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?

Jamie and I created this video as part of a year-end fundraising campaign for the Bay Area Urban Debate League. Donations are always welcome!

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.

Some Baltimore city high school students said they believe there is a connection between crime and “gangsta rap” music, and the issue was hotly debated Tuesday among teenagers who have opposing views on the issue.

The Baltimore League, along with one or two others, is pretty much the envy of every other UDL in the other country. They’ve got a program with extraordinary reach, involving every public high school and many middle schools in the city and with strong connections to the public school system, the state university system (particularly Towson University), and the local media. A few years ago, they even managed to get a piece on 60 Minutes which to this day is one of the promotional materials of choice for every UDL in the country.

The Baltimore Sun also covered the debate and hammered home the point about just how large and successful the BUDL is:

Organizers of the event tapped students from the Baltimore Urban Debate League – a nonprofit organization that helps students acquire debate skills and that works with about 1,000 students a year in about 60 city schools. The program targets teenagers who are in danger of dropping out of school and helps them become strong debaters and better students, said the league’s executive director, Pam Spiliadis.

Spiliadis said the strongest students travel to regional and national competitions.

“Ninety percent of our students graduate and 90 percent go on to college,” Spiliadis said. “Which is quite different than the general statistics in the city.”

“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!

“Touhey exchanged a series of emails with Carol Jones of the New York firm Bazan PR in which Jones confirmed that she had allocated 60 seats for the D.C. students. But when Touhey and the students arrived at the theater Monday evening, they were told that the seats were all taken by others who had been sent passes to the movie.

“Despite the fact that a guest list had been demanded and that the students and teachers were in line, the lists were not used to let people into the theater,” says Touhey, a former teacher at Cardozo High School. “When I asked why I had been required to provide a list, I was told that this was to justify the numbers [of seats] that I had been offered. When I protested that the students had done what they were supposed to do and that Bazan was not living up to its obligation, Ms Jones said that she would try to get some passes for the opening day.””

I first heard about this not long after it happened. Since their screening was Monday night, the day before ours, I had the opportunity to speak by phone with my contact from Allied Publicity (not the same company with whom Colin Touhey was dealing) and confirm that we did indeed have VIP seats reserved for our organization.

I don’t know the details of the arrangement that DC had, but the BDL got both some reserved seats and some general admission passes. Thankfully the theater didn’t fill up, because our VIP seats were ‘reserved’ by nothing more than sheets of paper sitting on the chair at the end of each row, and from what I could tell they were easily ignored. Still, all the Allied Publicity people I dealt with were very helpful, and in fact they were initially not letting anyone except members of our group into the theater. We ended up seating about 70 people even though only 40 seats were specifically reserved for us.

The one issue that did come up in Boston was that the whole thing was very last minute. The location wasn’t confirmed until four days before the screening, and up until they day of I wasn’t clear on the logistics of what we needed to do to claim our VIP and other seats when we arrived at the theater. I can easily see how similar last-minute planning combined with a larger crowd and less helpful staff could have led to DC’s situation.

It’s hard to say whether the publicity company is really at fault there, but I can definitely see why Colin went to the media with this when the PR woman didn’t respond to his complaint, and I’m glad to see that Marc Fisher chose to cover it.

It’s not even that those angles are false, exactly, but I find it very unfortunate when people choose to focus on these exclusively. Providing valuable educational opportunities to young people without access to them ought to be valued on its own merits, not simply because we are afraid of encountering those same young people in a dark alley. As the Post article puts it,

“But the biggest benefit of debate, according to the coaches, teachers and judges in the program, is that it engages underprivileged students, who are learning to study, think, write and present their ideas with the best of them. In the ’70s, when budget crunches forced urban schools to eliminate many “extraneous” programs, such as art, drama and speech, debate became the exclusive bailiwick of affluent private and suburban public schools. “For a long time, debate teams had looked very white and male, in coats and ties, like you’d expect,” says Spiliadis. “But we’ve changed the face of debate.””

The article mostly follows the two students at the J.B. Fuqua Urban Debate League Celebration in Atlanta that I wrote about a few months ago. I didn’t actually get to watch them debate, but I did meet them and hear some very good things.

Even better, there was an editorial in the Post Magazine the same day:

“Fifty-three years later, it goes without saying that we’ve made real progress toward equality, although it’s hard to argue we’ve arrived. Of course, today’s school disparities are said to be based on class, not race, however inexorably the two are intertwined. But putting aside the source of the problem, don’t you find it outrageous that so many children are consigned to inferior educations — and lesser lives — just because their parents can’t afford to raise them in a good public school district? And I, for one, wonder: Where are the Barbaras? Do these students not understand that they also deserve much better? Why don’t they raise their voices?

After reading today’s cover story by Baltimore writer Karen Houppert, which begins on Page 12, it occurs to me that you have to find your voice before you can raise it.”

Best of luck until then!

-Andrew

I’ll start with the good news. My friend David Wiltz is garnering still more media attention for the work that he has done with youth in LA. He and one of his former debaters were interviewed in this National Public Radio segment.

There are nearly two dozen urban debate leagues in the US, and I’m more familiar with some than with others, but everything I’ve seen suggests that few leagues do as good a job as LA has done to reach young people already in gangs or at high risk of getting involved with one. To some extent, this is simply a matter of necessity. Gangs are such an omnipresent part of urban life in LA that it would be nearly impossible to work with the populations Dave does without addressing the issue.

But I also know that in some leagues, and unfortunately I must count my own Boston Debate League among these, coaches and administrators have not done everything they could to reach out to these students who may ultimately have the most to gain from an activity like debate. The temptation, especially for young leagues and teams, is to start with the “naturals”, students who are already, responsible, high-achieving, engaged with their schoolwork, and generally on a relatively good track. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this, as these students deserve opportunities as much as anyone and will often still have college access difficulties for economic reasons or because even the best students at their schools simply do not receive an education that is on par with that provided to their competitiors from wealthier areas.

But debate has the power to change lives, to interest students in academic subjects in a way that school does not, to engage them in a way that traditional pedagogy does not, and to imbue them with a sense of confidence and power that they sorely need. I’ve seen many seemingly unlikely students take a remarkable interest in debate and change the trajectory of their lives because of it. I really admire the work that Dave has done to reach students most in need, and he’s a constant reminder to me of what I could and should be doing in Boston.

On the flip side of the coin, however, I also came across a New York Times article entitled “The Wrong Approach to Gangs” that argues,

“No city has failed to control its street gangs more spectacularly than Los Angeles. The region has six times as many gangs and double the number of gang members as a quarter-century ago, even after spending countless billions on the problem. But unless Congress changes course quickly, the policies that seem to have made the gang problem worse in Los Angeles could become enshrined as national doctrine in a so-called gang control bill making its way through both the House and Senate.”

LA is a paradigmatic example of a city that over-invests in heavy-handed and punitive responses to drug- and gang-related problems and under-invests in prevention and avoidance measures, including educational initiatives like the LAUDL. The willingness of policy-makers to write off people as young as 11 or 12 as irredeemably criminal is both heartbreaking and self-fulfilling. As my namesake Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, nothing breeds crime like prisons. Handing out prison sentences for petty offenses serves only to harden the offender, limit his access to legal employment, and connect him to other criminals.

It is beyond disheartening to see the federal government on the brink of replicating LA’s preference for punishment over prevention.