It's my purpose in writing this article to assist high school debaters in developing innovative negative strategies throughout the debate season. Typically, a debater will go to a summer institute where she will be inundated with evidence and strategic advice from the finest minds in college and high school debate. Unfortunately, the debater will often find upon returning home that she no longer has access to a research-quality University library, a large team, nor an argument-savvy coach.

It is this discord between the institute experience and the in season reality that motivates my writing. I want to first discuss the various categories of strategies, the ways that the negative can win rounds. I will then proceed to talk about some secondary strategic approaches. I will conclude with preliminary suggestions of how to turn these theories into concrete strategies.

Genres of Strategy: The negative can win the round in a number of ways, including the following:

Beat down the case and outweigh it with a disadvantage. This is the most standard strategic approach. It has the advantage of being widely accepted and understood as a means of winning, as well as being likely the most familiar approach for debaters. If you merely minimize the case impacts, you can win a disadvantage linked to either perception, adoption, or solvency. If you attack solvency alone or in combination with harm attacks, you must win a disadvantage linked to the perception and/or adoption of the plan, not its actual effectiveness. The title of this essay refers to this strategy-using a large-impact disadvantage such as Clinton to outweigh a mitigated case advantage.

Turn the case solvency. This strategy involves either a defense of the status quo or a counterplan to establish relative uniqueness for the turns. Relative uniqueness means the negative need not prove that the problem is being completely solved, just that the alternative to the Affirmative (either the status quo or a counterplan) is better than the Affirmative. The Affirmative often puts the judge in a "try-or-die" paradigm, stating that even if the plan is potentially problematic, the alternative is certain destruction. The negative needs to argue that the Affirmative can always make things worse-unless nuclear weapons are en route to the USA as the debate is proceeding, the Affirmative is not really "controlling uniqueness".

Impact turn the case. The negative demonstrates that the harm that the Affirmative solves for is actually a benefit. Examples include old standby "bad is good" approaches such as De-Development (economic depression good), SPARK (nuclear war causes disarmament), and Malthus (saving lives causes more people to die in the long run). A more subtle approach is to take out the final impact to the Affirmative and impact turn the internal link to the advantage. Example: the Affirmative claims a nuclear proliferation advantage and the negative argues that proliferation will not cause war and it will result in declining military spending on conventional forces, which will allow for economic development.

Win a net beneficial counterplan. This is really a derivative strategy in that you can't win a net benefit without adopting one of the other genres. A net beneficial counterplan is one in which the counterplan alone is better than the Affirmative plan alone or a combination of the entire Affirmative plan and part or all of the counterplan. Given the centrality of permutations to Affirmative counterplan strategy, the negative must devise every counterplan with answering permutations as its central concern. Example: If the negative runs the Japan counterplan with a net benefit of Japan solving better than the Affirmative, they must be prepared to explain why the permutation does not capture the net benefit.

Win a mutually exclusive counterplan with an advantage outweighing the case. If a counterplan is mutually exclusive with the Affirmative, then every advantage to that counterplan is a net benefit. This strategy is particularly useful against a case with a small advantage that doesn't link well to disadvantages. Think of what advantage can be accrued by doing the exact opposite of the Affirmative plan. Example: If the Affirmative makes a minor alteration of Nunn-Lugar, the Negative can simply ban the entire pro,, and claim advantages, even if the Affirmative change is not undesirable in comparison to the status quo Nunn-Lugar.

Win a kritik. Critics are effective strategic devices because they link to virtually every case, they are difficult for the Affirmative to research and argue against, they defy comparison in traditional policy debate language, and the wording of the evidence is often so cryptic that the negative is given great latitude in interpretation and application of their cards. Negatives can use kritiks as a priori arguments or as case take-outs/ case turns.

Derivative Strategic Approaches

There is probably little in the above section that the advanced high school debater did not understand in the abstract, but it is unlikely that many have thought of why they chose one particular genre of strategy over another. It was my intention to outline those genres to raise consciousness of the range of strategic alternatives available to negatives. From those genres, I have derived a preliminary series of principles and tools to better devise and implement strategy. They all rely upon the idea that the negative should make life as difficult and complicated for the Affirmative while staving within the bounds of behavior that is competitively equitable. The list reads as such:

Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the affirmative. Pick a strategy based upon the strengths and weaknesses of both the case the debaters. Every case has a relative weakness as does every debater. You must spend time thinking about these pressure points to develop successful strategies. If a case has good solvency, weak harms, and minimal DA links your strategy should be different than when a case has a solid advantage but links to your large genetics. Likewise, recognize the varying abilities of the 2AR to answer turns, counterplans, and kritiks and try to exploit their personal weaknesses.

Exploit the difference between the ideal and the topical. A well-worded resolution will be a controversial policy statement about a problem area. The words in the resolution force the Affirmative to take a particular policy action, precluding them from addressing a problem in the ideal manner. This discord between the ideal and the topical creates space for a host of negative strategies. It is unlikely that many authors have presented policies with the upcoming resolution in mind, and thus the Affirmative often utilizes a "square peg, round hole" approach to fit the literature into the resolution. Savvy negatives will read Affirmative articles and notice these inevitable gaps which give case turn and counterplan possibilities. These negatives will also use topicality to widen the gap between the ideal and the topical depending upon what they know about the Affirmative advocates.

The Strategic Triad. Try to have 3 round-winning arguments alive coming out of the negative block. You can confound the Affirmative's strategic planning by maintaining ambiguity and flexibility on what you are going to extend in the 2NR. While it is a bad idea to mindlessly extend everything on the flow just to keep it alive, a crafty negative block can efficiently extend a variety of arguments to keep the pressure on the Affirmative. It is important that the arguments be different in nature for the strategy to work; extending five DA's with similar links does not accomplish much. Keep topicality alive (perhaps even reading additional violations when the Affirmative counter-defines words), keep a kritik alive, keep a counterplan alive, keep some case turns or DA's alive. You can often have enough time to do all of this by limiting your card reading to that which is necessary. If the INC reads complete shells, then not much evidence is required later in the debate. Too often, high school debaters read ten cards extending a link that the Affirmative granted, or read numerous cards that say the same thing. If you discipline yourself, you can maintain the One final note-limit the use of the Triad to situations where you do not have a well-thought out, case specific strategy. If you are confident and prepared to debate the case, then don't muck it up. But if you have uncertainties, this is the best way to "muck it up" and not "mess up".

Run counterplans. Run counterplans because the status quo is rarely perfect and the Affirmative plan is likewise imperfect due to resolutional and strategic constraints. Most Affirmatives try to create a flexible balance in their plans-not taking too hard or too soft of an approach, not being too popular or unpopular, including a number of solvency mechanisms to hedge against negative attacks. Counterplans allow the negative to exploit the Affirmative balancing strategies. Counterplans can fork the balanced Affirmative by arguing for a hard-line or soft-line policy, a very popular or very unpopular policy. Furthermore, a counterplan (exclusion or agent in particular) can capture the IAC solvency without doing the entire plan by simply relying on the strength of the Affirmative evidence, which is rarely exclusive to doing the entire plan (it can either be broader or narrower than the Aff). Finally, counterplans can often be run conditionally or in combination with each other which makes life even more difficult for the Affirmative.

Use your knight to fork the affirmative. In chess, the knight is a valuable piece because it can put the opposing player in a fork, having to choose which valuable piece to lose. Debaters should use the principle of forking to choose arguments that force the Affirmative to go a particular way, and then punish the Affirmative for making that choice. Example: run an argument that the Affirmative must specify their agent and then run an agent counterplan and then choose one of the arguments based on the Affirmative response to the other. Forks are particularly useful against Affirmative teams that are unwilling to explain what their plan does in the C-X. They can either be previewed in the INC or concealed, holding back arguments for the negative block until the Affirmative makes their advocacy clear in the 2AC.

Concluding Thoughts

Most of this writing is abstract and can only be demonstrated through a case history of examples that space precludes discussion of in this essay. The most important thing you can do is amass information. Talk with people about their rounds about their cases, about cases they debated, about their strategies, about the teams they debated, and about tbe judges. Try to get copies of people's plans and their cites. These approaches that I have outlined depend upon accurate information for optimal implementation.