Debate Tie Breakers

Here is quick break down of debate tie breakers:

Tie Breaker	Explanation
Wins	A team wins including any bye wins
High Low Points	Add up the speaker point total for the team in each prelim round, subtract the highest and lowest scores
Total Points	Add up the speaker point total for the team in each prelim round, add all rounds
Opp Wins	Calculate the number of wins for each team's opponents in each prelim
Two High Low Points	Add up the speaker point total for the team in each prelim round, subtract the two highest and two lowest scores
ZScore	Calculate the judge variance score for each team
Ranks	Add up the ranks for each team in each prelim round
Ballots	Calculates the number of ballots a team has won in prelims (useful when assigning more than 1 judge in prelims)
Real Wins	A team wins excluding any bye wins
Random	Random Number

Imagine a team has the following results

Round	Results	Speaker 1 Points	Speaker 2 Points
1	Win	25	28
2	Win	22	25
3	Loss	21	20
4	Win-BYE	B	B
5	Loss	21	21
6	Win	25	25

In this instance, the team won rounds 1,2,4 and 6. So the team would have a Wins total of 4. However, you'll notice that in round 4 the team won against a BYE team. For purposes of Real Wins their win total would be 3. NOTE: very few tournaments use real wins.

For ballots, assume this tournament used only 1 judge per round. The team's Ballots total would be 4 as well. However, if the tournament assigned 2 judges per prelim, you can imagine a situation where judges have split decisions. So it may be advantageous to ignore the "win" metric and just count ballots.

Random number is just a random number generated when the team registers for the tournament. It stays constant for the entire tournament to ensure ranking stability.

The rest of the ranking criteria deal with speaker point totals for the team. So if we add up the scores for each round we get:

Round	Team Point Total
1	53 (25 + 28)
2	47 (22 + 25)
3	41 (21+20)
4	TEAM AVERAGE SCORE (46.6)
5	42 (21 + 21)
6	50 (25+25)

You'll notice that because of the bye round, the team will have their average point total inserted. If you add up the five scores that we have (53+47+41+42+50) and divide by the number of scores (5) you'll get 46.6 average.

So the team's Total Points would be 279.6. To get the High Low Points we subtract the highest team score (53 -Round 1) and lowest team score (41 - Round 3) from the total (279.6-53-41) which would be 185.6. Two High Low does the same logic except it remove the two highest and two lowest scores. So it would be 279.6-53-50-41-42 = 93.6

Opp wins goes through each opponent in prelim rounds and adds up the Wins total. It tries to measure the strength of the opponents.

Ranks adds up the ranks assigned to each team in each prelim and adds them all up.

ZScore measures judge variance. You can get more information about ZScore calculations.