Proteus Debate Academy is a project by Sasan Kasravi and Paul Villa to increase equity in academic debate by providing high quality coaching resources for free.
To “front” is to pretend to know things you don’t or to be able to do things you can’t. As slang it can refer to if someone buys flashy things they can’t afford to pretend to have more money than they do. Paul here is talking about learning to just sound like you know what you’re talking about. It really goes a long way and it’s the skill from debate that I probably use the most often (lol). -Sasan
Sasan explained but basically, despite what they tell you, judges are not flowing robots. They absolutely are persuaded by the performative element of the round independent of the words on their flow and you should exploit this. Sounding like you are winning matters, seemingly like you aren't pressed when really you are dying inside matters. I think this is why I view cross-x as being so under utilized in national circuit debate, most people just figure the judge doesn't flow it so it is just filler time or free prep but cross-x lets you really control the ethos debate. At a minimum, we want the judge in every round to have to pause at the end of the round and question whether we really lost or not, no matter how far behind we are on the flow.
Thumpers are link uniqueness arguments that answer common negative positions. - They say: DA: Business Confidence, econ growing now, you make it worse, that is bad - You have like 5 reasons the economy is bad prepped that you can quickly read to takeout or at least scare them off the position by hiding behind what may appear to be quality ink. The premise of most disads is "we are 5 units of X away from our disad impact happening and wouldn't you know it, the plan is 6 units of X". Thumpers basically say "here are a bunch of other things that have happened or are going to happen that are also at least 5+ units and therefore should have or will inevitably trigger your link" OR thumpers say "we are 0 or a bajillion units away from X so it doesn't matter" Edit: and crucially, these are super easy to prep a file of ahead of time ( i have my kids do it every thursday or friday before a tournament) and then you can just prep them every round in case you need them.
