The tournament will be managed following Stoa tab guidelines. There will be four preliminary rounds for Lincoln Douglas and Team Policy Debate. The normal procedure is to maintain club protect and give each competitor/team an equivalent number of Affirmative and Negative preliminary rounds. (There are sometimes unusual circumstances where this is not possible.)

Power Matching

We will be high-low lag power matching.

Software

We will be using debate software used for many college tournaments, STA-XL, which has the capability of more easily emailing ballots.

Tiebreakers

The tie-breakers to determine debater ranking within a win-loss bracket are as follows:

Tiebreaker #1: Wins 

Tiebreaker #2: Hi/Lo Speaker Points

Tiebreaker #3: Total Speaker Points -- All the points are summed together 

Tiebreaker #4: Opposition Record -- The number of wins from all of a team's opponents is summed together to arrive at a score. The higher the number, the better. The presumption here is that if two teams have the same record, and debater/team A faced opponents with an average record of 3-1, while team/debater B faced opponents with an average record of 2-2, then A should be ranked higher.

Tiebreaker #5: Judge Variance -- Each judge's score is statistically adjusted (using a Z-Score statistic) to account for those who give very low points and those who give very high points. For example, if two judges both give a debater 24 points in the round, but Judge A's average is 21 points, and judge B's average is 25 points, then the 24 means more from judge A than from B.