Kimberly Willingham

In the strategy segment, Andrew address tangling with the chipleader and making thin value bets at the final table (or rather, about not doing those things).

Timestamps

0:30 – Hello & Welcome
6:12 – Strategy
25:34 – Josh Nixon

Strategy

Six players remain at a final table. Payouts are:
$4000
$2700
$2000
$1460
$1020
$900

Stacks:
LJ 360K
HJ 273
Hero (CO) 558K
BN 393K
SB 231K
Ian Simpson (BB) 749K

Blinds 4500/9000/1125
Hero opens 22,500 in the CO with Qs 5s.

Flop (56K in pot) Js 4c 5h
BB checks, Hero bets 22,500, BB calls.

Turn (101K in pot) 2c
Both check.

River (101K in pot) 7h
Villain checks. Hero?

Dozens of the best two-person teams from throughout New England competed at the two-day district championship for one of two opportunities to debate at nationals. The other national qualifying team hails from the suburb of Weston, though the first alternates are also from the BDL.

Gena and her brother Ted (I don’t generally use kids’ real names when blogging about them but in this case their names and pictures are already in the news) are the first BDL debaters ever to qualify for nationals. It’s hard to think of a more deserving duo. Gena is one of very few students ever to compete in the BDL for all four years of her high school career, and she’s been winning top honors since her very first tournament, where she was the top speaker in the Novice division. Ted was attending BDL tournaments to cheer on his sister even before he was in high school, and their parents are fixtures at the competitions as well, always offering to help with the demanding task of distributing food to an army of ravenous teenagers.

These two have a ton of natural talent, a lot of support at home, and most importantly an insatiable work ethic. I have no doubt that they’ll make the BDL and the region proud in Indianapolis.

Round 3

Saturday morning proves far more hectic than anticipated. There’s a surprising amount of turnover, meaning students who competed last night but who if they plan on coming at all today have not arrived as of 8AM. Frustratingly, I’m not getting good information from coaches about which of their students have not showed up.

I am used to leading by moral authority. When I ran the BDL, the coaches and students all saw how hard I worked, and most of them knew that I wasn’t paid. I more or less shamed them into making my job easier and doing what I told them to do.

Few coaches and even fewer students remain from my era, and most of the others had never seen me before yesterday. I try to catch up with them as they arrive to confirm which students would be competing today, but I get a lot of eye rolls and brusque “I don’t know, not everyone is here yet,” and despite my pleas to come find me in the tab room if they need to make any changes, no one reports to me despite plenty of changes that should have been made before the start of Round 3.

This results in something like six forfeited debates, with twelve students sitting and twiddling their thumbs for an hour and a half. Had I been on top of the no-shows sooner, I could have reconfigured the pairings so that these six teams debated each other, but instead they all got the morning off. Fine with them, I imagine, but from my perspective a lost educational opportunity. There’s a similar scramble to determine which of our volunteer judges has actually shown up and to replace those who have not.

Round 4

Even once Round 3 gets off the ground, we continue to work in the tab room updating the computer. In the interest of starting at least close to on time, we often made changes and substitutions on the fly, crossing out the names of no-show teams and substituting in judges. Now, to ensure that the computer has accurate information upon which to base the next round’s pairings, we must go through and update the tabulation program with the changes we’ve made by hand.

Round 4 seems to get off to a good start, until several coaches poke their heads into the tab room. Apparently two teams who missed round 3 have since arrived, ready to debate round 4. To be fair, we were told about this, but we failed to update the tabulation program accordingly. Now, as a result of our error (and, of course, the students’ own tardiness) they stand to miss both of today’s preliminary debates. It’s getting late to redo all of our plans for the coming round, so rather than reconfigure the pairings, I pit these teams against each other. One is from the Novice division and one the JV, so it won’t count towards the official results, but at least the kids will get to debate. All parties walk away satisfied.

This kind of quick, creative problem solving is my favorite part of running a tournament. There are constantly little fires like this to put out, and a good director will improvise solutions to all of them while keeping the great tournament machine chugging along smoothly. It requires seeing all of the options at your disposal and understanding the ultimate objectives, which are to run a fair, educational, and fun event. Are you starting to see the similarities with poker?

Consistent with my lead-by-moral-authority philosophy, I comport myself as tournament director with an air of hurried authority. I always walk briskly and purposefully, and if someone wants to come to me with a problem or concern, they better walk and talk and keep up. If I’m hunched over the computer, some try to wait for my full attention, but I let them know they aren’t getting it. I can’t afford to stop working, so tell me about the next problem while I’m solving the current one.

Quarterfinals

There’s a lot to do as Round 4 ends. Heretofore, rounds have been “lag paired”, meaning that in Round 4 teams are paired based on their results from Rounds 1 and 2, enabling us to pair Round 4 while round 3 is underway. Now that we’re about to start the quarterfinals, we need the results of all four preliminary rounds to determine the top eight teams in each division.

Once all the data are in, we have to double-check everything up to this point to ensure that the proper teams advance. A few of our last-minute changes have produced some irregularities in the results, data that weren’t properly recorded. All of this must be verified and fixed before pairing the quarterfinal round.

To buy time for this extra bit of tabulation, we coordinate it with lunch. The kids fuel up on sandwiches and cookies while we pore quickly but thoroughly over the results, snatching bites of our lunch with any free second.

Despite this forty-five-minute hedge, we fall behind schedule preparing the quarterfinals. Eager to make up for lost time, I grab the pairings as soon as they’re printed, run off a few copies, and tape them up strategically around the cafeteria.

A student quickly brings the problem to my attention: “What rooms are these rounds in?” Whoops. I was in such a rush that I neglected to assign rooms to the quarterfinal rounds. Elbert scrambles to scrawl numbers on the pairings and replace the incomplete copies I hung. Approximately sixty-three thousand people interrupt this process to point out that they don’t know which rooms they’re supposed to be in.

Awards Ceremony

Finally the quarterfinals are underway, but there’s no rest for the weary. The next item on the schedule is the awards ceremony (yes, we have the awards ceremony before the semifinal debates – these tournaments run long, and only a few kids need to stay for the last two rounds, so we arrange things so that the vast majority are ready to go by 5 PM), and there’s a lot to do to prepare.

We have awards for not only the losers of the quarterfinals (the winners will get their trophies after semifinals or finals, depending on how far they make it) but also for the top individual speakers, for the schools with the most participating students, and for the best judges. Most of these awards are given in each of the three divisions and announced by a different individual, in the interest of including more people in the ceremony. I need to determine the winners of each of these awards and then distribute this information to the ten different presenters so they’ll have what they need for their part of the ceremony.

We also need a copy of each ballot from the preliminary rounds to distribute to each of the of the teams in each debate. That’s roughly 280 pieces of paper that need to be photocopied, front and back, and then separated into piles for each school.

It’s my own bright idea use BDL alumni in the awards ceremony. I love it when graduates of the BDL come back to serve as judges. In fact, they’re the only judges we pay, a policy that I began and that has lasted into the present day. These alumni often make for the best judges, because as former BDL debaters themselves who are now (mostly) in college, they are uniquely appealing as role models to the current debaters. They are also the judges least able to afford to volunteer. Many work two jobs to help pay for college, and no matter how much they’d like to, most can’t give up their Fridays and Saturdays for free.

Anyway, I asked some of these alumni to participate in the awards ceremony. The ceremony takes place in a large auditorium, and it turns out we have no microphone. The alumni, less experienced with speaking to large groups than am I, struggle on a number of levels. They speak far too quietly and quickly, and they don’t engage at all with the audience. This results in students only half paying attention to the awards and a lot of whispering and noise from the audience.

When it’s my turn to and announce the results of the Novice quarterfinals, I take the time to get everyone’s attention. “Are you ready to hear who won some debates?” Muttered yesses and grunts. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates, say yay-ah!” Now I’ve got some kids shouting back at me. I raise my voice and enthusiasm. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates, stomp your feet!” This time there’s a chorus of stomps. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates… shut up and stop talking so I can tell you.” Gales of laugher, and I know I’ve got them.

I draw out the announcements for full dramatic effect. “In the debate between X from school Y and A from school B, the winner is X. Team A, please come up to collect your trophies.” Repeat for the other three quarterfinal rounds. With each name announced, there’s uproarious cheering from one part of the room and groans from another.

Immediately after I announce the last of the results, one of the alumni judges rushes the stage. “Andrew! Andrew!” I lean over to talk to him. “You got that one wrong. You said the wrong team.” My stomach falls. He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t sure, but I ask him anyway. “Yes I’m certain, I judged it myself. That’s the team I voted for,” he says, pointing to the girls currently on stage collecting quarterfinalist trophies.

“Stay on stage a moment, ladies,” I tell them. They freeze, confused. “Let’s bring the other team up here as well.” Two boys in the front row, grinning from ear to ear, collect a few high fives as they come up on stage. “Guys, I’m really sorry, I just made a huge mistake. The other team are actually the winners.” The girls shriek with delight, while the boy’s teammates howl with laughter and point.

The boys, to their tremendous credit, take it like champs. They shake my hand and accept my sincere apologies gracefully. They hug their opponents as they take the quarterfinalist trophies. I’m embarrassed, but it could have been much worse if the judge hadn’t caught my error. The wrong team advancing to the semifinals would have been a disaster that couldn’t be undone.

Semifinals

Now, at last, the hard part is over. There’s a bit of a scramble to find judges for the semifinals, since it’s getting late and many volunteers are going home, but the time pressure is off. A good 70% of the students and coaches will leave now, and the atmosphere will be much more relaxed. It’s almost anticlimactic the way things quiet down even as the most important debates take place. It’s actually reminiscent of the atmosphere last days of the WSOP main event (thinly veiled brag), with most of the fanfare has wrapped up even though the stakes are the highest.

These kids don’t leave a lot of food behind, but lucky for me the vegetarian sandwiches are the least popular. I finally have time to get a meal and chat with the other volunteers. Much like many of our debaters, Elbert grew up in a poor family and joined the debate team at a high school that was otherwise rather lackluster, academically. He credits debate with opening his eyes to the world and getting him into college. He now works for the Federal Reserve combating fraud in military meal cards.

Finals

There are only six semifinal debates, so tabulating those results and pairing the three final rounds (one in each division) is a breeze. I decide to finally watch a bit of one of these debates I’ve been scheduling all day, so I sit in on the beginning of the Varsity finals.

It’s not a coincidence that two of the three students in the whole tournament whom I know are debating in this round. They are a brother and sister team, she a senior and he a junior, with a combined seven years of debate experience between them. They are also the only two white students at a high school in Roxbury, Boston’s historically black neighborhood where Malcolm X once lived. I don’t know their whole story or how they ended up there, but I have feeling that this experience has a lot to do with their facility for arguing.

“Tom” speaks first, delivering an eight-minute speech in favor of reviving the US space shuttle program. Apparently this is essential to secure US hegemony and eventually colonize space, ensuring the survival of the human race even in the event of catastrophe here on earth.

If you’ve never seen competitive policy debate, you have no idea how much can be said in eight minutes. Tom is nowhere near the fastest, but he is nevertheless spitting out more than two hundred words per minute. Contrary to popular opinion, policy debate is not about public speaking. It’s about logic, evidence, and refutation, and there’s strong incentive to make as many arguments as possible in your allotted time.

The Negative team, two African-American girls from a high school in South Boston, does not look familiar to me, but they know their stuff. “Melissa” calls into question the ideology of colonization. According to her, the very idea is premised on notions of European superiority and entitlement to rule the entire world, dangerous ideas that ought not be extended into space. She also talks about budget cuts that funding the Affirmative’s plan might entail, but it’s evident that the critique of colonialism is the real meat of her team’s strategy.

The other two girls deliver their speeches, clashing over the meaning of colonialism and its importance relative to the threat of human extinction. These are strong speeches, but nothing remarkable.

It is Melissa who blows me away the next time she takes the “podium”, which is really just a chair stacked on top of a desk. Her team’s colonialism argument, though interesting, rests on some pretty complicated philosophical foundations. It’s a topic I’ve rarely seen argued well by college debaters, let alone by students at a high school that struggles to meet state literacy standards.

Yet Melissa knows what she’s talking about. She quotes William Spanos applying Foucault’s critique of disciplinary power to US foreign policy. She explains, clearly and in her own words, the parallels between the bloody European conquest of Africa, Asia, and the Americas and the Affirmative’s proposed colonization of space. It’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever seen in a BDL debate, and though I leave before the final three speeches, I have a sneaking suspicion that the round is over.

I head back down to the tab room to await the results of the Novice and JV finals. The less experienced debaters tend to finish their rounds more quickly, and sure enough they are waiting eagerly in the cafeteria for their results when the Varsity students finally finish.

An impressive number of debaters have stuck around. In addition to the twelve who were still competing in the finals, roughly twice that many friends and teammates remained to watch, learn, and cheer them on. The debate I watched was packed with spectators eager to learn from two of the best teams in the League at the top of their game.

Conversation drops off quickly when I walk purposefully to the front of the cafeteria. I announce the names of both teams who competed in the Novice finals and have them come stand next to me. They are all new to the activity, and while of course it’s exciting to be doing well, winning isn’t something they’ve dreamed of and worked at for months or years. A panel of three judges decided unanimously for the Negative, who cheer and hug each other as I distribute trophies.

Next I stand the JV finalists on either side of me. Once again, it’s a 3-0 decision for the Negative. The cheering is a little louder this time, and the disappointment of the Affirmative team more evident.

Things get really tense when I call up the Varsity debaters. “In the debate between New Mission High School and Excel High School,” I begin. You could hear a pin drop. Melissa is shaking nervously. I know that the brother and sister team have won tournaments before, but for all I know this could be a first for Melissa and her partner. I shuffle the three ballots in my hand. “Let’s see, here’s one ballot for the Negative.” Melissa starts squirming even more.

“Aaaand, oop, here’s one for the Affirmative!” I say with mock surprise, as though I haven’t already looked to see who won. The audience picks up on what I’m doing to the poor debaters and laughs knowingly. “So I guess this final ballot will decide it.” I pause and smile, to more laughter from the audience and almost uncontrollable shaking from Melissa and her partner. “The final judge voted Negative, meaning…” but the rest of my words are drowned out by squeals and shrieks as the two girls embrace.

Tom and his sister smile politely. They’re disappointed, but they’re one of the best teams in the League, and they know they’ll be back. They hug and congratulate their opponents as I thank everyone for coming and wish them luck in the next debate. A few of the coaches, on the way out, thank me for keeping things running smoothly. “Glad to be of help,” I tell them.

There are 174 high school students registered for the debate tournament I am running this weekend. Roughly 135 will actually show up to compete, but not all of those 135 will be among those who registered in advance. These students will compete Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of them will, anyway – a few show up, without warning, on only one day or the other. Just as many will be competing simultaneously at another of our schools, most of which are not large enough to host so many debates at once. That other school is not my responsibility at all.

About half as many middle schoolers will debate in their own separate competition at my school on Saturday only. They are kind of but not really my responsibility.

When I stepped down, three and a half years ago, as executive director of the Boston Debate League (BDL), we were lucky to get 40 kids at a tournament. Obviously there was no need to spread them out across two sites. There were no middle school debaters.

There were no paid employees, either, unless you count the alumni of the league to whom I paid a small stipend to judge at competitions. We had a lot of volunteers, some of them quite committed, but I still did virtually everything myself. The new Executive Director was the BDL’s first full-time employee.

When he told me that he’d be out of town this weekend, I jumped at the chance to help out by directing the tournament at one of its two locations. Running tournaments was my favorite part of running the BDL. They were a high that invigorated me to push through the often boring work of fundraising, volunteer and Board recruitment, and league administration. I found an old blog entry from my days as director, in which I described the tournament experience thusly:

“All of this logistical work occurs amidst a blur of commotion: stomping feet, pounding music, beeping timers, and the din of young voices echoing through the vast hallways of this big brick schoolhouse. I puzzle over the constantly shifting matrix of school names and student initials, all the while incorporating last minute changes, pointing late arrivals vaguely in the direction of the auditorium, where donuts and coffee await them, and fending off unimportant inquiries and requests to “hurry, the students are getting restless.” It is as demanding as playing eight tables of poker at once, and I love every second of it.”

This tournament is much larger than the ones I used to run, but I’m not doing it alone. There’s a volunteer working the tournament tabulation program on a BDL-owned computer, another volunteer manning the judge desk, and two employees handling the logistics of feeding all these students, setting up awards, and otherwise ensuring that things run smoothly.

It’s a little unclear, at first, what exactly my role is aside from overseeing all this activity. It soon becomes clear, though, that none of these individuals is sufficiently experienced to know how to resolve efficiently and effectively the multitude of little issues that always arise at these tournaments.

For example, Elbert, the volunteer on the computer, has used the tabulation program only once before. It would surely be faster for me simply to take over for him, since I have to tell him how to do most things anyway, but I won’t be at future tournaments and he will. He’s a capable and dedicated volunteer, and time invested in on-the-job training for him is well worth it, even if it can get frustrating when things get hectic.

Things get hectic very quickly. Over the next hour and a half, debaters and their coaches trickle into the host school’s cafeteria where several aluminum trays stuffed with salad and pasta await them. My first job is to find the coaches and compare the roster they submitted earlier in the week with the list of students now physically present in the building. For the most part they’re ready with quick and clear information, but there are always a few question marks, students who are supposed to be coming but not yet here.

As I collect updated data from each school, I bring it back to the tabulation room (“tab room”, from now on) and help Elbert make the necessary changes. Everything goes smoothly enough except that five minutes before the pairings for the first round are to be released, one school has not yet arrived. I get the coach on the phone, introduce myself, and have her tell me how many teams she’ll have competing. We can figure out the names later; for now I just need the numbers to get the round paired.

In policy debate, students compete in teams of two. Thus, a school that brings ten students would usually have five teams. A school with nine students would also have five teams, with one student debating “maverick” or by himself. A school with ten students could actually have six teams, if two of their students aren’t getting along and insist on both debating solo. We discourage it, but it’s been known to happen.

The BDL offers three divisions of competition: Varsity, Junior Varsity, and Novice. The latter is a new addition since my departure, and to be honest I’m not clear on the distinction between Novice and JV. For my purposes, it doesn’t matter. I just need to know that they are distinct.

We’ll have two debate rounds, each about an hour and a half long, tonight. Teams will be paired randomly for these two rounds, with the caveat that teams from the same school will not be matched against each other.

There is one, very broad topic that students debate for the entire year. This year it has to do with the US federal government’s role in space exploration. Everyone must argue both for and against such exploration. If you’re Affirmative, arguing for it, the first round, then you’ll be Negative in the second. The computer, thankfully, handles all of this for us.

Elbert and I update team information for the school that is just now arriving and quickly print a pairing for the first round, just in time for the opening announcements. The cafeteria is large and bustling, and when it gets as quiet as it’s going to get I still have to shout to be heard. “Welcome to Tech Boston Academy! Thank you all for coming out to compete today. My name is Andrew, and I used to be the director of the League. I’m really excited to be here today, and I’m simply amazed by how many of you there are here. In my day we were lucky to get 30 or 40 debaters. I’m posting pairings now. Please make your way to your rooms immediately, rounds need to be underway in fifteen minutes.”

Two hundred students, coaches, and judges converge on the sheets of paper even before I’m finished taping them up on the wall. The complaints are quick to follow. “What team am I on?” “Do we have keys?”

The pairings identify teams by school name and a letter: “Tech Boston A”, for example. This is a change from my time, and one whose logic I don’t understand. Apparently students and coaches don’t yet know which team is which and need the tab room to give them a “key” that identifies which students are on which team. Elbert runs back to the computer to print these, and the coaches follow. Ultimately this is a set-back of less than minutes.

The bigger problem is that the judge table hasn’t done a great job of checking-in judges as they arrive. This means that we have only a vague idea of which of our registered judges is and is not actually here and available to judge a debate. We need at minimum one judge for every two teams, which means 35 judges for each round. Judging is technically part of the coaches’ job description, but they hate doing it and do have better things to do, so we use volunteers as much as possible. The drawback of this is that they can’t always be counted upon to show up when they say they will, and there’s nothing we can do if they don’t.

All we can do is put out ballots with the name of the judge scheduled to be in each round and then see which ones get picked up. We instruct all the other volunteers to stand nearby, ready to fill in as needed for those who aren’t actually present. This means that the last rounds to start are a good twenty minutes behind the first, and by the time I and one of the BDL employees walk the halls to ensure that each debate is actually underway, the round is half over.

Thankfully, Round 2 is paired randomly, meaning that the outcome of Round 1 won’t influence it and we can get started on it immediately. In fact, Elbert already has this underway when I get back to the tab room. What he doesn’t have is up-to-date information about which judges are here, which means that we once again have to do the print-and-substitute-as-needed method of judge assignment.

Still, Round 2 gets underway without too much drama, and then it’s time to enter the results from Round 1. We have to record both which team of two won and lost each debate and also speaker points awarded to each of the four students in the debate based on the quality of their individual performance. At the end of the day on Saturday, we’ll give awards to both the teams with the best win-loss records and the individual students with the highest speaker points.

Round 3 is going to be power-paired off of the first two rounds, meaning that teams that won their first two debates will be paired with other teams who also won their first two debates. Thus, we can’t begin pairing Round 3 until all of the results from Round 2 are in. Round 2 is the last one of the night, so students and coaches depart as they finish, until finally only the four of us remain at the school, working diligently in the tab room to prepare for tomorrow.

Elbert and I finish up the Round 3 pairing, which we know will have to change depending on which judges and debaters actually show up tomorrow. Meanwhile one of the other BDL employees sets up another computer and printer for the middle school administrators to use. I can tell from his sighs that it isn’t going well. “I keep getting this printer error,” he tells me.

I take over for him and mess around haphazardly with the printer configuration for a few minutes. He leaves the room to finish cleaning up the food in the cafeteria. I unplug and replug the printer’s USB cable. He returns to the sound of printing. “You’re a genius,” he tells me with a clap on the back. We’ve got the first, shorter day of the tournament under our belts.

For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011– my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant.  The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?

I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?

I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.

Online poker made enough mainstream headlines that random aunts and uncles knew something had happened. Explaining everything that’s happened to online poker and to me in the last eight months is a mouthful that hasn’t gotten much shorter despite the amount of practice I’ve had spelling it all out.

I want to be clear that I’m “anxious” rather than “worried” or “depressed”. There really aren’t bad outcomes, which is very reassuring. Making big decisions is stressful regardless, but it is considerable consolation to feel confident that everything will work out in the end.

The two big advantages that I have over my 21-year-old self are money and experience. I graduated from college with $10,000 in the bank, $50,000 in student loans, no job, and no plan. OK, I had a bit of a plan, but it was a stupid one.

I never would have predicted it, but poker proved to be the missing ingredient that salvaged that plan. It enabled me to live with my girlfriend in Boston, start a non-profit organization, and travel extensively. What began as a way to make ends meet while searched for a job has blossomed into a full-on career, a phenomenon that was highlighted when I joined PokerStars Team Online. Knowing that I was able to muddle my way through a period of anxiety and make a very satisfying life for myself once before gives me a lot more confidence for this go-round.

The funny thing is that after two years, the whole nomad thing was wearing a bit thin, for me anyway. I wanted a little more stability and to feel at home somewhere. This didn’t make its way on to the blog, but one of my goals for the year was to get more settled somewhere.

Fail. The girlfriend and I returned to Boston intending to settle in place there and work out some big decisions about where to go and what to do in the longer term. Those conversations were taking place in late February and March. You know what happened next.

Suddenly I was driving to Montreal on Easter Sunday to open a Canadian bank account in the hopes that it would facilitate withdrawal of the money I had online. Of course that was before PokerStars painlessly returned US players’ funds and before that other site did the things that it did (or before we realized what was going on there, anyway). There was a last-minute trip to Madrid, and although I didn’t cash in the European Poker Tour main event, my third top-100 finish in the WSOP main event certainly took the edge off of Black Friday. Then two months in the Canadian Rockies, a European road trip, two months in Vancouver (featuring another deep run in a live tournament), camping in Death Valley (do you know anyone else who flies to Las Vegas to take a break from gambling?), then my mother’s house in Maryland for the holidays and some undefined period thereafter. You can imagine how quickly family members’ initial concern for my professional well-being melts away when they hear that list of “hardships”.

The only advantage that 21-year-old Andrew possessed over the man I am now was having his twenties ahead of him. Before all the 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings start rolling their eyes, let me clarify that I don’t feel old in the sense that my best years are behind me or that I’ll never have the chance to do all those things I wanted to or anything like that. As usual, David Foster Wallace captures the feeling far better than I could:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

OK, it gets a little too dark there at the end. My own feeling is that, “It’s not too late but it soon will be”. I’ve managed to make remarkably few major decisions or long-term commitments in the last eight years, but that’s starting to feel less tenable.

As a poker player, my instinct is always to gather more information, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the Whos, Whats, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of online poker in the US. Whether not I’ll be able to supplement my income by playing online poker has huge implications for what I do and where and how I live.

Poker has also taught me to play the hand I’m dealt and accept that the eventual outcome may not be under my control. At the moment, I’m looking no more than a few weeks into the future. I’ve got a few more days in Maryland, then I’ll be in the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, then it’s a little vaguer but possibly visiting friends and family in some combination of Maryland, New York, and Florida, then in Boston for a Boston Debate League tournament, and then… well, that’s still a work in progress.

Skimming a year’s worth of posts actually turned up a quote that should conclude this little rant nicely. It’s from one of Jared Tendler’s post-Black Friday blog posts, and I originally quoted it in my own post-Black Friday post:

Right now you’re looking for answers. The problem is that some of you are so desperate for answers you’ll listen to almost anything or anyone. That desperation is very similar to feeling desperate to win. You’ll do almost anything to shake this feeling because the uncertainty is almost too much to handle.

The reality is that there aren’t many answers out there right now. If you try to force an answer too soon, you’ll be making the same mistake if you were forcing the action because you need to win money right now. You have to stick to a sound and logical strategy.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.

I know this has been a rough year for online poker players everywhere and especially in the US, but let’s keep it in perspective. As my grandmother once told me, “There’s always someone worse off than you.”

The organization closest to my heart is the Boston Debate League, a nonprofit that I founded seven years ago. The BDL now serves thousands of students in thirteen of the city’s public high schools. We (I’m still on the Advisory Council, though admittedly spending the better part of this year outside of the country made it difficult to participate actively) help schools to start competitive after-school debate teams, organize citywide competitions, and train teachers to use debate as a teaching tool in their classrooms.

Debate can have a powerful influence on kids who are not doing well in school. It’s engaging in a way that their usual schoolwork may not be, and it encourages independent, critical thinking. Urban students who debate are 42% more likely to graduate from high school than their non-debating counterparts. A single year of debate increases a student’s reading level by an average of 2-3 grades.

It’s a very effective, and cost-effective, way to address one of our country’s most pressing problems. Your contribution would enable the BDL to bring this incredibly valuable activity to more students. If you believe that all of the free information I provide on this blog has helped to make you some money this year, please kick a piece of that back to this organization that is very important to me. And please leave a comment so I’ll know! I promise it will warm my heart.

You can donate online at http://www.bostondebate.org/give. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about the organization, or you can learn by browsing the website.

Thanks!

My interview starts at around the 2100 mark. Also on the show is Brandon Steven, who finished 10th in this year’s WSOP. I haven’t done too many interviews, but hopefully I’ll be doing more in the future, so please let me know what you think, good or bad!

Not that I can take any credit for this victory, but I worked with the CDL for several years while I was in college. In fact, it was a formative experience that led to my starting up the BDL when I moved to Boston. Even absent that personal history, I’d have to say that this is a very impressive accomplishment that hopefully will pave the way for more UDL success on the traditional debate circuit in the future.

Pictures and press release available here.

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who donated to the Boston Debate League. I promise I’m not about to turn this into a “pledge drive” blog, but it was a unique opportunity, and I appreciate your patience and your generosity.

At least one commenter mentioned frustration with the donation site’s request for personal information. That was the site we had to use for the “March for Goodness” competition, but you are always welcome to make donations by PayPay, credit card, or check through the Boston Debate League website. It will no longer count towards the contest, but it will still go towards a very good cause and make me very happy!

Please donate here, right now!

I’ve got another story for you today about the power of debate, this one actually from a similar organization that I worked with in Chicago before I founded the Boston Debate League. I was a junior at the University of Chicago: white, reasonably well-off, over-educated, and sheltered. I grew up in a solidly white, middle-class suburb of Baltimore and, aside from a few summers working at a 7-11 and a year of volunteering in the Chicago Debate League, I had very little experience interacting with people from backgrounds different than my own.

I’d just gotten a job as an assistant coach in the CDL and had been assigned to Orr Academy, an under-performing (to put it mildly) high school in Chicago’s Harlem. As the name suggests, the neighborhood was virtually all black (the only white person I ever saw on the streets there was selling pornographic DVD’s out of a briefcase) and economically depressed.

At the first competition of the year, the director of the CDL introduced me to the head coach at Orr. I assumed that he would in turn introduce me to the students, but actually the first thing he told me was that he had to go and that I should “keep an eye on” the team for the rest of the day. He gestured vaguely towards the cafeteria table where they were all gathered and then headed out the door.

They were an intimidating bunch, mostly young men dressed in “urban attire”. I would most definitely cross the street, or more likely find another street altogether, if I were to come upon that same group standing on a corner at night. It was hard for me to imagine them taking my geeky white ass seriously, but I took a deep breath and tried to look confident as I walked towards them.

Seeing me approach, by far the largest of the young men stood up from the table and turned towards me. No exaggeration, this guy was 6’5 and I wouldn’t be surprised if he tipped the scales at 350 pounds. I met his gaze and held it until his round face finally burst into a wide smile. “You must be Mr. Brokos!” He shook my hand vigorously and introduced himself as Tarell. Then, draping an arm effortlessly over my shoulder, he took me around the table and introduced me one-by-one of the other members of the team, who all greeted me quite warmly.

I started visiting their school once a week, which entailed a one-hour ride on the Green line in each direction. It truly felt like stepping into a different world when I boarded the train in Hyde Park, the gentrified bubble that is home to the U of C, and disembarked an hour later amidst Harlem’s boarded-up windows and discarded syringes. Needless to say, I stuck out like a sore thumb walking from the train station to the school, and I never felt entirely comfortable.

As soon I stepped into the head coach’s classroom, though, I always got a warm greeting from Tarell, and his welcoming smile immediately put me at ease. He made small talk effortlessly, told me about the school and asked me what I’d been up to. Tarell was never a particularly good debater, but he was more dedicated to the activity than anyone else on the team. He was at every practice, and he always gave me an update on who would be coming that day, who would be late, who had to leave early, etc. During any group discussion, he was the most vocal, quick with a joke, but always encouraged others to participate as well. His easy confidence gave them the confidence to speak up, just as it had put me at ease back when we first met.

I never had any problems walking to the school, except once with a police officer who hassled me for a while, presumably because I thought he was there to buy drugs (in his defense, that probably is why the vast majority of white people walking the streets of Harlem are there). Once when I got to the school, though, there were far more students hanging around out front than usual. I had a bad feeling about the situation, but I’d already traveled an hour to get here, so I took a deep breath and tried to talk quickly through their midst towards the front door of the school, which was about 200 feet away.

Suddenly, a boy about 15-years old jumped out in front of me, stomping the ground loudly with his heavy boots. I jumped a bit and put my hands up defensively, and several of his friends laughed. He didn’t say anything, but he stared me straight in the eyes. When I tried to step around him to the right, he side-stepped as well to stay in front of me. I stepped to the left, but same thing. I tried to smile disarmingly and say, “Excuse me, my friend”, but he just stared back with angry eyes.

I don’t know what this guy was up to or what if anything would have happened next, but suddenly I saw Tarell walk out the front door of the school. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone. He stepped around the bully and put that familiar arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Mr. Brokos, everybody’s waiting for you inside.” The other boy disappeared into the crowd, and we walked into the school. “There’s going to be a big fight today. I thought maybe I should wait for you down here,” Tarell explained.

“Thanks,” I murmured, still shaken and a little embarrassed at having to be rescued by one of my students.

“Tarell sure seems like a natural for debate,” I commented to the head coach one day. “He’s so confident and outgoing.”

The coach smiled with amusement. “That’s Tarell after a year on the debate team. He used to be the shyest kid in class, always very sensitive about his weight. He always sat in the back of the room and wouldn’t say anything to anybody. Debate gave him that confidence to speak up.”

I don’t know what would have happened to Tarell if he hadn’t had the opportunity to debate, and frankly I don’t know where he is now either. I doubt that he’s a millionaire, but I know that he went to college, and I’m sure he’s a lot better off than he would have been without debate. It’s an activity that changes lives, particularly for young people like Tarell who have so few opportunities available to them at their schools. He wasn’t a genius, but he was a good person, a kind person, a caring and thoughtful person, and he deserved the opportunity to find his voice.

Please donate today.

I want to share with you the story of one of the first BDL students to really make an impression on me. “Angela’s” school didn’t join the League until her senior year, so she only had one year to compete, but she really tore it up. She steamrolled the Novice division in her first tournament, won first prize, and immediately moved up into the Varsity division. She won two tournaments in the Varsity division that year and ended up taking second place in the City Championships.

As you might imagine, Angela was an extremely mature, bright, and articulate young woman. To this day, I consider her one the smartest people (not just high school students) I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. My first introduction to her actually came via an extremely professional voicemail message I got when calling to remind her about a summer camp she’d signed up for. The message explained that Angela would be out of the office this week and could be reached on her cellular phone. It sounded like I’d reached a professional businesswoman, not a teenage girl. When I asked her about this, Angela explained that she had a summer job at the Federal Reserve Bank.

At some point, I commented to one of Angela’s teachers that she seemed so bright and together and could probably write her ticket to pretty much any college that she wanted. The woman gave me a concerned look and said, “She’ll be lucky if she graduates high school.”

It turns out Angela just didn’t do homework and was in danger of failing several classes. I never got the full story, but apparently she was dealing with some serious problems at home and lacked either the time, the energy, or the inclination to do homework.

I’ve worked with thousands of students from urban public schools. While I rarely get to know them well enough to learn their individual stories, I’m well aware that a lot of them are likely to have problems with poverty, abuse, violence, drugs, the law, etc. Sometimes it’s obvious, and other times I can’t help but speculate, but Angela was someone I never would have expected. In retrospect, I suppose it makes sense that having so many burdens to bear at such a young age contributed to her precocious maturity, but she’d just always seemed so together to me.

She did graduate high school, but I lost touch with her for several years. About a year ago, quite out of the blue, she sent me an e-mail thanking me for the opportunities that the Boston Debate League provided for her. She told me she was finishing up college at the University of Massachusetts and attributed that fact, together with her having graduated high school at all, to her school’s debate team. She was also working as a community organizer and motivational speaker, which again she felt was made possible by the confidence and speaking skills that she learned through debate. It was very rewarding for me to hear that not only had she gotten her own life on track but that she was using the skills she’d acquired through debate to help many more young people.

I wrote back asking if there were any opportunities for me to see her speak, but I never heard from her again. I can’t tell you how uncommon it is for me to hear anything from the students I work with after they graduate, but for a number of reasons, I’m not surprised that Angela was the rare one to reach me.

With a donation as small as $10, you can help to change more young lives. Please do your part!

The Boston Debate League, a non-profit organization that has been near and dear to me for some time, has entered a “March Goodness” competition. We are competing against 64 other non-profits in hopes of ultimately winning $10,000. To make it to the final four, we must generate more “unique donations” than the 16 other non-profits in our group.

I’d really appreciate your help with this. The goal isn’t necessarily to raise the most money, but to have the most individuals donate. You can donate as little as ten dollars, but of course we won’t complain if you would like to donate more.

To donate, please go to http://www.razoo.com/story/Mg2010-East-Boston-Debate-League

I can personally vouch for the quality of this program, the integrity of its leadership (I’m on the Board), and the overall good that your donation will accomplish. I strongly encourage you to watch this five-minute film that highlights some of the ways in which debate improves the lives of underserved youth. You can also learn more about us on our website.

Thank you for supporting the BDL and our students. Remember: the key is unique donations. Please consider passing this information on to friends, family, co-workers, anyone who cares about providing enriching opportunities that change the lives of young people whose considerable talents too often go uncultivated because of the circumstances into which they are born.

If you do contribute, please leave a comment letting me know! Hopefully it will encourage others to do the same. If you have any questions or concerns, please leave them here as well, and I’ll be happy to address them. Just to let you know: if the BDL wins the $10,000 prize, I promise you something sick for the blog, maybe some free video content or something.

Thanks!

I’m proud to announce that the Boston Debate League, a non-profit organization that I founded 5 years ago and on whose Board I now serve, has been selected as one of these charities. If any of you, or anyone you know, is interested in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to run the Boston Marathon and support a valuable cause, please e-mail me (andrew@thinkingpoker.net) for more information. Running for our team will get you weekly training and advice from a professional coach and the opportunity to share this experience with other motivated individuals like yourself. And the best part is, you don’t have to be an experienced distance runner already- that’s what the training is for!

The Boston Debate League is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting academic debate as an extracurricular activity and an agent of cultural change in Boston’s public high schools. I can tell you from personal experience that competitive debate can get the most unlikely students excited about academics. I have seen failing students on the verge of dropping out of school turn their lives around and earn college scholarships. I have seen nervous, quiet students cultivate an inner confidence and become powerful advocates for themselves and their communities. The Boston Debate League delivers results like this to those who need them most, the largely low-income and minority students in Boston’s public high schools. You can learn more about the Boston Debate League from our website.

By joining our team and raising money for the Boston Debate League, you will have the opportunity to accomplish something that most people never dream of, and you will be doing it for an important cause. Even if you aren’t able to run, please consider making a donation to support those who are.

“But the 26-year-old Brokos’ real passion isn’t poker. It’s coaching inner-city schoolkids in the art of debate. When he couldn’t get a paying job in education pursuing his interest in forensics, he used his poker winnings to support himself while he started the Boston Debate League, which has grown from three schools in 2005 to eight. Impressed with Brokos’ bootstrap work, the city school system provided funding for a full-time executive director to run the league, but Brokos continues to donate his time several days a week — with poker remaining as his means of support.”

I should clarify that technically, the Boston Public Schools (BPS) is not providing the full-time executive director. He’s solely an employee of the Boston Debate League (BDL), which is an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization that raises funds from individuals and public foundations (no poker tournaments yet). BPS does, however, provide stipends for teachers who coach debate, food and supplies for participating students, and train fare to help low-income students attend BDL events. Still pretty sweet to get this kind of national attention though!

The BDL also got its first mention, and a fairly substantial one at that, in the Boston Globe, the city’s most prominent daily paper. The reporter did a nice job speaking with a variety of students, coaches, and administrators, and ultimately presented two of our most important themes: that debate is a rigorous academic activity that students nonetheless enjoy, and that it attracts all types of students, not only those who are already high achievers.

The credit for this goes to my girlfriend, who diligently reached out to nearly one hundred contacts at a wide variety of news outlets. Thanks, Em!

The debate team at the Academy of Public Service sailed into the “elite eight” last year at the national championships in Chicago.

Now, thanks to that oratorical success, the debaters have talked their way into another year of funding as their school merges with the nearby Noonan Business Academy in Codman Square.

“The output of the debate team was a big part of the decision,” said team coach Locksley Bryan. “They saw these kids doing academic calisthenics at a very high level and it impressed them.”

The backstory, as I understand it, is that several years ago the Boston Public Schools received a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support a transition to small schools. The grant funded the dissolution of Boston’s large public high schools into multiple small schools sharing a single building. Thus, what was Dorchester High School became three schools within the renamed Dorchester Education Complex: Tech Boston, Noonan Business Academy, and the Academy of Public Service (APS).

Dorchester is one of the more troubled neighborhoods in Boston, and these schools had more than their share of problems. APS, however, was fortunate enough to have a wonderful headmaster and several great teachers who saw the value that a debate team could have for their students and their school. They got in touch with me, and I helped them start such a program three years ago.

Thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned faculty, APS quickly became one of the most successful schools in the League, putting up some of the best participation numbers and repeatedly taking top honors at citywide competitions. This was a big deal for a school that used to be known derogatorily among Boston’s young people as “Dumbchester”.

The Gates grant expires at the end of the current school year, and BPS seems to be reconsolidating some (though not nearly all) of the small schools it created. APS was slated to be absorbed by the more popular Tech Boston and its students dispersed. However, teachers, faculty, students, alumni, and community members rallied in support of their school. As the most eloquent orators, several of the debaters took leadership roles in this effort, speaking before the Boston Schools Committee about the value of the Academy of Public Service. The debate team was one of the flagship programs to which they pointed as evidence of the school’s success.

As an organization, we’ve learned a lot from this event. We’ve come to appreciate more fully how much a debate team can transform a school culture, ultimately affecting even non-debaters in a positive way. When intellectual competition takes on the fun, excitement, credibility, and even popularity of a sports team at a school, that school is bound to improve. Joining the debate team becomes a cool, or at least socially acceptable, thing to do, and more kids get into it. These students, and the teachers who coach them, bring their newly acquired skills into their classrooms, raising the quality of the class for all its students.

An alumnus of the APS debate team who now volunteers as a judge at our competitions put it best when he told me, “If they had said three years ago that they wanted to close APS, I wouldn’t have argued with them. It was a bad school. But it changed when the debate team came along. Debate turned around a lot of kids lives. Kids who were going to drop out started coming to school again so they could debate. It’s a much better school now and I don’t think they should close it.”

Here’s another random brag, this one from the Stars weekly $500. Sorry was having trouble with the converter, basically I had an open-ended draw on the turn and overbet shoved when a flush card came on the river:

PokerStars Game #21709641365: Tournament #116152197, $500+$30 Hold’em No Limit – Level III (100/200) – 2008/11/02 18:23:05 ET
Table ‘116152197 23’ 9-max Seat #7 is the button
Seat 1: nofingclue11 (11900 in chips)
Seat 2: tiger76 (9370 in chips)
Seat 3: jesseluke82 (5480 in chips)
Seat 4: berra86 (13699 in chips)
Seat 5: lowlife039 (13250 in chips)
Seat 6: Mia_121 (9276 in chips)
Seat 7: Joao M. (10835 in chips)
Seat 8: foucault82 (8390 in chips)
Seat 9: Psychout (8600 in chips)

*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to foucault82 [Tc 9s]
nofingclue11: folds
tiger76: folds
jesseluke82: folds
berra86: folds
lowlife039: folds
Mia_121: folds
Joao M.: folds
foucault82: calls 100
Psychout: checks

*** FLOP *** [Qc 8s 7c]
foucault82: bets 299
Psychout: calls 299

*** TURN *** [Qc 8s 7c] [5d]
foucault82: bets 666
Psychout: raises 666 to 1332
foucault82: calls 666

*** RIVER *** [Qc 8s 7c 5d] [2c]
foucault82: bets 6559 and is all-in
Psychout: folds
Uncalled bet (6559) returned to foucault82
foucault82 collected 3662 from pot
foucault82: doesn’t show hand

He pretty much can’t have a flush because he’s not min-raising a flush draw on the turn. It just doesn’t make sense to minimize his fold equity and re-open the betting, giving me the opportunity to blow him off his draw. So it’s a great bluffing opportunity when the flush comes in. The only problem is that people are stubborn, especially when they have pretty hands (which the min-raise suggests he does), so I made the only bet that I thought I could force a tough lay down. I expected it to work damn near 100% of the time, though, which is why I found it interesting.

I must admit, though, that spending five hours a day, five days a week in charge of a bunch of teenagers is more than a little exhausting. Even though we had a great group that was for the most part eager to learn about debate and easy to get along with, it was still a lot of work and pretty draining. I was in no mood to play poker at the end of a day, that’s for sure.

Here’s me taking notes on the board during a short debate two of our students had about the morality of eating meat.

Poker-wise, I ended the month almost exactly dead even after rakeback. I guess that’s not too bad given that my several forays into 25-50 resulted in several bad beats to the tune of five figures. I did make more of an effort to learn PLO, watching the PLO Leakfinder series on Cardrunners and the PLO guest series that Tom Chambers did for Poker Savvy Plus. I put in several sessions at 2/4, and even though I was a net loser, I feel like I am getting much better at reading hands and board textures.

The World Championship of Online Poker starts today, but I probably won’t begin playing in earnest until next week, so that’s when you can expect to see more regular posts. Sorry for the extended silence.

The check is for $191,000 because I left a $2000 tip for the dealers. That might seem like a lot, but 1% is pretty standard, and remember that you only tip when you cash, so in some sense the 10% who make the money are tipping for the 90% who did not as well as for themselves. It’s kind of a screwy system, but that’s how it works.

The other big news, which would have been the lead item any other week, is that as of August 4th I will no longer be the director of the Boston Debate League. The League is getting larger, serving more students and schools, and partnering with the central administration of the Boston Public Schools. Running it is turning into a full time job for which I have neither the time nor the inclination.

We’re very fortunate that the chairman of our Board is also the founder and managing partner of Isaacson, Miller, an international executive search firm for nonprofits. Ordinarily they work with big organizations like museums and universities, but one of their associates, who is also a Board member, helped us conduct a nationwide search for a director. We hired a great candidate who is frankly more qualified than I thought we were going to find. I’ll still be working with the League, having a paid, full time employee is going to make a world of difference for us.

July’s been an exciting month. I went from being way behind pace for hitting my yearly goal for poker income to being just a hair’s breath away. I probably won’t end up meeting my goal for hours played since I won’t feel like forcing myself to put in hours when I don’t feel like playing. On the plus side, I probably will play more non-hold ’em games, and I may even hire a PLO coach.

Granted I’m about to turn around and spend all of June’s winnings in Las Vegas, but I was going to play the main event anyway, so the winnings are still very meaningful. And if you count staking profits, June turns into a damn fine month.

I was playing smaller stakes, though deep-stacked, and ran at about 4 BB/100 over 19K hands.

Non-poker stuff, which is where I devoted a lot of my time, is going great as well. The school system is really excited about the debate league and committed to investing in it, and we’re very close to hiring an extremely qualified new director. I wish I had a bit more time for poker, but as I said, the first part of July will be dedicated to it, and once there’s a paid employee working on the debate stuff, I should have more free time as well.

I’m very excited that after months of meetings, the superintendent and her staff have agreed to invest $50,000 in the League. This is actually less than I was hoping, but it’s still a huge improvement from nothing and will hopefully get us a foot in the door. Everyone I’ve met in the administration has seemed genuinely taken with the program. Now we’ll have access to data such as debaters’ GPA and test scores (this will be part of our deal with BPS), the numbers will back up our claims about how participation in debate can improve confidence, academic achievement, critical thinking, literacy, etc. It seems very plausible to me that there could be debate teams in every high school in the city, and maybe middle schools as well, within ten years.

It’s kind of sad that I’ll probably be leaving Boston just as this thing really takes off. I’ll still be involved as a member of the Board, but we’re hiring a full time person to direct the League.

This afternoon, I attended an end-of-the-year banquet and awards ceremony for one of my debate teams. In addition to awards for all the debaters, they had one for me in honor of my last year as director. Though it was technically from the whole team, I know that the coach and one student in particular were behind it. These two are respectively among the most extraordinary of the dozens of teachers and hundreds of students I’ve worked with in my seven years in the urban debate field, and their respect means the world to me.

Here’s the trophy, which I’m sure will become one of my most cherished possessions:

Actually the aforementioned student just found this blog recently. When she saw me today, the first thing she said was, “Hey I googled your name.”

Uh oh, I know where this is going. “Yeah?”

“I didn’t know about all that poker stuff.”

“Yeah I don’t really make a big deal about it at work.”

“That’s pretty neat. So you are like a beginner?”

“Uh, I didn’t say that. Where’d you get that from?”

“Some article from the Baltimore Sun said it was like your second time or you made money for the second time or something.”

“Yeah, my second time making money… at the world championships.”

“Oh. That’s pretty good.”

And a close-up of the engraving:

Sean was one of the best speakers I’ve seen, and I’ve seen thousands. When Sean won top speaker at the tournament, I was not surprised. When a reporter from the Kansas City Star called me about an article he was writing on Sean, I was not surprised. (Well, I wasn’t surprised that a reporter would do want to write an article about Sean. I was surprised that he had bothered to track down Sean’s judges from the national championship).

I had trouble putting into words what exactly it was that I liked about Sean, which is rare for me, but the reporter did a nice job of turning my rambling into a coherent thought:

Thirty-four teams from 19 debate leagues across the nation battled it out in Chicago last weekend at the Chase Urban Debate National Championship. [Sean] earned a $2,500 scholarship for snaring the top individual award.

And he did it while attacking some of the hectic, rapid-fire tactics of debate even as he showed he could dominate that style, said judge Andrew Brokos.

“He was charismatic and principled,” Brokos said. “He had all the skills … to play within the game while getting the judges to acknowledge his criticism of the game.”

Judging Sean was also exciting for me because he debates for Kansas City Central, the debate team that was the subject of one of my favorite books, Cross-Ex. Even if I weren’t deeply immersed in the world of urban debate leagues, I would have loved this white journalist’s account of following, and eventually coaching, the largely black team as they “challenge[d] the debate community on race, power, and education.”

Jane Rinehart, who coaches at Central and was one of the “stars” of the book, has apparently taken Sean into her home as well and is now his legal guardian. The article is pretty vague regarding what happened, but it sounds like his family just up and took off on him while he was away at a debate tournament:

That’s how, at 17, you bear the weight of having walked up the steps to your home after returning from another out-of-town tournament and finding the window blinds gone, the furniture gone…

This is my favorite thing about the urban debate league scene, and what makes it so different from poker. Virtually everyone I meet, both students and coaches/administrators, are extraordinary and inspiring people who have done, are doing, or surely will do great things. It’s incredibly uplifting to spend time in their company. Compare that to the usual lineup at a 2/5 NL table at Foxwoods, and you’ll understand why I don’t enjoy live poker.

At 7:44, he was nowhere in sight, so I called his brother’s cell phone, which he was borrowing for the day. “What’s going on, George?” I asked, trying to give the impression that I was pretending, but only kinda pretending, to be annoyed. In other words, he wasn’t in trouble yet, but he had better get his ass in gear.

“Sorry, I had to walk. I’m on my way.”

“How far away are you?”

“Five or six minutes.”

“Alright. Feel free to run.”

Fifteen minutes later, the other latecomers had arrived, but George was still nowhere in sight. I called him again. “You told me five minutes.”

“Sorry, I’m almost there. I’m on Stuart Street. I’ve been running.”

“Stuart and what?”

“I’m almost there. Two minutes.”

“Hurry.” At the first of three bus stops, we were already twenty minutes behind schedule, and I hate being late.

George did indeed appear two minutes later, sweating despite the chilly air of a winter morning, out of breath, and with tie disheveled. “Sorry,” he panted while climbing the stairs of the bus.

“Where were you walking from?”

“Ruggles.”

“You live over that way?”

“Yeah.”

“You could have just taken the Green Line here. Or taken the Orange to Forest Hills, that’s where we’re going next.”

“Walking is faster,” he muttered, eyes fixed on the seat in front of him.

“There’s no way that’s true,” I told him, but let the matter slide.

*************************

In part because we were late to arrive, we left Rhode Island nearly an hour later than planned, and it was well after dark as the bus approached Boston. “Where you getting off, George?” I asked him as we pulled into Forest Hills.

“Copley. I’ll walk from there.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” He wouldn’t be walking through a particularly dangerous neighborhood, for the most part, but just in general I didn’t like the idea of releasing a teenager from my custody into the street alone after dark. “Why don’t you get off here and take the Orange line.”

“I prefer to walk.”

“Alright,” I said with a resigned shrug.

Thankfully, a teacher sitting across from me was a bit more savvy. “You mean you prefer not to pay for the train?”

“Um… yeah,” he admitted, a bit embarrassed.

For me, the $1.70 train fare is a trivial expense. Sometimes I choose to walk because it is a nice day or because I feel like it, but the cost of the train is never a consideration.

Although this isn’t the first time it’s been brought to my attention that a kid from a low-income family doesn’t think this way, I don’t generally pay for kids’ train fare. The thing is that I pay for a lot of other stuff. At a typical tournament, I’m buying breakfast and lunch for the participants and paying for the awards we give at the end of the day, not to mention volunteering my time to organize and run the event. So even though I know that the cost of transportation can be a real barrier to participation, I usually leave that cost to the kids anyway. If they want to debate badly enough, I figure, they can find a way to come up with train fare no matter how broke they are.

But now I was faced with a new realization. George enjoys debating, and I had no doubt that if he had to take the train, he would have come up with the money. In other words, it wasn’t a matter of him not caring enough about participating to make the necessary sacrifices. But if there was any way for him to do both, to come to Rhode Island and avoid paying $3.40 for train fare, he was going to do it, even if it meant bookending a long and demanding day with a mile and a half walk through the cold to and from the bus stop. And there was nothing I could do but blush, hand him $2, and thank him for coming.

A local radio station, WJMN 94.5, is also going to air an interview with a few of our debaters and me between 7 and 8 PM tonight.

“Students at the Josiah Quincy Upper School, and six other schools, represent the city locally and nationally as part of the program.

“Debate is about taking a risk,” said Alexander Chan, 17, captain of the Josiah Quincy team. “It is about finding a voice.

“Debate used to be very upper class. With urban debate you have all different backgrounds,” said Chan, a three-year veteran of the team. “It gives us a taste of what we can accomplish.”

For the students at Josiah Quincy Upper School, the debate squad gives students a team they can call their own. For football, athletes must play for South Boston.”

Also, a photographer was there and took literally hundreds of pictures, but the only photo accompanying the piece was a still from the film. Still, it was great to get the exposure and media attention!

“The message resonated with some of the dozens of students and poker players who came to hear Addington speak. Andrew Brokos, 25, who makes money playing poker online 25 to 30 hours each week and teaches debate to Boston public school students, said that while he never hands out cards and chips to his students, the skills he teaches are similar to “no limit hold ’em.”

Debaters must watch their opponents closely, play each argument strategically, and use “crystallized aggression” to win a debate – the same way they would try to win a high-stakes hand, he said.”

There is such a hectic energy that surrounds these events, particularly the first one of the year, when there are so many kids who are trying debate out for the first time. Some are driven by their fear to arrive early and pace nervously outside of the school until I arrive to let them in. Others panic and can only be coaxed into coming by coaches and teammates who spend the arrival/breakfast hour furiously calling and texting their no-shows.

These coaches, veteran and novice alike, scramble to marshal their squads for the season opener. They have registered their students with me several days ago in teams of two, but I’ve learned to prepare for a barrage of 11th hour changes:

“Shanice isn’t coming, drop her and pair Marcus with Beni. Tarell can debate alone.”

“Chanelle and Kiki are having a spate; we need to split them up. Pair Chanelle with Dan and Kiki with Jemal.”

“I have a student who’s never been to a practice, but he’s here now and wants to debate. He’s not registered. Is that OK? Can we find him a partner from a different school?”

“Shanice is here, let’s put her back with Marcus, then Beni and Tarell will debate together after all.”

It takes me three drafts of the schedule for Round 1 to get everything straight. Almost half the teams in the Novice division are from the same school, meaning that they can not debate against each other, and my computer program has difficulty generating a schedule that meets this constraint. Meanwhile, there are only four teams in the Varsity division, and although two of them are from the same school, there is no way around pairing them against each other for one of the three rounds. But computers are not given to such compromises, and ultimately it becomes easier to print the closest approximation that the program can give me and then correct it by hand.

All of this logistical work occurs amidst a blur of commotion: stomping feet, pounding music, beeping timers, and the din of young voices echoing through the vast hallways of this big brick schoolhouse. I puzzle over the constantly shifting matrix of school names and student initials, all the while incorporating last minute changes, pointing late arrivals vaguely in the direction of the auditorium, where donuts and coffee await them, and fending off unimportant inquiries and requests to “hurry, the students are getting restless.” It is as demanding as playing eight tables of poker at once, and I love every second of it.

Finally, I’m ready to photocopy and distribute the pairings just ten minutes behind schedule. Only a few people notice that I’ve entered the auditorium and ascended the wooden stairs to the podium at center stage, but they quickly start a chorus of shushing the spreads quickly across the disparate huddles of well-dressed teenagers.

“Good morning, everyone. Thanks for your patience. The veterans among you know that it wouldn’t be a BDL tournament without some hectic activity in the morning. But you also know that we usually make up that time over the course of the day and finish ahead of schedule, because I’m just that good.” Usually my faux arrogance is a good for laughs or even a few cheers, but this crowd is anxious to get started. I skip my introductions and get right to business, making a few announcements and then handing out the pairings and the judge’s ballots.

A mob of people, coaches and students alike, converge on the pile of paper at the front of the auditorium. Papers are shuffled, sheets passed back and forth between friends and strangers alike, and everyone is scrambling to gather her things and get to her assigned room. It is now 9:45, and I have told them to start their debates at 9:30.

By 9:50, the auditorium is empty, save for a few coats, backpacks, and crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts boxes. Season Four is officially underway.

There were 10-12 kids in attendance on any given day and a few coaches as well. I was particularly surprised by the latter, because the coaches are all public high school teachers who already do way too much work for not enough money. Far be it from me to pressure them into giving up a week of their summers to spend even more time on debate, but several chose to do so anyway, and my hat’s off to them. Truthfully I’m in awe of most any teacher, and these incredibly caring, dedicated, hard-working people going above and beyond are nothing short of amazing. I spent most of the institute working with them, and I must say it was a privilege.

The high school students were equally cool, though they spent most of their time working with two volunteers from Harvard’s debate team who were with us for the week. Most of them were taking time off from summer jobs to come to the camp, and after spending the first half of the day doing very demanding and intensive debate preparation, when I was more than ready to be done for the day, they’d have to head off to work.

The other impressive thing was that the vast majority of these students knew nothing about debate. I was expecting to get mostly experienced debaters and maybe a few new people, but it was just the opposite. So basically these kids took time off of work or otherwise gave up a week of their summer vacations and followed my vague directions to show up at some classroom on the UMass Boston campus on nothing more than a whim that debate might be interesting to them.

Fortunately, it seems, most of them were correct. Ralph and Leo, our Harvard volunteers, really went above and beyond to make the camp simultaneously fun, interesting, and rigorous. After just a few days, these students put on a very respectable first debate this morning. Obviously there were tons of mistakes, since they were all novices, but I saw so many glimmers of understanding, flashes of intuition, and all-around good instincts!

A few of them in particular stood out. One was a Somali girl who had immigrated to the US when she was 10 years old. Her school wasn’t actually even in the Boston Debate League, but she had done a rather different form of debate and chose to come to the camp anyway. I’m glad she did, because she was a real delight to have around! Though occasionally nervous, she was smart as a whip and had a very mature intellect. When it came to thinking through some of the more complex arguments we considered, she was usually the first to figure things out, and her contributions were invaluable.

Another was John (not his real name), who was pretty disinterested on the first day. But he’d already made the effort to come, and that was worth a lot. By the end of the institute, he’d won the award for Most Improved. According to Ralph and Leo, something clicked for him during his practice round this morning, and suddenly he just making some highly sophisticated arguments. His coach, who’d been coming to the institute as well, told me that John had done more work this week than he did in a full semester of this coach’s class last school year.

Debate does that sometimes, just hooks kids who have never been interested in or done well at school before. It’s one of the most rewarding things to see someone realize for the first time that he is smart. There are these kids who have just never tried very hard, always gotten bad grades, and for that reason earned probably deserved reputations as lackadaisical students. But debate, which is a much more participatory and student-centered activity, though also an extremely rigorous and intellectual one, seizes them in a way that nothing else has. Sometimes this spills over into their schoolwork, but even if it doesn’t, it’s often enough to keep them coming to school, which in turn is often enough to get them a diploma, and that makes a world of difference.

When we first started the League, I treated the awards we gave out at tournaments as an after-thought. As far as I was concerned, participation and education, not competition, were the important things. But it can be a special moment when a kid who has never won anything, not a sports trophy, not a school award, nothing, suddenly finds herself recognized for being smart. It is often not just the student but her family who are surprised, and that single positivite experience can sell someone on debate for a long time.

It was a great week, for them and for me. I spend so much of my time either dealing with the frustrations of poker or doing tedious/annoying administrative work for the League, work that needs to be done but is not the least bit fulfilling and certainly not the reason I started the League in the first place. But events like this, where I see so much development in such a short period of time and can experience vicariously the thrill that kids get when they are wrapped in debate, recharge my battery and help me power through all the other crap I have to do.

The dedication of volunteers like Ralph and Leo and of the teacher-coaches is inspiring, too. I deal so often with well-meaning people who never come through in the way they tell me they will or people who just want to volunteer to do the fun and rewarding stuff rather than the stuff that really needs to get done, and it is refreshing to spend time with the genuinely committ people who really know what it means to help.

The paradigmatic example of this is Leo, who was brought on board by his friend Ralph, initially just to be a third instructor at the institute. As Ralph started soliciting donations for our meals, however, it became clear that we’d sometimes need someone with a vehicle to pick up and deliver food. Leo ended up being that person, so a lot of his time was not spent talking about an activity he loves with a bunch of fun and dedicated students, but rather sitting in traffic and dealing with all the hassles of food delivery while Ralph and I did the fun stuff. And he was always asking if there was more to be done.

The best question, however, came from a group of students who approached us instructors after we’d said our farewells to ask, “Are we going to do this next summer?”

To which another student added, “Yeah, but for more than a just a week!?!?”

Turnout was very good among coaches, for whom we’re running a parallel program. In fact I’m going to be working with them probably exclusively today.

The kids are a great bunch, as you might expect from the strongly self-selecting group of high school students willing to wake up at 6AM and give up a week of their summer vacations to come to a debate camp, especially when almost all of them are brand new to debate. At the risk of sounding corny and/or self-important, I told them that some of them were going to look back on the first day of the camp as a day that changed their lives. Not because of anything special I did, but simply because for the right person, debate is really something that can change the trajectory of her entire life.

I know because it certainly had that effect on me. This year will be my tenth anniversary in debate, and it is strange to think that ten years after attending that first meeting in the interest of chasing tail, I still dedicate so much of my time to thinking about and teaching this great game.

Some background: Emily and I went to high school together, though we didn’t start dating until she was in college at Boston University and I at the University of Chicago. We had a long-distance relationship for three years, seeing each other every few weeks and living together during the summer (once in Boston, once in Maryland, where we’re both from originally).

After graduating, I turned down a full time job working with the Chicago Debate League and the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues so that I could move in with Emily in Boston. At the time, she was working for one of the few Republicans in the Massachusetts Congress, and she later worked on Kerry Healey’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign.

Even while making money playing poker, I made an effort to spend a lot of my time doing stuff that I felt was important. I ended up starting an urban debate league in Boston, which has been the equivalent, time-wise, of a pretty substantial part time job for the last three years. The League has come a long way in the last three years, but there’s a lot to be done. If I were to leave Boston now, a lot of the time and money I’ve invested in the League in the last few years would go to waste.

So when Emily first asked months ago about my plans for the near future, I told her I wanted another year in Boston. Healey’s loss to Deval Patrick in the gubernatorial race meant that come December, Emily was without a job. Frustrated by months of unanswered applications, she started looking for interesting summer jobs, something that would be a break from the office/political work she’d been doing.

What she found instead was this job in Las Vegas, where her prospective employers seemed like pretty cool people who were very eager to hire her full time, year round. I wasn’t happy about it, because I felt like I had given up a very appealing job in Chicago to move to Boston where she had a job lined up, only to get attached to something in Boston and have her looking to leave again.

But I was also forgetting how frustrating it was back a few years ago when I was applying for job after job, pouring hours into scanning listings and sending out resumes to get not so much as an acknowledgement that my application had been received in return. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to end up in a situation where I can make very good money doing something I enjoy, accountable to only myself, and with enough free time for another project that is substantial, fun, rewarding, and valuable. It’s only understandable that Emily wants to find something similar, a job where she is appreciated, where she likes what she is doing and who she is doing it with, and where she isn’t selling her soul to make a living (remember, she’s been working in Republican politics).

It’s hard to begrudge her those things, when I’ve been so fortunate. I make enough money to pay the rent myself, my schedule is flexible enough to allow extended visits with her, and if I’m going to have a home away from home anywhere, it might as well be Las Vegas! It would be pretty selfish of me to refuse to use those benefits to help someone I love achieve similar satisfaction.

So I’m going to spend one more year in Boston while Emily is in Las Vegas. It’s far from certain that even after another year the Boston Debate League will be able to survive my departure, but it is a sure thing that it would fall apart if I left now. I honesty thing another year of advocacy will give it a fighting chance, and even if it doesn’t work out, I will still have introduced that many more students to a valuable, potentially life-changing activity.

Emily is packing now, and on July 7th, we’re going to start a week-long drive to Vegas, taking our time along the way to spend a few half days in places like Niagara Falls and Denver. Unless something comes up to require my presence in Boston, I’m going to stay out there with her through the WSOP main event in early July. I have a lot of research to do, but I’m also looking forward to playing some live tournaments and some internet tournaments on West coast time (100K guarantee starts at 6PM there!!!).

A week ago, I was speculating about some of the non-HE WSOP prelim events and whether I should play them if the conflict with the NLHE ones. But I actually think I have that bass ackwards. There are going to be better NLHE tournaments going on during the same time period (Venetian Deep Stack Series, Binion’s Poker Classic, Bellagio Cup III, Orleans Open), with more generous structures and buyins better suited to my bankroll. But often does one have the opportunity to play a big buy-in Razz tournament? Actually, there are some more affordable non-HE games in those series as well, so I may not end up playing many WSOP prelims at all, especially since I want to play some live ring games as well.

I may not update much during the week we’re on the road, but hopefully we’ll have some fun experiences worthy of a trip report.

There are actually some audio clips also, though they’re hard to find. After the second paragraph, there’s a drop-down box that says “related articles, multimedia, and images.” From there you can select three different audio clips of students debating.

Coming with us is Mandy, a sophomore at Tufts University and volunteer coach at the Josiah Quincy Upper School where Charles and Peter debate. She’s sweet and smart, once you get past her occasional moments of blondness.

JQUS’ other coach, Noah, picked me up from my apartment and then swung by JQUS to grab the kids when they got out of school. We headed straight to the airport and hopped in a quite long AirTran security line. It was at this point that Peter removed from his carry-on luggage the small, clear plastic container in which he’d placed his travel-sized liquids. Among the shampoo and toothpaste were several needles. “What are those?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m allergic to peanuts.” Wow, good to know, since I’m about to be responsible for you for three days. Peter had never flown before, in fact never been more than one state beyond Massachusetts, so he was excited but nervous. I walked him through the process of organizing his luggage for security, unable to shake the feeling that this was the exposition to some sort of narrative, and that I’d soon be experience rising action, a climax, etc. I remembered the advice of a playwright who visited my high school creative writing class: “If you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, you’ve got fire it in third.” If you give a kid a peanut allergy….

Once we’re through security, it dawns on me that airlines often serve peanuts. Peter looked me in the eye and swore up and down that only eating peanuts would trigger an allergic reaction and that it wouldn’t bother him if they were just served on the airplance.

This proved true. I fell asleep during takeoff, woke up about half an hour into the flight, and worked a bit on my laptop until the battery gave out. The flight was about as smooth as you could ask for, and Peter seemed to enjoy it, looking out the window whenever cloud cover broke to admire the view.

We landed without incident and met the folk from the Rhode Island Debate League, who had also been on our flight, at the baggage claim. Our hosts in Atlanta had sent me an e-mail about a shuttle service that would bring us to the airport, but Will, the director of the Rhode Island league, did not have his information with him, so I suggested he follow us and just hop on our shuttle, if possible.

As I attempted to lead my growing pack of ducklings to the shuttle area, I saw another familiar face: David Wiltz, director of the Los Angeles Debate League. I’ve worked with David for several short but intense periods of time during summer debate camps, and he’s one of my favorite people in the world. He’s kind, laid-back, and incredibly genuine, a great teacher and role model for the kids with whom he works.

David’s a grown man with a lovely wife and a brilliant little girl, but he’s still very genuinely in touch with West Coast hip hop style. He’s explicitly told me that, as a black man, he wants to show his students that people who look, dress, and talk like them can get married, start families, and hold ‘respectable’ jobs as well as anyone. It’s a great philosophy and one that I’ve seen work well in action: the LAUDL has attracted the most diverse pool of students I’ve seen in any UDL, drawing in All-American football players and LA gangsters alike.

Responsibility and preparedness, however, and not David’s strong suits. “Andrew, you know how we’re supposed to get to the hotel?” Aaaaaaaah, how do you people just show up in a foreign airport with high school students and no plan for how you will get to your hotel? He and his debaters join the pack, and together we find our shuttle. The driver won’t take more than ten, so the Rhode Island crew ends up waiting for the next one while the rest of us get to the Marriot Courtyard and check in.

My college debate partner, still one of my best friends, currently lives in Atlanta but is about to move to Tanzania. I’m excited to see her one last time, and she’s excited to meet some people from this Boston Debate League I’m always talking about. After we get settled, Emily swings by to pick up Mandy, Charles, Peter, and me and take us out to dinner. Looking for something cheap and quick, we settle on the Steak and Shake.

Peter has mentioned that he’s never heard a southern accent before, and our waitress provides a great introduction. She’s the picture of southern hospitality, a middle aged woman with hair as wide as her smile.

Peter orders a hamburger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake- no peanuts there, right?

The waitress returns and compliments us all on clearing our plates. “Everyone’s hungry tonight, no leftovers for the dog,” she tells us. “My husband keeps saying, ‘save something for Butchie, save something for Butchie.’ I told him, ‘You’re the cook, make a mistake or something!'” With a deep laugh, she drops off of her check and scurries off to a bus a nearby table.

“You don’t look so good,” Charles tells Peter. It’s true: Peter looks like he’s going to be sick and is swaying a bit on his chair.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” he announces.

“This kid. You know what he told me at the airport today? He’s got a peanut allergy. Good to know, right?”

“Andrew, he might be having a reaction now,” Emily tells me in a serious tone that has me worried immediately.

“He didn’t eat any peanuts.”

“I don’t know, maybe the fries were made with peanut oil or something? He doesn’t look good.”

Peter emerges from the bathroom, looking worse. His face is kind of swollen, and he’s still staggering.

“What’s the matter, Peter?”

“Nothing. Just a little disagreement with what I ate.” He starts darting his tongue about his mouth, like a dog who’s just been fed a spoonful of peanut butter.

“Peter, you alright?”

“My throat just feels a little tight. Like, my- what’s the dangly thing? Uvula?”

“Is this what happens with your peanut allergy.”

“Um, I don’t really know,” he says dismissively. “I should just drink some water.” He quickly downs a glass.

“We should get you home.”

“I’ll pay the check.” Emily grabs the slip of paper and takes it up to the register, refusing to take any cash from me.

We get Peter back to his hotel room, and he’s still not looking or feeling well. “What are we supposed to do, Peter, if this is an allergic reaction?”

“Uhm, I don’t really know. It usually passes.” He says this like it’s no big deal at all that he doesn’t know what to do, but I sure as hell don’t, and someone should.

“When are you supposed to take your epipen shot?” My familiarity with this kind of thing is limited to the scene from Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman overdoses on heroin and John Travolta has to jolt her awake with a shot of adrenaline to the heart. In other words, my perception of needles administered by non-professionals is that they are a drastic, emergency measure only.

Peter’s clueless, who can I call? Of course! His mother. It’s well after midnight now, and I’m afraid she won’t answer a call from my unrecognized number, and would be freaked out anyway if I started telling her her son was having an allergic reaction. Peter was born in the US and speaks with English without any accent, but for all I know his mother might speak Mandarin exclusively.

So I instruct Peter to call her. He explains the situation in the same lackadaisical way he’s been talking to me. It doesn’t sound like she knows any more than he does. I meant to ask to speak to her, but he hung up too quickly.

Almost immediately after setting down the phone, Peter rushes into the bathroom and vomits loudly and repeatedly. I’m paralyzed with worry and indecision now. Thankfully some sort of maternal instinct kicks in and Mandy rushes into the bathroom after him to calm him down and clean him up. He rinses out his mouth and tells us he feels better now that it’s out of his system, then goes to take a shower.

I’m still not convinced, and Emily keeps telling me that we don’t want it to get any worse. Finally I decide I need to talk to his mother myself and call her again from Peter’s phone. I introduce myself and tell her immediately that her son is alright, lest she freak out, as I’m sure my mother would be doing in the same situation. She is remarkably calm, and, thankfully, speaks and understand English with near-perfect clarity.

“He just threw up, and his face is looking swollen. He says his throat feels kind of tight, also. I just wanted to speak with you myself and get your opinion on the situation. I’m happy to take him to the hospital if you think that would be appropriate now.”

“Hmmm, well his allergist did say we should take him to the hospital next time he shows any symptoms of allergic reaction.”

“Then that’s what I’m inclined to do.”

“OK. Just a moment, I’ll get you his insurance information. Oooh, I almost gave him his insurance card, but I thought, ‘It’s just a few days.'” Yeah. I guess a more responsible chaperone wouldn’t have taken a minor across state lines without that information, huh? I reassure her again that he seems fine but I want to be safe and make sure it doesn’t get any worse. She’s still calm and helpful, and I assure her that I’ll have Peter call once we’ve got anything new to report. After giving her my name and number, I hang up.”

“I’ll go get directions and the car,” Emily says as she walks out of the room.

Peter emerges from the bathroom in shorts and t-shirt, hair dripping. “I spoke with your mom again. You need to get dressed, we’re going to take you to the hospital.” He doesn’t look happy about this, but my tone makes clear that it’s not debatable.

“Charles, unless you badly want to come, I think it’s best for you to stay here. Mandy, Iwould like you come with me.” Both agree, and I leave Chris with Will’s phone and room numbers in case he needs anything. I call Will to tell him what’s up and ask him to check in on Charles, then Mandy and I take Peter out to the car where Emily is waiting.

The roads are empty and the directions simple, so we find the hospital without incident. I’ve never been to the ER (actually once as a baby but I obviously don’t remember that), but I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories about how long one might wait with a non-emergency condition. Consequently, I’ve come prepared with my laptop, notepad, and book. Thankfully, however, the place is empty. We sign in, Peter beelines for the bathroom, and they are calling his name before he’s out.

A very friendly nurse takes his vitals and asks about his condition. “What are you allergic to, sweetie?” Though he’s a 17-year old junior, Peter’s a tiny guy with a baby face that seems to trigger the maternal instincts of every woman he meets.

“Peanuts.”

“How long you been allergic to peanuts?”

“Um, a long time I guess.”

“Well, how’d you end up with peanuts?” she asks in a half-nagging, half-teasing tone.

We explain the situation. “Do you have any prescriptions?”

“Um, no. I carry epipens.”

“Did you take one?”

“I didn’t have it with me.”

“I have an allergy myself, so I know. You gotta keep ’em with you,” she says sternly, then cracks into a guilty smile. “Do I have one on me now? No, but I’m bad. You should keep them on you.”

“I know.”

“OK, a room just opened up in back, so we should be able to take him in a few minutes. Let us know if he starts to have trouble breathing,” she tells me. I thank her and take Peter back to the waiting room where Emily is.

We barely have time to tell her what’s happened before a nurse calls Peter’s name. Mandy and I both stand up and start to follow. “I can only take on of you.”

“Only one?”

She sighs and smiles. “Alright, come on,” gesturing to both of us. She’s moving quick, so I don’t really get a chance to talk to Emily, but I know I don’t need to. She’s waiting, without a book or anything, for as long as she needs to, and she’s not going to leave even if I tell her to. This is such a stark contrast to many of the volunteers and others I work with for the Boston Debate League. There are a lot of people who want to help, but everyone wants to do the fun or interesting stuff rather than the stuff that really needs to get done. Really helping is sitting in a hospital waiting room with nothing to read and no idea of how long you’ll be simply because someone needs you to be there at that moment.

A different nurse, also very friendly and gentle, gives Peter a gown and sets him on a bed. She looks him over again, asks a lot of similar questions, and says a doctor will be in soon. The doctor is a middle-aged Asian man with a heavy southern drawl. It’s a very strange combination of features, sufficiently so to be distracting even under the circumstances. The nurse returns quickly with a needle and tells Peter, with a bit of an embarassed smile, “I’m going to need to see your bottom.”

Blushing, Mandy and I duck out for a minute. When we return, Peter is zipping up his fly and then fidgeting uncomfortably while trying to sit on the bed. “We’ll need to give him one more shot, but we’ve got to get it ready first,” the nurse says as he leaves.

Peter needs to go the bathroom, so I follow him and wait just outside. While I’m waiting, I get a call from an unfamiliar 617 number on my cell phone. Figuring it’s Peter’s mom, I answer and update her on the situation. Her son emerges, and I pass him the phone. While we’re talking, the nurse signals to me that she’s ready with his shot. I tell Peter.

“Mom, they want to give me epiphedrine [sp?], should I take it?” Um, Peter, I didn’t get the impression this was optional. He asks again, and starts explaining something. I ask for the phone back.

“Hello? Yes, this shot wasn’t really presented as an optional thing.”

“Yes, I thought that was strange, but Peter kept me asking me, like a question.”

“Yeah, that’s why I took back the phone.” She laughs.

“OK, thank you for taking care of him.”

“No problem, I’m just glad I got a hold of you.” So true. I would have been very uncomfortable taking Peter to the hospital and authorizing shots without his mother’s permission.

They give him one more injection and tell us they’ll check back in half an hour. If his symptoms have gone away, they’ll be able to discharge him. He doesn’t look good at the moment: there are hives all over his neck and some on his inner arms as well. Mandy keeps telling him that he looks like hell, which is making him nervous. He starts shivering uncontrollably, but when I ask, he says he isn’t cold. I don’t want to worry him, but I’m starting to worry myself. Fortunately, the doctor is just outside and happy to check in. “Nervousness is a very common side effect of benadryl. Nothing to worry about.”

After twenty minutes, the swelling is down, but apparently not as far as it should have been. They give Peter another shot, and after another twenty minutes, we’re good to go. There’s Emily in the waiting room, smiling to see Peter walking around and looking better. She’s been sitting for like two and a half hours now, what a trooper. She drives us back to the hotel, unable to resist asking whether anyone wants to stop at the Steak and Shake.

Mandy takes Peter upstairs, and I stay outside for a moment to talk to Emily. She’s spent summers and even a full year once in Africa, but now she’s going indefinitely. We were very close in college, and even though I’ve only seen her a handful of times since we graduated, it’s very strange looking at her now, thanking her for being such a good friend tonight, and thinking that I don’t know when I’ll see her again.

“I’ll be in the DC area Christmastime.” Good to know. “Sorry we didn’t get to hang out much tonight.”

“Well the hospital was fun, too.”

“Yeah.”

“Good luck in Tanzania.”

“Thanks. Good night.”

I walk back inside. Mandy’s on the hotel phone. I shoot her a quizzical look. “Charles has the deadbolt on their door, and we’re trying to wake him up. Peter’s calling his cell.” Finally Peter answers the phone, meaning he’s made it into the room.

I’m about to head up myself when I hear “Brokos?”

“Holy shit, Aaron Davis.” Aaron is one of the best debaters I’ve ever taught. He’s also one of the most annoying, because he knows he’s one of the best. Don’t get me wrong, I love and respect him, but I HATE watching him debate. He’s arrogant and patronizing and rude and it’s so frustrating because he could be so good but he always tries to win on cheap shots. But I’m thrilled to see him, I really am, and I give him a hug.

I should say that Aaron is a rare breed, a black man who was openly gay at a rough high school. I have to respect that. But he’s in college at Pomona now, which seems to have given him license to flame it up. He’s got a ball cap pivoted about 130 degrees around his head, t-shirt tied up around his mid-riff, and a hint of a straggly, black goatee decorating his chin.

Apparently Chicago’s Payton High School, which is ‘urban’ in the strict sense of being in a city but not really educationally or financially disadvantaged in the sense that people tend to think of when they hear “urban public school,” has hired Aaron to coach their team at this event. Good to see him, but it’s 3 AM and I need to get some sleep.

David left the hall light on for me. Awwwwwwwwww.

The purpose of Tuesday’s luncheon was to build that capacity. The NAUDL’s staff and Board members have a lot of expertise and experience with this sort of thing, which I do not. Their Board draws heavily on former debaters who went on to business or law school at Harvard University, which means that specifically they are well-connected in the Boston region.

I knew the NAUDL’s contribution to the event was going to be substantial, but I was still shocked by just how impressive it was. One of our guests expressed surprise that Harvard Law School was still in session, what with so much of their faculty at our luncheon, including Louis Kaplow, Sonja Starr, and Larry Tribe. For many, he will need no introduction, but for those who don’t know, Larry Tribe is one of the most prominent lawyers in the country, having argued before the Supreme Court in such landmark cases as Bowers v. Hardwick (where he challenged the constitutionality of anti-sodomy statutes) and Bush v. Gore.

I knew Larry was going to be there but had never met him before and had no idea what he looked like. We were expecting more than twenty guests, most of whom I had never met, but the moment Larry walked into the room, I knew it was him. He’s a small man, somewhat short and fit (though another guest commented that he had lost a good deal of weight, so that may be a recent development), with a tremendous presence about him. Sporting a handsome and well-tailored suit, he really seemed to exude confidence and competence. Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “Masters of the Universe” to refer to brokers and other Wall Street types, but the term leapt to my mind immediately upon shaking Larry’s hand.

The esteemed attorney, however, also came across as extraordinarily kind, gracious, and humble. I can only imagine what kind of hourly rate this man pulls down as a consultant, and here he is attending a luncheon for our little organization for the sole purpose of learning how he might able to help us more in the future. It’s really unbelievable.

This also demonstrates the potent gravitational pull of the debate world. It’s been decades since Mr. Tribe and some of our other guests participated in this activity, but they still remember it fondly and attribute much of their current success to their participation. A commonly echoed sentiment, and one with which I can sympathize, was that, “debate changed the trajectory of my life.” I know literally hundreds of people who would agree with this statement, which reminds me of why I’m so committed to expanding access for those who have the most to gain from it.

On that note, I had brought with me two students from the Boston Debate League to speak to our guests about their experiences and how they feel debate has helped them. Both were seniors, young black men in their late teens from low income families. One of them, Charles, is in his third year of debate and was one of the very first students to join the League during our inaugural season. The other, Stephen, is finishing up his first and only year of high school debate (both of these names are pseudonyms).

Looking at them in contrast to the rest of the room, I had to wonder to what extent they felt like a part of this debate fraternity. Nearly everyone in attendance was a former debater, and most were white men of middle age or older. Those who weren’t already wealthy were certainly well on their way, with connections to prominent institutions like Harvard University.

I had prepped them ahead of time, and the kids understood their role as both spokespeople for the League and evidence of our accomplishments. The very fact that they were able to speak extemporaneously, coherently, and persuasively to this distinguished audience was proof that we were doing something right, after all.

Charles thanked me afterwards for the opportunity and told me he was honored to have been chosen. Still, I couldn’t help but wander what that room looked like to them. Did they see their own futures, debaters who had parlayed a valuable extracurricular activity into prestigious and lucrative careers? Or did they see foreigners, people separated from them by the great gulfs of wealth, money, and power?

And how did I look as I, also a white man who for some reason could afford to volunteer so much time and money (they don’t know that I play poker), worked the room, introducing myself to the illuminati and thanking them for their support? Did they see me as a fellow-in-arms, playing the same game they were to try to direct some of this wealth and influence towards their less fortunate peers? Or was I just another white guy glad-handing the good ol’ boys as they looked on silently?

Driving in the Boston area is something that I usually avoid, and with good reason. Streets rarely run in a straight line for more than a few blocks, and they are known to change names or make sudden turns such that by going straight, you might leave Cambridge Street and end up on Dorchester Avenue. If you were later to find a road called “Cambridge Street”, it might not be the same road you left, as you may have crossed into Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, or another neighboring city that re-uses street names Boston has already used for other streets. That, of course, assumes you find a sign at an intersection at all.

An intersection might well be the convergence of six roads, two of which come to an end, one of which changes names, and one of which doubles back on itself at a two hundred degree angle. Needless to say, when there are signs at all, they are a confusing maze of circles and arrows that cause motorists to slam on their breaks and veer suddenly across three roads of traffic. It’s a delight.

After picking up five dozen donuts, twenty-five Munchkins, and three Boxes o’ Joe from the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I began what should have been a twenty-minute drive to the Dorchester Education Complex. Armed only with Google Maps directions, I arrived forty-five minutes later to find a handful of students, one volunteer judge, and one of the teachers from the Academy of Public Service (our host school), standing around outside. “I take it you aren’t just enjoying the fresh air?” I asked them.

Dan, the teacher, shook his head mournfully. “I just called the headmaster, he’s going to be here in a few minutes.” Fortunately, it was a nice day, already in the fifties at 8AM and sunny. I broke out the coffee and donuts, only to find that Dunkin’ Donuts had not given me cups, cream, sugar, or napkins. A lot of coffee was about to go to waste.

A few minutes later, Zac, the headmaster, showed up to let us in the building. In my five years of working around urban education, I’ve rarely met anyone as capable and dynamic as Zac. He took over as headmaster when Dorchester High School, with the help of a Gates Foundation grant, broke down into three small schools inside the same building. One of those schools, the Academy of Public Service, got off the ground just one year before the Boston Debate League, and was still searching for its identity. To my delight, I learned that Zac wanted to build the school around forensics and public speaking, and we had several conversations about how debate might fit into that vision.

I’ve never seen a headmaster as committed to his school’s debate team. Despite working what are probably sixty hour weeks, he comes to all of our competitions, walks around to watch all of our students debate, stops to talk to me about his school and the direction of the League, and as a member of the Boston Debate League’s Advisory Board, does what he can to advocate for and promote our organization.

The results of his commitment and dedication are plain to see. The Academy of Public Service, despite its geographical location in what is derogatorily known as ‘Dumbchester’ among Boston youth, has the largest and one of the most competitive teams in the League. They’ve got a great coaching staff who certainly deserve a lot of the credit, but Zac’s fingerprints can be seen as well. He treats the debate team as a component of the school culture that is every bit as important as the football or basketball teams. He buys embroidered vests for the team, prominently displays their trophies in a case in the hallway and in his office, and meets with them all individually every week.

This isn’t necessarily a replicable model. Zac is a young, charismatic, deeply caring black man. All of those characteristics help him to relate to his students in ways that other headmasters, no matter how competent and well-intentioned, might not be able to do. But what he does works, and his team is better off for it.

Once I’m inside the building, it’s time to tackle the next problem. The coach of each team submits to me on the Wednesday prior to a tournament the names of the students who will be competing for her school. As you might guess, however, there’s quite a bit of variation between the students registered on Wednesday and the students who show up on Saturday morning. For instance, I was still trying to find the school when I got a call from a coach telling me not one of the five students she had registered would be competing today.

Then there are other students who don’t show up, or show up late, or show up but were not registered on Wednesday. Technically, I am supposed to turn all of these students away. But our participation has been low enough this year that I can’t afford to do that, so I delay the start of the first round (our schedule has time built into it for just such delays) and redo the schedule that I put together last night. The only reason I bother doing it the night before is so that I will have something to work with in the event that my computer breaks or we’re locked out of the building for over an hour in the morning or anything else catastrophic happens.

We finally get the first of three debate rounds underway about fifteen minutes after their scheduled start time. A debate round consists of two students from one school arguing against two students from another school for nearly ninety minutes while a volunteer evaluates their efforts and chooses a winner at the end. Many of our volunteers are college debaters or former high school debaters now in college, which presented a problem, as many universities are on Spring Break this weekend.

There was a silver lining, however, in that this forced me to reach out to some new sources of volunteers who had not worked with the League before. In particular, we got two black students from Boston University Law School, one of whom had eight years of debate experience between high school and college! Of course we appreciate any volunteers we get, but I’m always conscious of the fact that so many of the coaches, judges, and administrators, myself included, are white, while so many of the debaters are not. It definitely helps to dispel common myths and stereotypes about debate when we have more diversity among our adult employees and volunteers.

On a similar note, I was glad to have back as a volunteer judge an alumnus from the very first season of the Boston Debate League. Two years after graduating from high school, Chris is pursuing a BS in Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales College. I called him largely out of the blue because Zac had invited some important people from Boston Public Schools to the tournament and wanted to have some alumni from the League for them to meet. In particular, he said, they would want to meet young black males, a key demographic in urban politics.

I hadn’t seen Chris in two years, and frankly one thing I’ve learned from putting this League together over the last few years is that even people whom you’d expect to be very reliable often fail to come through for you in crucial ways. So I was happily surprised when he immediately agreed to drive up from Rhode Island for the afternoon. Although in my opinion a former debater in the League ought to feel some responsibility to help out after graduating, this has generally not been the case, and in fact I’ve had a lot of difficulty staying in touch with our alumni. I was really touched that Chris was willing to go to such great effort with so little prompting. It’s so rare that you find people who really will come through in a pinch, and I have great respect for anyone who does.

Chris wasn’t able to make it in time for the first round, but was happy to judge the second and then be on hand to speak with any dignitaries who came. The only guest we ended up having was a woman invited by me, not Zac, but because she was the vice-president of the Boston Schools Committee, she was quite an important guest. I told Chris she was around and he told me he’d seek her out and schmooze her.

I found the two of them watching the same debate and went to introduce them. Before I could say anything, Chris blatantly pointed at her and said, “Is this that lady you wanted me to talk to?” Subtle. They seemed to hit it off well, though, and I think she was generally impressed with what she saw. She stuck around for the awards ceremony and announced some of our winners, so we were able to get a lot of good pictures of her with our debaters.

The event was a little bittersweet for me because, since I won’t be at the City Championships (I need to take two of our debaters to a national competition in Atlanta the same weekend), this was the last time I may see some of the debaters there. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, because that’s not my style, but I did wish them all well and tell them how proud I was.

That’s no exaggeration, either. There are few things that people fear more than public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke that, since public speaking is America’s number one fear and death is number two, most people, if at a funeral, would prefer to be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. I’m thoroughly impressed by any high school student, especially one from a school, home, and/or neighborhood culture where academic pursuits are sometimes discouraged, who is willing to join her school’s debate team and share her opinions in public.

I’m on my way out the door when my phone rings. I’m terrified that this will be someone canceling on me at the last minute, but it’s just Ho asking for directions by public transportation.

When I get to Faneuil Hall, I’m relieved to see that Carla, who I am expecting to be the least prepared, is first to arrive. Better yet, she tells me she’s got her whole first speech written and wants me to look at it.

It turns out to be a very detailed and dry history of Supreme Court litigation concerning school segregation. A lot of it does not appear to be in her words, though there are no quotes or citations. (By the way, I hesitate to call this plagiarism, though I guess technically it is, because I don’t believe it was her intent to pass off the work as her own. When I pointed out that she needed to cite her sources, she was happy to do so, and in general I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge about proper research and citation among the students I’ve worked with. Once teacher showed me papers he was grading where bibliographies included sources such as “termpapers.com”.)

I explain to Carla that she needs to cut out a lot of the history and focus more on making arguments about the current state of affairs. She’s surprisingly calm about the fact that I’ve just told her to rewrite her speech two hours before show time. Conveniently enough, the volunteer I wanted to have work with her shows up just then, so I introduce the two of them and then get to work preparing the stage for the public debates.

The good folks at Faneuil Hall have provided us with two long tables and a beautifully carved wooden podium. I ask if it’s alright to move the podium, and the property manager tells me, “Just be careful, it’s only held together by wooden pegs.” I shove it gingerly across the stage, all the while worrying that with my luck, I’ll be the one to destroy Samuel Adams’ lectern.

Surveying the stage now, it occurs to me that a single high school student might get pretty nervous sitting at the long table all by herself with dozens of people staring at her. So even though these debates will be one on one (unlike most of our competitions, which are two on two), I decide to suggest that each debater invite another student from her school to sit at the table with her during her debate for moral support. Carla in particular looks relieved when I suggest this.

It’s now 9:15, and nine of my ten debaters are here. The only one missing is Ho. His teacher is here, but she hasn’t heard from him. Just then, my phone rings again, and I answer to hear Ho tell me, “I just want to tell you, I am going to be fifteen minutes late.”

“You’re fifteen minutes late now, Ho.”

He’s silent for a minute. “I am going to be thirty minutes late.”

“Alright,” I can’t help but laugh. I know he’s plenty prepared already, so I’m not too worried about it, though Carla is really antsy to meet him and find out what exactly he’ll be arguing. Unlike the regular debate tournaments our students attend, this event is intended to be more about drama than debate. I don’t want the students worrying about who wins or trying to make each other look stupid on stage, so I’m giving them a chance to meet their opponents and run through their debates ahead of time. This proves very popular, as everyone is nervous and quite willing to strike a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal with her opponent.

When Ho finally arrives (nearly an hour late), he is looking very sharp in a dark suit and handsome tie. I’m wearing a Brooks Brothers that set me back a couple hundred dollars at 50% off, but I can’t disagree when he looks me up and down, straightens his tie, smiles, and says, “Ah ha, now I show you up!”

With about a half hour to go, I take all the students up on stage with me to show them where they’ll sit and stand and when. The sound guy we hired gives them a quick tutorial on how to adjust the height of the microphones, how close to put their mouths to them, etc., which is a great idea and something that hadn’t occurred to me. As he pointed out, it’s one less thing for them to be nervous about when they’re up there.

The last thing I explain is how to handle the audience. They are accustomed to being cross-examined by their opponents after a speech. For the public debate, however, the audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions, which means they could be asked pretty much anything. We go over some strategies for dealing with off-the-wall questions or things they just don’t know how to answer.

“First off, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. If a question is really tangential, everyone will realize that, and you won’t look bad for saying, ‘I’m not prepared to answer that,’ or, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information,’ or something along those lines.

The other thing you can do is have some talking points. Have you ever seen politicians answer questions? “

“They don’t,” Ho interjects.

“Exactly. They smile, nod, say ‘Very good question,’ and then just say whatever they want to say, even if it has nothing to do with the question. So I’d suggest that you each think about important points you want to emphasize during cross-examination, and then if you get any questions out of left field, you can just brush it off and go to your talking points.”

As of 11AM, our scheduled start time, we still don’t have much of an audience. I take a look outside, and heavy winds are gusting heavy snowflakes through the crisp Boston air. Nothing’s sticking on the ground, but it looks and feels like a blizzard. No wonder so few people have chosen to come out. Oh well.

The emcee for the event, the headmaster of one of the schools in the League, thanks everyone for coming and then introduces the guest moderator for the first debate. As much preparation as we’ve done with the students in the debate, we’ve done very little with the guest moderators, and it shows. Despite my wild gesticulating from the back of the room, she lets the cross-examination of the first speaker go on for way too long, then thanks the students for a great debate and starts giving her closing remarks.

I run over to the foot of the stage and wait for an opportunity to interrupt her and tell her there are still three more speeches left. She blushes a bit and introduces the second speaker, who gives her four minute speech and then takes some questions from the audience. Now, with two speeches left to go, the moderator says, “Sorry about trying to cut you off prematurely before, now thank you both for a great debate,” and starts to leave the stage. I don’t have the heart to embarrass her again, and we’re already behind schedule, so I just mouth, “Don’t worry about it,” to the students on stage, who are shooting me confuzzled looks. Neither seems too disappointed to leave the stage without delivering a rebuttal speech, though.

After that things go smoothly, and the audience fills out a bit more. Mostly they are friends and family of the people in the debate, but occasionally some tourists come in and sit for a speech or two, which is very cool. Faneuil Hall is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Boston, and though it’s technically closed to them for our event today, we told the officers outside to invite anyone who came to see the building to come in and watch a bit of the debates. Faneuil Hall is, after all, of interest to the tourists precisely because it was a public forum where issues of pressing national importance were debated.

As the fourth debate is drawing to a close, I pull Carla and Ho out of the audience and line them up at the foot of the stage, ready to be introduced. Ho is fine about going up on stage alone, but Carla, even with a friend at her side, is shaking like a leaf. “Andrew, I don’t know this!” she whines. It’s very, very tempting to make a comment about she maybe could have started preparing before last night, but that’s not going to make a difference now, so I just tell her she’ll be fine. She looks less than reassured as the guest moderator for her debate announces her name and she takes the stage, clutching at her friend’s hand.

Ho is the first to speak, and he does a great job. We worked together on a brief opening, but he’s revised it since Thursday, and it’s better than ever. He introduces himself and his school, provides some quick background on the desegregation cases now before the Supreme Court, and dives right into his arguments against forced integration.

“Although forced integration schemes were intended to desegregate schools, the have ironically caused more segregation by driving students out of urban school systems,” he begins, and I smile. “Take my school, for example. In the 1970’s it was a white school, like 90%. Now, only 7% of students are white.”

This is killer stuff. For these debates, I tried to choose topics that were of national interest and importance but still personal and relevant to the students. Frankly, there’s nothing all that special about getting some people to talk about a random issue. This event is supposed to be a celebration of the voices and opinions of Boston’s young people, and it’s really, really good to hear some personal experiences brought into the debate.

When his four minutes are up, Ho confidently announces, “I am open for cross-examination.” Carla lobs him a few softball questions, and I can see immediately that his answers are scripted. Fine by me, but as soon as the floor is opened to the audience, things get rough. One of Ho’s teachers is in attendance, and with an impish grin, he rises from his seat.

“You argue that as America becomes more diverse, schools will naturally become more integrated. But the country is much more diverse than it was in 1954, yet schools have not been as segregated as they are now since the Brown decision. How can you be sure that this trend will change in the next fifty years?”

“Could you repeat that please?” I know damn well that Ho understood the question the first time, and I can see the wheels spinning in his head as his teacher struggles to rephrase.

“What assurance do you have that more diversity in the country will mean more integration in schools? Haven’t we seen just the opposite in the last fifty years?”

“Ah! That is a very good question. But I feel it is better to let integration happen naturally, because when you force it, you can actually make schools more segregated.”

With a knowing smile, the teacher sits back down, seemingly satisfied with his student’s stalling and evasion tactics.

Now it’s Carla’s turn to speak, and there’s an awkward silence as she fumbles to adjust the microphone. Once she starts talking, though, she sounds good, real good. Remnants of the history lesson, with proper citation, remain, but her speech is now chock full of strong arguments as well. The only indication of her nervousness is some slightly excessive pausing between sentences, and I’m confident that 75% of the audience doesn’t even notice.

Carla handles her cross-examination gracefully, turns over the floor to Ho for his rebuttal, and then concludes the debate with a strong rebuttal of her own. Now it’s my turn to take the stage for the first time all day to join Alan Khazei, co-founder of City Year and keynote speaker at the event, in handing out medals to all of the participants. “Nice job,” I tell Carla as I shake her hand and Dr. Khazei drapes a medal around her neck.

“Shut up, I sucked,” she smiles, taking her place alongside the others.

Afterwards, there is a lot of milling around and picture taking. As a way of reassuring them, I had promised the debaters that they’d have a sympathetic audience, since everyone would be there because they were interested in the debates. That turned out to be not entirely true, as Ho’s teacher had offered extra credit to her students if they came to the event. About half a dozen of them showed up and were (understandably) completely disinterested in the debates, sleeping or whispering quietly to each other the entire time. I didn’t really care since they filled out the audience and weren’t disruptive.

What was surprising was the way they treated Ho afterwards. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was a rock star: they all wanted to have their picture taken with him, shake his hand, congratulate him, etc. To the best of my knowledge, these were not friends of Ho’s or members of the debate team or even honors students, they were just random kids who knew him from school.

It’s a common assumption, one that I’ll admit to harboring when I first started working with the Chicago Debate League, that urban public schools students would have no interest in a debate team. In an environment where kids are supposed to be ‘hard’ and show no interest in academics or education, who would want to join a debate team? Even other nerds at my suburban high school poked fun at me on occasion.

But the truth is that you’ll find as many bright, articulate, outgoing, and/or intellectual students as you would anywhere else. And unlike at schools in more affluent areas, where college-bound students are offered multiple AP courses and a bevy of academically-oriented after-school activities, these students have fewer outlets. Sometimes you get these kids, sometimes even ones who have never done well in school before, who just fall in love to with debate because it is so different from anything that’s been available to them before. It’s tough and rigorous but it also very open-ended, so they can pursue arguments they are interested in and really be in control of what they are learning and doing in ways that they can’t in a classroom.

OK, tangent over. Bottom line: the event went well in a lot of ways, and the students surprised me by demonstrating some skills that I wasn’t sure they had acquired. I wish there was more of an audience, but now that we’ve done it once and ironed out the kinks, hopefully in future years we can put more effort into publicizing it.

After graduating from college, I turned down an offer of a full-time job with benefits (not a wise thing for a kid with a degree in philosophy to do) in the urban debate field so that I could be with my girlfriend in Boston. I missed the debate league, though, and so along with a friend of mine, I started a similar one in Boston. Two years later, six schools and about sixty students participate in our debate competitions.

Anyway, last Saturday we put on a series of public debates at Faneuil Hall, an historic building in Boston where Samuel Adams argued for revolution, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass argued for abolition, and Susan B. Anthony argued for women’s suffrage. I was obviously very excited to have my students become a part of the tradition of great debate at Faneuil Hall, but there was a lot of preparation to be done getting them ready to debate in front of an audience (generally, a single judge is the only witness to their debating).

Ten students from four different schools debated five different topics in a series of one-on-one debates. Although I provided them with background reading and some advice about how to prepare more than a month ago, I’ve worked with high schoolers long enough to know better than to expect that they will have done much of anything until I sit down with them and make them do it. So in the weeks before the event, I visited all of their schools to talk to the participants in person and explain what they would be doing and how they should prepare.

Two weeks before show time, I visited South Boston high school to meet with three of the public debaters. Although I recognize the faces of most of my debaters, I’m more of an administrator than a teacher or coach these days, so I don’t know them personally as well as I would like. It’s something I miss a lot. So although I knew who Carla (not her real name) was, it was almost like I was meeting her for the first time on this particular Wednesday.

Carla is in her first year of debate, and with only two competitions under her belt, is one of the least experienced students participating in the public debate. However, her coach, a wiry, balding, middle-aged history teacher who is also a boxer, ice hockey player, and lawyer, described her to me, in this thick Boston accent, as a “wookhaas” [workhorse] and assured me she’d be ready.

As I expected, she knew virtually nothing about her assigned topic, which was to argue that the Supreme Court should not prevent school districts from taking a student’s race into consideration when assigning her to a school. (For those who don’t know, two separate cases, one originating in Louisville and one in Seattle, are before the Supreme Court this term. In both cases, the school districts were seeking actively to integrate their schools by prohibiting, for instance, more black students from attending public schools that were already disproportionately black.)

When the Supreme Court first ruled in Brown v Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, it provoked massive conflict in the American South, where the only thing keeping black and white students separate were the laws prohibiting them from attending the same schools. In the North, however, neighborhoods were sufficiently segregated that the ruling had little effect, and with or without laws enforcing segregation, white students went to white schools and black students to black schools.

In the 1970’s, the Court started pursuing integration more actively, ordering the busing of students across major cities from white neighborhoods to black schools and vice versa. There were protests and riots akin to those seen two decades ago in the South, and in few places was the rioting worse than in South Boston, a working class white neighborhood.

Carla and I discussed this history a bit but talked mostly about the continued segregation of public schools in the US. Boston abandoned its controversial busing in favor of an “open enrollment” scheme where any Boston public high school student could end up at any high school in the city as a result of a complex preferencing system, similar in many ways to those in Louisville in Seattle, but with the important distinction that race is not a factor in the final assignment. Though the neighborhood of South Boston remains largely white, whites are now a minority at South Boston High. At least once year to this day, a teacher at the school tells me, students arrive at their school one morning to find graffiti reading, “Niggers go home. Keep Southie white.”

Carla is a pretty Hispanic girl, clearly very intelligent. She was flattered to be chosen as a participant in the event and blushed when I told her all the reasons she was selected (this to make her less nervous about speaking in front of an audience.) I don’t know how long her family has been in the US, but I’m guessing she is not first generation, given how well she speaks English.

I ask if anyone has any more questions, and Carla asks if I will be back next week. I wasn’t planning on it, but when she promises to have a draft of her speech typed up for me to review, I can’t say no. “I want to have everything finished by Monday, so I won’t have to worry about it,” she tells me. Add responsibility to her list of character traits.

On Friday, I realize that Monday is Martin Luther King day, and schools are closed. I call Carla’s coach and arrange to visit the school on Wednesday instead. On Tuesday night, I get a call from a reporter interested in doing a story on the public debate. I invite her to come with me to South Boston the next day, and she agrees.

When I arrive on Wednesday, two of the three students in Saturday’s debate, including Carla, are absent. Her coach tells me Carla hasn’t been in school all week. “What are the odds that she won’t show up on Saturday?”

“She’ll be thah,” he assures me.

I promised the reporter, who is from a local NPR affiliate, a chance to hear run-throughs of Saturday’s speeches. The only public debater present is Nina (not her real name), who is going to be advocating for guest worker legislation. I ask if she is ready to practice her first, four minute speech.

“Um, not quite.”

“Just give it your best.”

She stares at the reporter’s gigantic boom mic. “I have a question first.”

I walk over to stand next to Nina and look over her shoulder at her notes. “What’s up?”

“What’s guest worker legislation?”

Thankfully, as a radio reporter, our guest has no video camera to record the look of horror that flashes across my face. Not wanting to panic Nina, I do my best to explain the issue to her calmly and emphasize the importance of reading up on it in the next two days.

Although she didn’t get to hear as much public debate preparation as I’d promised, the reporter seemed really impressed with what she saw anyway. While I worked with some other students on the team, she interviewed Nina and the coach, and then when the students left, she interviewed me.

My philosophy is that the students make the best salespeople for the Boston Debate League. It’s virtually impossible to speak to them without being impressed by how smart, articulate, and outgoing they are. Consequently, I do what I can to encourage media coverage to focus on them rather than on me.

The story of a kid who plays poker to support a debate league for inner city youth seems like it might be a bit too enticing, so when she asks if running the League is a full-time job for me, I just tell her, “It feels that way sometimes.” Thankfully she laughs and moves on.

To be continued