Tournament structure
Every team competes in eight preliminary rounds. The top sixteen teams then go on to a knockout stage, involving octo-finals, quarter-finals, semi-finals and ultimately the grand final.
Preparation time
Some of the rounds are pre-prepared, and some are impromptu debates. Rounds 1, 3, 5, and 7 of the preliminary rounds and the grand final are all pre-prepared debates. The motions for these rounds were released at noon GMT on 1st June 2011, and are as follows:
Round 1 - This House would offer dictators immunity in return for leaving power
Round 3 - This House believes that Universal Primary Education is a misallocation of resources for the developing world
Round 5 - This House would legalise the sale of human organs
Round 7 - This House believes that women can only achieve equality under a secular system of government
Grand Final - This House believes that autocracy is doomed in the age of Facebook
However, teams only find out which side of the motion they will be supporting and which team they will be debating against when the official draw is released. This will take place at noon GMT on 5th July 2011, exactly six weeks before the tournament is due to commence.
The remaining rounds are impromptu debates. Teams are given one hour to prepare for the debate, starting when then motion is announced. All of the team members are involved in preparation, although only three will speak in the debate.
Team classification
Each participating country is assigned a letter from A-H, depending on the performance of the country’s team in the tournaments held over the last three years. This year, the performances of teams in Washington (2008), Athens (2009) and Doha (2010) will determine the letter given.
The purpose of the grading system is to ensure that each team has preliminary rounds of equal difficulty - each team faces one team of each grade over the first eight rounds. There is no direct advantage to being a higher ranked team.
This year, Wales is a B team. The full rankings can be found here:
Judging
The eight preliminary debates are nearly always judged by three individuals - one chair judge and two wing judges. Each of them individually mark the speakers and the teams, and then place their judging sheet in a sealed envelope. At this point, they reveal their decision to each other. There are two possible outcomes of any debate - either a team wins unanimously, where each of the three judges has independently concluded that the same team has won the debate, or a team wins on a split, where one of the judges as reached a different conclusion to the other two.
The break
After the eight preliminary rounds, the break is announced. This is the announcement of the top sixteen teams (also known as ‘breaking’ teams) who progress to the ‘out’ rounds (see below)
The breaking teams are decided firstly by number of wins, then by number of judges, and then by the speaker points (‘speaks’) accumulated by each team over the eight rounds.
The ‘out’ rounds
The ‘out’ rounds follow the break. These are knock-out rounds, beginning with the octo-finals, progressing to the quarter-finals, then semi-finals, and finally the grand final. The order in which teams break determines who they will face in the out rounds, as illustrated by the diagram below.
The number of judges in the out rounds increases - there are five in the octo-finals, seven in the quarter-finals, nine in the semi-finals and eleven in the grand final.
Last year, Team Wales 2010 became the first Welsh team in the history of the tournament to reach the semi-finals, so the pressure is really on this year!
No comments:
Post a Comment