BY JEFFREY XIONG
On October 18-19th, 43 teams competed at the Polygon Invitational at Washington High School. El Cerrito High School’s Audrey Dowling & Maxime St. Jean eventually won the tournament without dropping a single ballot, defeating Dougherty Valley Michael Finnessey & Chilsea Wang in finals on a 3-0 decision. El Cerrito affirmed the resolution “The proliferation of theory in high school parliamentary debate does more harm than good.”
Maxime St. Jean (left) and Audrey Dowling (right) at Washington High School after the Polygon Invitational, picture courtesy of Audrey Dowling
The Polygon Invitational featured three preliminary rounds with unusual rules, as it has every year, at the discretion of tournament director Artem Raskin.
“I think the existing rules of parli aren’t particularly well thought out, and tournaments mostly keep using them out of inertia,” said Raskin. “From the time parli was introduced to high schools in the early aughts, the rules haven’t changed much, primarily because parli didn’t have a national organization to facilitate rule changes and coordinate between different regions. Now that we have one, it’s time to start thinking seriously about what the ideal format of parli would look like.”
Following the tournament, Raskin sent out a poll asking competitors to rate their favorability towards the tournament out of 5. There were mixed opinions on each of the rounds, with some debaters preferring certain rounds while other debaters disliked them.
“Our favorite structure was definitely the no-notes round, it forced us to really focus on the big issues and clashes in the round instead of getting bogged down in the weeds of line by line,” said El Cerrito Dowling & St. Jean, “It was also refreshing and freeing to not be tied to flows or preprepared notes. We both had a lot of fun with this round structure and would love to see more of it in the future.”
However, this round was the least popular of the three rounds, receiving an average score of about 2.9/5. “For the no flow round prepping was very different because there’s absolutely nothing we could write about, and as a second speaker it’s extremely hard to refute everything if there’s nothing to reference back to,” said Irvington debater Caroline Xin.
In Round 4, flex time was added in between each speech, and the speech times were changed as follows: a 5 minute 1AC, an 8 minute 1NC, a 7 minute 1AR, a 9 minute 1NR, and a 5 minute 2AR. This round had an average rating of 3.4/5.
“The best round structure was definitely the flex time in between that could be used for either cross examination or prep time, but also gave the opportunity to delve into the minute details of the case,” said Xin.
In Round 5, teams were allotted 6 POIs during constructive speeches that the speaking team was required to answer. This round had an average rating of 3.5/5. Despite the overall high rating, there was some dissent. “My least favorite was probably the poi round [because] coming out of the flex time round it just felt like a worse version,” said Evergreen Independent debater Nidhir Guggilla.
“I'm not quite sure what to make of these results. Last year, mandatory POIs were the least popular of the Polygon rules, so I was considering eliminating them, but this year, they were the most popular,” said Raskin.
The tournament also introduced a new measure, margin-of-victory (MOV), as the tiebreaker for teams rather than speaker points. Judges were told to assign the winning team a score between 51 and 99, and the losing team a score between 1 and 49, with the scores for the two teams adding up to 100. The closeness of these two scores would represent how close the round was, with a 75-25 split being the theoretical average. In theory, this would help reduce judge biases in speaker points.
Said Guggilla, “I liked the MOV points but looking at the numbers I’m pretty sure that judges didn’t realize that 75-25 was supposed to be average so [the tournament should] do that better.”
In semifinals, Dowling & St. Jean defeated Irvington Darsh Singhania & Caroline Xin on a 3-0, while Finnessey & Wang defeated Menlo-Atherton Peter Koenig & Alana Hartsell on a 2-1.
The final round was judged by Peter Kistler, George Yu, and Jon Telebrico. On the affirmation, El Cerrito argued that theory harms education, can be exclusionary, and exists antithetical to the purpose of parliamentary debate. On the negation, Dougherty Valley’s arguments focused on theory as a tool of recourse and a way for debaters to develop important logical skills. Judges voted mostly on the exclusion and education loss arguments from the affirmation. A recording of the finals round is available here.
Menlo-Atherton debaters Peter Koenig & Alana Hartsell earned the highest cumulative MOV. The tournament broke to quarterfinals from a field of 43 teams — less than 20% of all teams — which made breaking particularly difficult. All teams with a 4-1 record or better broke.
In the novice division, held as a Saturday-only tournament, the novice division broke to finals. Irvington’s Aarya Morgaonkar & Tanish Sathish and Irvington’s Rohan Advankar & Ashwin Raghuraman closed out finals so there was no finals round held.
The Polygon Invitational will likely be held again next year, and will perhaps feature different rules. “I would like us to test out some new polygon rules that haven’t been tried before,” said Raskin, “or to adjust the rules we used this year.”
Quarterfinals
Irvington Singhania & Xin BOW Irvington Garg & Shah (walkover)
Menlo-Atherton Hartsell & Koenig def. Crystal Springs Upland Ma & Qin (3-0)
El Cerrito Dowling & St. Jean def. Evergreen Independent Bao & Dong (3-0)
Dougherty Valley Finnessey & Wang def. Valley Christian Vu & Rukasi (2-1)
Semifinals
Dougherty Valley Finnessey & Wang def. Menlo-Atherton Hartsell & Koenig (2-1)
El Cerrito Dowling & St. Jean def. Irvington Singhania & Xin (3-0)
Finals
El Cerrito Dowling & St. Jean def. Dougherty Valley Finnessey & Wang (3-0)