The competition was challenging, with a lot of them coming from the best international schools in China, and we didn't do as well as we thought, but we clinched the last spot and are on to the quarterfinals tomorrow! I think we had 2 wins and 2 losses but we had good speaker points.

@bohaska Qualification was looking shaky after round 3 with 2 losing debates, but for the last round, I decided to argue for Pro and switch to talking about the benefits of wind power in the Arctic instead of the more traditional points about oil and rare earth elements, which caught our opponents off-guard, them having prepared for a debate about oil.

We then had a weird switch of positions where we, Pro, were trying to convince the judge that no reasonable company would extract Arctic oil because it's too expensive, and Con trying to say that Arctic oil extraction will happen if allowed and will lead to very bad consequences.

Closing date pushed back to November 5th, on the 4th there will be 4 rounds of debate, on the 5th the semifinals and finals will be done.

What format is this? How many other teams are there?

@w4t3rm374n I am not exactly sure how many teams will be there, I estimate around 20 teams.

Public forum debate.

@w4t3rm374n ok, I went and downloaded a couple of past high-school debates, and for the online ones they average around 5 debates per rounds, which implies only 10 teams on average.

May be a bit higher as people switch from middle-school to high-school though

@w4t3rm374n I got the schedule, there are 15 teams participating