WELCOME TO THE 2012 DEBATER'S LEAGUE!!!
16 Wrestlezone members square off in a battle to determine who is the best debater on the forum. Over the next few months, each participant will be placed in a double elimination tournament, matched up each week with a member of their opposing bracket, and will be given a topic to debate. Topics will be presented to the contestants from a wide array of wrestling corners. Each contestant should be skilled in international, independent, old school, and general wrestling knowledge of all time periods. Otherwise, get ready to do some research.
The Tournament
A double-elimination tournament is broken into two sets of brackets, generally called the winner’s bracket and the loser’s bracket. Each debater begins in the winner’s bracket, but with one loss, goes into a loser’s bracket, where they will have to debate their way back.
In a four-team bracket, for example, the two first-round losing debaters will play in an elimination round, with the loser eliminated. The two first-round debaters that won will play each other. The loser of that debate will then face the winner of the elimination round.
The loser of that game will then have two losses and is eliminated, and the winner reaches the championship against the debater that’s already won their first two games.
The championship finals are set up as a possible two debates, because it would be unfair to have the winner’s bracket champion eliminated with its first loss. So while the winner’s bracket champion needs to beat the loser’s bracket champion once to win the tournament, the loser’s bracket champion must win twice.
The Judges
Dagger and I have selected a group of well-qualified judges to assess each debate fairly and carefully. They have expertise in different fields of pro-wrestling knowledge and are as impartial as they come. We want these debates to be as fair as possible and will strictly enforce this rule for the duration of the tournament.
Judge #1: Nate
Judge #2: SavageTaker
Judge #3: CH David
Judge #4" Funkay
These men will be judging your fate in this tournament. Feel free to incessantly kiss their asses in the forum, but they will not take bribes, they will not be biased, and they will pick the WrestleZone Debater’s Champion.
The Debates
The 16 debaters will be placed into tournament brackets with double elimination rules. Each bracket's matchup puts two debaters against each other in a debate. When the debate thread is created, a coin will be flipped to decide who gets to be the home or away debater. The home debater will (initially) have all of the power. They get to choose EITHER which side of the debate they want to argue OR who provides the opening statement. Of course, they can always defer to the away debater; but if they make their choice, the away debater gets to make the other decision.
After these choices are made, the first post of the debate must be posted within the first 24 hours, otherwise it will affect the starter's Punctuality portion of the judging. Debaters have 24 hours to respond to their opponent's post and the faster the response, the better chance you have to score higher point totals.
The debate will have a definitive time period (normally 3-5 days, depending on which round of the tournament we're in. Time will be extended as we go deeper into the tournament.) To keep things moving, the first round matchups of the tournament may only have a maximum of three posts from each of the participants in order to support their arguments. Once this criteria is met, (or the allotted time of the debate runs out,) the debate will end and judging will begin.
Each judge will give you a score out of 5. Therefore, you can receive 20 possible points in each debate.
Clarity of debate - 1 point
Punctuality - 1 point
Informative - 1 point
Persuasion - 2 points
Rules
All WrestleZone rules are enforced here. Flaming will not be accepted in the debates, but passion will. Keep it clean, people. Also, this is a non-spam zone, so do not spam otherwise you WILL be infracted.
Rules are subject to change and can be updated as the season progresses. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to post them in the Ask a Question Thread in this section.
Good Luck to everyone!
D-Man