13307, 13320, 13579, 13988, 14083, 14284, 14526, 14642, 15081, 15819, 16769, 16792, 16826, 16947, 17029, 17214, 17925. [4] . http://en.wikipedia.org... [5] 250, 349, 526, 779, 1033, 1309, 1570, 1755, 1840, 1994, 2101, 2246, 2435, 2595, 2826, 2986, 3182, 3428, 3669, 3922, 4097, 4273, 4454, 4655, 4852, 5125, 5438, 5846, 6265, 6617, 6954, 7304, 7708, 8068, 8302, 8574, 8932, 9135, 9323, 9594, 9896, 10245, 10633, 10954, 11453, 11540, 11683, 11888, 12163, 12382, 12393, 12646, 12747, 12844, 13043, 13220, 13371, 13499, 13550, 13583.