Hey everyone! I’m Tony Cui and I competed on the national circuit for 4 years at Enloe High School, primarily on the east coast. Throughout my debate career, I acquired two bid rounds (Bronx, Valley), a bid my senior year, and broke at a variety of bid tournaments. I now attend Duke University as a sophomore.
Please add me to the email chain: tonyyyycui@gmail.com
Prefs Shortcut:
ID pol Ks, theory, T: 1
High theory Ks: 2
Traditional, Tricks, Phil, LARP : 3-4
Dense Phil/Nailbomb affs: 4
Misc:
Tech > Truth, but your arguments must require a warrant
Don’t use CX as prep time, but yes feel free to use prep time for CX
I’ll try to be as tab as possible, but I won’t vote on arguments that are blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
Try not to blitz through analytics pls :( my fingers can only type so fast.
I’ll try to average speaks specific to the tournament (the 4-2 screw has been an enemy of mine in the past so I'll adjust accordingly).
Disclosure is probably a good norm. I understand if you're a novice or new to circuit debate, but everyone else should probably disclose or at least have a good reason why they shouldn’t disclose.
Please collapse.
Ks:
**I will not fill in the gaps for you. If you’re explaining an extremely dense position you personally don’t know then we’ll both be sad.**
Personally, I’ve read a lot of Asian-pess / Settler Colonialism/ Capitalism Ks in the past, so I’m most comfortable with a lot of identity politics literature. I’ve also had a lot of experience debating high theory args (Baudrillard, Deleuze, etc.) so I know the general gist of most of them, but a thorough explanation wouldn’t hurt anyone. (Please don't read these arguments in front me just because I read them in the past, this is just to gauge the different positions I'm comfortable evaluating).
Links contextualized specific to the 1AC are probably better than links of omission and should be warranted as such starting from the 1NC. K tricks like floating PICs/root cause claims are fine.
I’d like to think I’m 50/50 for framework vs. non topical K affs. For non-topical affs, I think a robust explanation of your model of debate is probably a good idea. Most of these affs end up losing to T-framework because they fail to explain why fairness or skills are necessarily bad.
Theory:
As a debater, I read a lot of spec shells, spikes, Nebel, paradigm dumps, etc. so I’d like to think I’m good at evaluating these debates. I think frivolous shells are ok, but obviously the more frivolous the shell, the more likely I am to buy arguments made against the shell.
If you’re reading an excessive amount of spikes with a) b) c) etc., then please *SLOW DOWN* if you want me to flow them all.
LARP:
I was never the best at these types of debate and so I’m probably not the best at evaluating LARP.
That being said if you do end up reading LARP in front of me, please WEIGH (IE magnitude/scope/time frame, metaweighing included). I will be very sad if there is no weighing done.
Tricks:
Personally I’ve debated with and against a lot of these. If there is a genuine warrant and implication conceded in the speech that they are given in, then by all means collapse to it. However, I think a lot of tricky arguments are implicated a lot more than they really are and I’d be very much open to buying conceded defense made on these arguments.
Please don’t be sketchy in CX. Don’t try to pretend you don’t know what an apriori is. Trying to actually explain condo logic or the principle of explosion when asked in CX is probably good too.
Phil:
I know the basic phil arguments (Kant, Util) but anything that strays further than the general debate realm of phil arguments is when I start to get confused. Still though, I primarily debated on the east coast so feel free to still read your 10 point justified normative frameworks, but be ready to explain it.
I think using phil to interact with other arguments on the flow (like Ks and LARP) is smart and probably a good idea.
Explaining the warrants behind “action theory” or “performativity” would be nice.
NOTES FOR ONLINE DEBATE:
I absolutely hated debating online my senior year and I lost lots of rounds because either my wifi cut out or my laptop crashed. With this in mind, please keep a local recording if possible in order to ensure I can still resolve the round.
Additionally, I won't dock speaks for wifi/microphone/tech issues (trust me I understand).