RMC

Incredible, that is the only word I have to describe what happened this weekend. As you know if you read two posts down I went to the RMC this past weekend. Now, what you may not have known, is that I went into that tournament with a severe case of pessimism. I figured I would go 1-5 again, and have my partner ready to fire me again, but strangely enough, I didn't. If you read all the way to the end of this you will be able to see what actually happened, but for now I will be giving a round analysis.

OK, thursday morning, start of the day, I'm scared to death, postings go up, and my partner tells me that we get a bye (meaning we get an automatic win and don't have to debate the first round). I'm slightly excited, but when I sit down to think about it I realize that it's kinda a bad thing. The way they do these tournaments is that starting on the third round they start to match you with people who have similar win/loss records, getting a win on the first round starts you off hitting hard teams.

Well the second round was fun. We were negative against a case that we had absolutely no evidence against. I gave the greatest speech of my life in that round (a completely evidence-free 2NC in which I started walking around the podium. Needless to say, we won that round, although it was close according to the judge.

Our third round (technically our 2nd actual round) was one that concerned me. I was slightly afraid that we would hit a nasty team and get trampled. Well, in a way, we did. We debated good friends of ours who had been to nationals before, and they knew our case because they had helped us with it. The judge for that round didn't really know what he was doing, so I can't really say if we should have lost or not. But whatever, we lost that round.

The fourth round (and the last round of the first day) was quite honestly my favorite round of the tournament. The judge was going all dreamy-eyed every time she heard me speak, and I got the other team to admit that uranium has a half-life of 10 years (it actually has a half-life of like 4.5 billion years). We won the round, and came out of it with some good friends.

The fifth round started bright and early on friday morning. We debated a team that we had known from camp, and one that was running a case that had not been updated for the riga summit (where a lot of things had been changed with NATO). We won it, I can't remember much more except that the judge was dressed as a civil war soldier for some reason.

The sixth round I was really scared. We debated one of the top teams in the entire region, and they basically chewed us apart as much as I can remember. Plus I debated badly since it was so late in the tournement. Anyway, the judge gave us the win for some odd reason.

So here we were at the time they anounced who went into the outrounds (the rounds that were win or stop debating for the rest of the tournement). Whoever went into there rounds got to go to regionals (another tournement that is by invitation only). I was nervous, and I didn't think we would do it (bear in mind that we don't know who wins rounds until the end of the tournement on saturday). To make a long story short, we broke, and so did the other utah team. We were set to debate them in Octo-Finals.

This was a sad time, only one of us would continue, and we both wanted (and wanted each other) to. This was also the first round we had where people were watching us, so I didn't do as well as I could because of nervousness. We had three judges this time, and after a round where I screwed up badly, we lost on a 2-1 decision.

The next morning we found out that the other utah team had won, we were ok with it, seeing as we really hadn't expected to make it this far, but I was slightly disapointed.

At the end we came out winning five rounds and only losing 2 out of the seven rounds we debated. We were 10th overall, and could have been better if we hadn't lost too the other Utah team.

Well, I'm just happy I broke to regionals. Expect to see another report after that.