INVITATION: (note that the invite in an alternative format suitable for cutting and pasting appears below).

Dear Colleagues:

The Sanford I. Berman Debate Forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is proud to host the third annual Las Vegas Classic Debate Tournament. Once again we are offering a Round Robin and Invitational Tournament. Once again we have contracted with the Hyatt Place Las Vegas which is the closest hotel to the UNLV campus (we have secured a lower rate per night than last year). Once again, the tournament will take place in campus buildings with free wireless internet access. As always, we promise to provide classic Vegas hospitality and excellent competition. In addition, we are very excited to announce three important improvements to our tournament!

• Starting this year, in honor of Ross Smith, and because we think it helps to fight against point inflation and creates clearer distinctions between speaker awards, the tournament will use the RKS scale (a 100 speaker point scale).
• The tournament will feature online ballot entry (with special thanks to Jon Bruschke).
• The “UNLV Debate Team Guide to FUN in Sin City” will be published and available to all teams at registration. Vegas is the most fun town on earth—we want to help you realize “Vega’s maximum fun potential” while you are here.

Once again we are happy to welcome all of our friends to beautiful and exciting Las Vegas!

Jacob Thompson
Director, Sanford I. Berman Debate Forum

Joe Battocletti, Ian Beier, Michael Grossman, and Grace Saez
Assistant Debate Coaches

For additional information, please contact Jake at
jacob.thompson@unlv.edu
(office) 702-895-3474
(cell) 702-809-9670

ENTRY INFORMATION:

General Information:

Registration for the Round Robin will be Tuesday September 29, 2009 and Round Robin competition will take place on Wednesday and Thursday September 30 and October 1, 2009. Registration for the Invitational Tournament will take place on Friday October 2, 2009 and Invitational competition will take place on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday October 3-5, 2009.

We will use debateresults for tournament entries and judge preferences.

The invitational tournament will offer varsity, junior varsity, and novice divisions in policy debate.

Given any viability for a novice-only division (basically more than four teams from different schools), we will not collapse the novice and JV divisions.

We will compile a list of each school's affirmative and negative arguments, and distribute an electronic copy to each school attending the tournament.

We will use the NDT/CEDA policy topic. The time limits will be 9-3-6, with 10 minutes of preparation time per team.

The round robin tournament will accept eight teams and there will be seven rounds of competition. Ties will be broken according to head to head win-loss record.

The invitational tournament will have seven preliminary rounds; four prelims will occur on Saturday and three will occur on Sunday. The first elimination debate also will occur on Sunday night. Rounds 1 and 2 will be preset, 3 and 4 will be paired off 1 and 2. All remaining rounds will be straight power matched.

Deadline: The entry deadline to enter the invitational tournament is Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. PST.

In order to ensure that teams have adequate time to make travel arrangements, the deadline to apply for admission to the round robin tournament is Sunday August 23, 2009. We will notify the community of those teams admitted to the tournament by Tuesday August 25, 2009.

Fees: Entry fees for the Round Robin and the Invitational Tournament will be $125.00 per team. Round robin teams who do not wish to participate in the invitational tournament will be assessed a $250.00 entry fee.

HOTEL INFORMATION:

Once again, we have retained the Hyatt Place Las Vegas located at 4520 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89169. It was our tournament hotel last year and received rave reviews from everyone who stayed there. The Hyatt place has incredibly nice accommodations and FREE WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS THROUGHOUT. PLEASE MAKE YOUR HOTEL RESERVATIONS AT THE TOURNAMENT HOTEL; it is important to the viability of our tournament that you do so!!!

It is the closest hotel in Las Vegas to the UNLV campus (easily within walking distance), features a free airport shuttle, and this year’s rate is even lower than last year’s rate. It is a bargain during peak tourism season in Las Vegas at only $85 per night Tuesday through Thursday, and Sunday and Monday and a mere $90 per night Friday and Saturday.

Registration for the round robin and regular debate tournament and release of debate pairings each morning will all occur at the Hyatt Place. The cutoff date for block-rate reservations is September 19, 2009, so make your reservations early.

To book your room online at a special group rate go to:

1. www.lasvegas.place.hyatt.com
2. Choose your check-in date and check-out date. Your arrival and departure dates must be between the group dates of September 29, 2009 and October 6, 2009.
3. Enter group code G-DEB9 for the UNLV Debate group rate in the box labeled Group/Corporate #.
4. You then hit the check availability button.
5. From here verify that your group name is specified next to rate details and if everything matches then hit “book.”

** If you would prefer to book by phone please call 702-369-3366 or 1-888-444-0611 just ask for the UNLV Debate block rate or mention group code G-DEB9.

The Hyatt Place has a FREE hotel shuttle that will take you to and from McCarran International Airport. Given that the Hyatt Place is adjacent to the campus (it’s only a five minute walk to the buildings you will compete in), you may choose to forego a rental car at our tournament. However, at this time we cannot provide an evidence shuttle to and from the tournament hotel. The Hyatt Place shuttle runs from 5 am until midnight. It leaves for the airport once every hour arriving at approximately 15 minutes past the hour. To have the shuttle pick you up, please notify the hotel when you are making reservations and call the hotel directly after you have picked up your baggage (702-369-3366) or call them from the free phone on the “phone board” near luggage carousel 9.

OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

Judging: Each school is expected to provide qualified judges to accompany their teams, and judge in the divisions in which they have entered teams. Judges who are not eligible to judge in the Varsity Division will judge in Junior Varsity and Novice. Every judge entered must have a judging philosophy posted on debateresults. If we believe that a judge representing your team proves him or herself to be unqualified, we may ask another judge from your school to increase their judging commitment to compensate the tournament for lost rounds.

Each team participating in the Round Robin tournament is expected to provide a qualified judge to accompany their team. Each judge will provide five rounds of judging (we’ll most likely only use four, but just in case…). We will (to the best of our ability) use judge preferences to place round robin judges.

Each team participating in the invitational tournament is expected to provide four rounds of judging. All judges are committed through the first elimination debate on Monday, or one round beyond which their team is eliminated. Judges should be able to cover a school's commitment despite potential constraints. We cannot provide hired judging. If you have extra judges available from your school, please let us know—we will almost certainly be able to point them toward some school that needs hired judging.

We will use judge preferences for preliminary and elimination debate rounds. Preferences will be available on the Bruschke system. Novice and Junior Varsity preferences will be honored, but we expect that Novice and Junior Varsity teams will NOT strike non-Varsity eligible judges. Last year the tournament lost approximately 30-40 rounds of available judging because Novice and Junior Varsity teams struck all of the Novice and Junior Varsity-only eligible judges, in order to ensure that does not happen again we ask that Novice and Junior Varsity teams appropriately rank members of the Novice and Junior Varsity-only eligible judging pool. All judges at the tournament are expected to render a decision where they indicate one, and only one, team that won the round (did the better job of debating). Judges' ballots not adhering to this principle will be "corrected" by the tab room through use of a coin flip.

Elimination rounds: Given an adequate number of teams, and available judging for the first and second elimination debates, we will clear up to half of the field (although not more than 32 teams) in the varsity division, as long as those teams have (at least) a .500 record.

We will not break brackets in elimination rounds.

Awards: Our awards will be awesome! The Round Robin Tournament will feature boxing title belts as awards. The Invitational Tournament will have a variety of awards including large poker chip sets for the finalists and champions in all three divisions; additional awards will include silver flasks, flashing “Welcome to Las Vegas signs, and other classic Vegas accoutrements.

Eligible Teams: We believe in maximizing the competitive opportunities for eligible students.

We will accept hybrid teams at the invitational tournament. If two schools each have an extra debater, we would allow a combined team from two institutions to compete in the preliminary rounds of the tournament, and would allow those individuals to be eligible to receive speaker awards. Hybrid teams will not be allowed to advance to elimination debates at the invitational tournament, and hybrid teams will not be allowed to apply for admission to the round robin tournament.

UNLV teams will compete in the Invitational Tournament.

Transportation Information: Fly in to the McCarran International Airport (LAS). Every major air-carrier has regular flights into and out of McCarran. McCarran is a hub for both Southwest Airlines and Allegiant Air—check these carriers’ websites (www.allegiantair.com) for incredibly cheap flights.

Parking: Parking at the tournament hotel is free as is parking at UNLV on the weekend. The tournament will purchase 1-day temporary parking passes for all participants on Monday October 5 (elim day). In order to receive a free parking pass for Monday you will need to send an email to battocle@unlv.nevada.edu with a subject line “UNLV Debate Tournament Parking,” and indicate the number of permits that your team needs. These requests must be received no later than noon (CST) on Monday September 28, 2009. Please try to minimize the number of permits that you request as we are paying for them.

Round Robin Application Procedure: We are hosting an open and transparent application-based round robin tournament. The decision-making process that determines which teams are admitted to this tournament will be impartial and based on a mathematic formula.

Round robin debate tournaments are a unique and proven forum for high quality debate competition. Existing invitational round robin debate tournaments are, without a doubt, some of the most prestigious tournaments in America. Unfortunately, invitational round robin tournaments sometimes leave out deserving or qualified teams, and they sometimes include teams that do not deserve the invitation. We believe that a round robin debate tournament with a transparent application process and an impartial admission process will make for better and more credible NDT first and second round applications.

Our goal is to have the best debate teams in America apply for our round robin tournament and be admitted based on their merit. To achieve that goal we already have sought input from many members of the debate community to refine the application process. Given that this is only the second year of our round robin tournament, will attempt to refine the selection criteria a bit.

The application process for the 2009 Las Vegas Round Robin Debate Tournament will be available online at debateresults.com by the end of the first week in August. Dr. Jon Bruschke will set up debateresults to accept applications, and to allow anyone to view those applications as soon as they are posted. Remember, the deadline to apply for admission to the round robin tournament is Sunday August 23, 2009. We will notify the community of those teams admitted to the tournament by Tuesday August 25, 2009.

Briefly, the application process will operate in the following way:
1. Debaters apply and earn points based on their performance and rankings last year
2. The formula is set up to accept any of the following: a team of two debaters who debated together last year, a team of two debaters who were on the same squad but debated with different partners last year, or a team that includes one or two freshpersons.
3. Any ties for the ninth place application will be broken using Bruschke’s RPI system.

We will accept the top eight point-earning teams to our round robin tournament.

Tournament Schedule:

Tuesday September 29, 2009
7 p.m.-9 p.m. Las Vegas Classic Round Robin tournament registration (at Hyatt Place)

Wednesday September 30, 2009
10:00 a.m. Round 1
12:30 p.m. lunch (at Hyatt Place provided by tournament)
1:30 p.m. Round 2
4:00 p.m. Round 3
6:30 p.m. Round 4

Thursday October 1, 2009
10:00 a.m. Round 5
12:30 p.m. Lunch (at Hyatt Place provided by tournament)
1:30 p.m. Round 6
4:00 p.m. Round 7

Friday, October 2, 2009
7 p.m.-9 p.m. Las Vegas Classic Invitational tournament registration (at Hyatt Place)

Saturday, October 3, 2009
8:00 a.m. Pairings Released, Rounds 1 & 2, Hyatt Place
8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast, UNLV Campus
9:00 a.m. Round 1 Required Starting Time
11:30 a.m. Round 2 Required Starting Time
1:30 p.m. Lunch
3:00 p.m. Round 3 Required Starting Time
5:45 p.m. Round 4 Required Starting Time, All Round 3 ballots should be in

Sunday, October 4, 2009
8:00 a.m. Pairings Released, Round 5, Hyatt Place
8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast, UNLV Campus
9:00 a.m. Round 5 Required Starting time
11:00 a.m. a bevy of delicious snacks will be available—lunch following round 6
12:00 Noon Round 6 Required Starting time
2:00 p.m. Lunch
3:00 p.m. Round 7 Required Starting Time
6:00 p.m. 1st Elimination Round Required Starting Time (both open and junior varsity)

Monday, October 5, 2008—Elimination Rounds in the UNLV Student Union
8:00 a.m. Pairings Released, Hyatt Place
9:00 a.m. Second Elimination Round Required Starting Time
11:30 a.m. Awards Assembly
12:30 Third Elimination Round Required Starting Time
3:00 p.m. Fourth Elimination Round Required Starting Time
6:00 p.m. Fifth Elimination Round Required Starting Time

In case you missed them before—here are our top 11 reasons to consider coming to the Las Vegas Classic Debate Tournament.

1) IT’S IN LAS VEGAS—This point requires no further explanation.

2) HIGH QUALITY COMPETITION—We were the 5th largest debate tournament in America last year and will only continue to grow in size and competition quality as time goes on.

3) LOW COST—You can find incredibly cheap flights to Vegas (especially on Southwest and Allegiant Air, but also on all other major carriers). In addition, we’re charging ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY FEE for our round robin tournament.

4) HOSPITALITY THAT IS OFF THE HOOK!—Seriously…we’re going ALL IN on the hospitality front. Our goal is to convince you that this is and will continue to be the most hospitable tournament in the nation. We have a professional massage therapist giving free massages. We will serve serious breakfasts and lunches on both Saturday and Sunday. We will provide a TON of snacks throughout all 3 days of competition. Finally, we WERE going to plan a big post-tournament party for Monday, but then we realized there is already a party going on....it's Vegas.

5) COMPS—One hallmark of classic Vegas is the comps system (basically, “you come here, we give you free stuff”), we are going to give you a TON of free Vegas-related schwag.

6) CENTRALIZED LOCATION—The airport, campus, and tournament hotel are all within 5 minutes of one another (they all also are 5 minutes from the Las Vegas strip). Almost all of our debates will take place 2 buildings in the center of campus just a 1 minute walk to our brand new student union (with 5 good restaurants, a Starbucks, and a Jamba Juice)

7) FREE WIRELESS—In the hotel and at the tournament.

8) AWESOME TROPHIES—Although most of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, public evidence of your success at our tournament will be both gaudy and fashionable as we will be awarding the top teams in the Round Robin with boxing belts, and the winners and finalists in all 3 divisions of the Invitational Tournament very nice poker chip sets. Other classic Vegas accoutrements like dice sets, stainless steel flasks, and gigantic belt buckles, etc will round out the trophy selections.

9) SUPPORT A NEW PROGRAM—Despite recent lamentations about the decline of NDT/CEDA debate, we just started, and we’re here to stay. All of those who purport to support new and/or beginning debate teams should come to our tournament to evince a public display of that support.

10) SUPPORT ALL 3 DIVISIONS OF DEBATE—We will offer all 3 divisions of competition (N, JV, V)… We expect that the novice and JV divisions will stay viable and distinct from one another. All of you who purport to support novice and JV competition should pony up.

11) IT’S IN LAS VEGAS—Seriously…your school will pay for you to take a trip to America's ultimate vacation destination. How can you say no?

Dear Colleagues: The Sanford I. Berman Debate Forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is proud to host the third annual Las Vegas Classic Debate Tournament. Once again we are offering a Round Robin and Invitational Tournament. Once again we have contracted with the Hyatt Place Las Vegas which is the closest hotel to the UNLV campus (we have secured a lower rate per night than last year). Once again, the tournament will take place in campus buildings with free wireless internet access. As always, we promise to provide classic Vegas hospitality and excellent competition. In addition, we are very excited to announce three important improvements to our tournament! • Starting this year, in honor of Ross Smith, and because we think it helps to fight against point inflation and creates clearer distinctions between speaker awards, the tournament will use the RKS scale (a 100 speaker point scale). • The tournament will feature online ballot entry (with special thanks to Jon Bruschke). • The “UNLV Debate Team Guide to FUN in Sin City” will be published and available to all teams at registration. Vegas is the most fun town on earth—we want to help you realize “Vega’s maximum fun potential” while you are here. Once again we are happy to welcome all of our friends to beautiful and exciting Las Vegas! Jacob Thompson Director, Sanford I. Berman Debate Forum Joe Battocletti, Ian Beier, Michael Grossman, and Grace Saez Assistant Debate Coaches For additional information, please contact Jake at jacob.thompson@unlv.edu (office) 702-895-3474 (cell) 702-809-9670 ENTRY INFORMATION: General Information: Registration for the Round Robin will be Tuesday September 29, 2009 and Round Robin competition will take place on Wednesday and Thursday September 30 and October 1, 2009. Registration for the Invitational Tournament will take place on Friday October 2, 2009 and Invitational competition will take place on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday October 3-5, 2009. We will use debateresults for tournament entries and judge preferences. The invitational tournament will offer varsity, junior varsity, and novice divisions in policy debate. Given any viability for a novice-only division (basically more than four teams from different schools), we will not collapse the novice and JV divisions. We will compile a list of each school's affirmative and negative arguments, and distribute an electronic copy to each school attending the tournament. We will use the NDT/CEDA policy topic. The time limits will be 9-3-6, with 10 minutes of preparation time per team. The round robin tournament will accept eight teams and there will be seven rounds of competition. Ties will be broken according to head to head win-loss record. The invitational tournament will have seven preliminary rounds; four prelims will occur on Saturday and three will occur on Sunday. The first elimination debate also will occur on Sunday night. Rounds 1 and 2 will be preset, 3 and 4 will be paired off 1 and 2. All remaining rounds will be straight power matched. Deadline: The entry deadline to enter the invitational tournament is Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. PST. In order to ensure that teams have adequate time to make travel arrangements, the deadline to apply for admission to the round robin tournament is Sunday August 23, 2009. We will notify the community of those teams admitted to the tournament by Tuesday August 25, 2009. Fees: Entry fees for the Round Robin and the Invitational Tournament will be $125.00 per team. Round robin teams who do not wish to participate in the invitational tournament will be assessed a $250.00 entry fee. HOTEL INFORMATION: Once again, we have retained the Hyatt Place Las Vegas located at 4520 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89169. It was our tournament hotel last year and received rave reviews from everyone who stayed there. The Hyatt place has incredibly nice accommodations and FREE WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS THROUGHOUT. PLEASE MAKE YOUR HOTEL RESERVATIONS AT THE TOURNAMENT HOTEL; it is important to the viability of our tournament that you do so!!! It is the closest hotel in Las Vegas to the UNLV campus (easily within walking distance), features a free airport shuttle, and this year’s rate is even lower than last year’s rate. It is a bargain during peak tourism season in Las Vegas at only $85 per night Tuesday through Thursday, and Sunday and Monday and a mere $90 per night Friday and Saturday. Registration for the round robin and regular debate tournament and release of debate pairings each morning will all occur at the Hyatt Place. The cutoff date for block-rate reservations is September 19, 2009, so make your reservations early. To book your room online at a special group rate go to: 1. www.lasvegas.place.hyatt.com 2. Choose your check-in date and check-out date. Your arrival and departure dates must be between the group dates of September 29, 2009 and October 6, 2009. 3. Enter group code G-DEB9 for the UNLV Debate group rate in the box labeled Group/Corporate #. 4. You then hit the check availability button. 5. From here verify that your group name is specified next to rate details and if everything matches then hit “book.” ** If you would prefer to book by phone please call 702-369-3366 or 1-888-444-0611 just ask for the UNLV Debate block rate or mention group code G-DEB9. The Hyatt Place has a FREE hotel shuttle that will take you to and from McCarran International Airport. Given that the Hyatt Place is adjacent to the campus (it’s only a five minute walk to the buildings you will compete in), you may choose to forego a rental car at our tournament. However, at this time we cannot provide an evidence shuttle to and from the tournament hotel. The Hyatt Place shuttle runs from 5 am until midnight. It leaves for the airport once every hour arriving at approximately 15 minutes past the hour. To have the shuttle pick you up, please notify the hotel when you are making reservations and call the hotel directly after you have picked up your baggage (702-369-3366) or call them from the free phone on the “phone board” near luggage carousel 9. OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION: Judging: Each school is expected to provide qualified judges to accompany their teams, and judge in the divisions in which they have entered teams. Judges who are not eligible to judge in the Varsity Division will judge in Junior Varsity and Novice. Every judge entered must have a judging philosophy posted on debateresults. If we believe that a judge representing your team proves him or herself to be unqualified, we may ask another judge from your school to increase their judging commitment to compensate the tournament for lost rounds. Each team participating in the Round Robin tournament is expected to provide a qualified judge to accompany their team. Each judge will provide five rounds of judging (we’ll most likely only use four, but just in case…). We will (to the best of our ability) use judge preferences to place round robin judges. Each team participating in the invitational tournament is expected to provide four rounds of judging. All judges are committed through the first elimination debate on Monday, or one round beyond which their team is eliminated. Judges should be able to cover a school's commitment despite potential constraints. We cannot provide hired judging. If you have extra judges available from your school, please let us know—we will almost certainly be able to point them toward some school that needs hired judging. We will use judge preferences for preliminary and elimination debate rounds. Preferences will be available on the Bruschke system. Novice and Junior Varsity preferences will be honored, but we expect that Novice and Junior Varsity teams will NOT strike non-Varsity eligible judges. Last year the tournament lost approximately 30-40 rounds of available judging because Novice and Junior Varsity teams struck all of the Novice and Junior Varsity-only eligible judges, in order to ensure that does not happen again we ask that Novice and Junior Varsity teams appropriately rank members of the Novice and Junior Varsity-only eligible judging pool. All judges at the tournament are expected to render a decision where they indicate one, and only one, team that won the round (did the better job of debating). Judges' ballots not adhering to this principle will be "corrected" by the tab room through use of a coin flip. Elimination rounds: Given an adequate number of teams, and available judging for the first and second elimination debates, we will clear up to half of the field (although not more than 32 teams) in the varsity division, as long as those teams have (at least) a .500 record. We will not break brackets in elimination rounds. Awards: Our awards will be awesome! The Round Robin Tournament will feature boxing title belts as awards. The Invitational Tournament will have a variety of awards including large poker chip sets for the finalists and champions in all three divisions; additional awards will include silver flasks, flashing “Welcome to Las Vegas signs, and other classic Vegas accoutrements. Eligible Teams: We believe in maximizing the competitive opportunities for eligible students. We will accept hybrid teams at the invitational tournament. If two schools each have an extra debater, we would allow a combined team from two institutions to compete in the preliminary rounds of the tournament, and would allow those individuals to be eligible to receive speaker awards. Hybrid teams will not be allowed to advance to elimination debates at the invitational tournament, and hybrid teams will not be allowed to apply for admission to the round robin tournament. UNLV teams will compete in the Invitational Tournament. Transportation Information: Fly in to the McCarran International Airport (LAS). Every major air-carrier has regular flights into and out of McCarran. McCarran is a hub for both Southwest Airlines and Allegiant Air—check these carriers’ websites (www.allegiantair.com) for incredibly cheap flights. Parking: Parking at the tournament hotel is free as is parking at UNLV on the weekend. The tournament will purchase 1-day temporary parking passes for all participants on Monday October 5 (elim day). In order to receive a free parking pass for Monday you will need to send an email to battocle@unlv.nevada.edu with a subject line “UNLV Debate Tournament Parking,” and indicate the number of permits that your team needs. These requests must be received no later than noon (CST) on Monday September 28, 2009. Please try to minimize the number of permits that you request as we are paying for them. Round Robin Application Procedure: We are hosting an open and transparent application-based round robin tournament. The decision-making process that determines which teams are admitted to this tournament will be impartial and based on a mathematic formula. Round robin debate tournaments are a unique and proven forum for high quality debate competition. Existing invitational round robin debate tournaments are, without a doubt, some of the most prestigious tournaments in America. Unfortunately, invitational round robin tournaments sometimes leave out deserving or qualified teams, and they sometimes include teams that do not deserve the invitation. We believe that a round robin debate tournament with a transparent application process and an impartial admission process will make for better and more credible NDT first and second round applications. Our goal is to have the best debate teams in America apply for our round robin tournament and be admitted based on their merit. To achieve that goal we already have sought input from many members of the debate community to refine the application process. Given that this is only the second year of our round robin tournament, will attempt to refine the selection criteria a bit. The application process for the 2009 Las Vegas Round Robin Debate Tournament will be available online at debateresults.com by the end of the first week in August. Dr. Jon Bruschke will set up debateresults to accept applications, and to allow anyone to view those applications as soon as they are posted. Remember, the deadline to apply for admission to the round robin tournament is Sunday August 23, 2009. We will notify the community of those teams admitted to the tournament by Tuesday August 25, 2009. Briefly, the application process will operate in the following way: 1. Debaters apply and earn points based on their performance and rankings last year 2. The formula is set up to accept any of the following: a team of two debaters who debated together last year, a team of two debaters who were on the same squad but debated with different partners last year, or a team that includes one or two freshpersons. 3. Any ties for the ninth place application will be broken using Bruschke’s RPI system. We will accept the top eight point-earning teams to our round robin tournament. Tournament Schedule: Tuesday September 29, 2009 7 p.m.-9 p.m. Las Vegas Classic Round Robin tournament registration (at Hyatt Place) Wednesday September 30, 2009 10:00 a.m. Round 1 12:30 p.m. lunch (at Hyatt Place provided by tournament) 1:30 p.m. Round 2 4:00 p.m. Round 3 6:30 p.m. Round 4 Thursday October 1, 2009 10:00 a.m. Round 5 12:30 p.m. Lunch (at Hyatt Place provided by tournament) 1:30 p.m. Round 6 4:00 p.m. Round 7 Friday, October 2, 2009 7 p.m.-9 p.m. Las Vegas Classic Invitational tournament registration (at Hyatt Place) Saturday, October 3, 2009 8:00 a.m. Pairings Released, Rounds 1 & 2, Hyatt Place 8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast, UNLV Campus 9:00 a.m. Round 1 Required Starting Time 11:30 a.m. Round 2 Required Starting Time 1:30 p.m. Lunch 3:00 p.m. Round 3 Required Starting Time 5:45 p.m. Round 4 Required Starting Time, All Round 3 ballots should be in Sunday, October 4, 2009 8:00 a.m. Pairings Released, Round 5, Hyatt Place 8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast, UNLV Campus 9:00 a.m. Round 5 Required Starting time 11:00 a.m. a bevy of delicious snacks will be available—lunch following round 6 12:00 Noon Round 6 Required Starting time 2:00 p.m. Lunch 3:00 p.m. Round 7 Required Starting Time 6:00 p.m. 1st Elimination Round Required Starting Time (both open and junior varsity) Monday, October 5, 2008—Elimination Rounds in the UNLV Student Union 8:00 a.m. Pairings Released, Hyatt Place 9:00 a.m. Second Elimination Round Required Starting Time 11:30 a.m. Awards Assembly 12:30 Third Elimination Round Required Starting Time 3:00 p.m. Fourth Elimination Round Required Starting Time 6:00 p.m. Fifth Elimination Round Required Starting Time In case you missed them before—here are our top 11 reasons to consider coming to the Las Vegas Classic Debate Tournament. 1) IT’S IN LAS VEGAS—This point requires no further explanation. 2) HIGH QUALITY COMPETITION—We were the 5th largest debate tournament in America last year and will only continue to grow in size and competition quality as time goes on. 3) LOW COST—You can find incredibly cheap flights to Vegas (especially on Southwest and Allegiant Air, but also on all other major carriers). In addition, we’re charging ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY FEE for our round robin tournament. 4) HOSPITALITY THAT IS OFF THE HOOK!—Seriously…we’re going ALL IN on the hospitality front. Our goal is to convince you that this is and will continue to be the most hospitable tournament in the nation. We have a professional massage therapist giving free massages. We will serve serious breakfasts and lunches on both Saturday and Sunday. We will provide a TON of snacks throughout all 3 days of competition. Finally, we WERE going to plan a big post-tournament party for Monday, but then we realized there is already a party going on....it's Vegas. 5) COMPS—One hallmark of classic Vegas is the comps system (basically, “you come here, we give you free stuff”), we are going to give you a TON of free Vegas-related schwag. 6) CENTRALIZED LOCATION—The airport, campus, and tournament hotel are all within 5 minutes of one another (they all also are 5 minutes from the Las Vegas strip). Almost all of our debates will take place 2 buildings in the center of campus just a 1 minute walk to our brand new student union (with 5 good restaurants, a Starbucks, and a Jamba Juice) 7) FREE WIRELESS—In the hotel and at the tournament. 8) AWESOME TROPHIES—Although most of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, public evidence of your success at our tournament will be both gaudy and fashionable as we will be awarding the top teams in the Round Robin with boxing belts, and the winners and finalists in all 3 divisions of the Invitational Tournament very nice poker chip sets. Other classic Vegas accoutrements like dice sets, stainless steel flasks, and gigantic belt buckles, etc will round out the trophy selections. 9) SUPPORT A NEW PROGRAM—Despite recent lamentations about the decline of NDT/CEDA debate, we just started, and we’re here to stay. All of those who purport to support new and/or beginning debate teams should come to our tournament to evince a public display of that support. 10) SUPPORT ALL 3 DIVISIONS OF DEBATE—We will offer all 3 divisions of competition (N, JV, V)… We expect that the novice and JV divisions will stay viable and distinct from one another. All of you who purport to support novice and JV competition should pony up. 11) IT’S IN LAS VEGAS—Seriously…your school will pay for you to take a trip to America's ultimate vacation destination. How can you say no?