Lilit Kommunikation A fantastic result at the World Debating Championships: we reached the ESL quarterfinals! We did it — again! In 2011, last year, my debating partner Marcus Ewald and I first reached the ESL quarterfinals at the World Debating Championships in Gaborone, Botswana. This year in Manila, Philippines, we repeated that wonderful success even more convincingly! Across nine preliminary rounds, the world’s smartest debaters competed in English. Teams from Oxford, Leiden, Tokyo, Lahore and Beijing fought for the top places — and we were right in the middle as “Gutenberg A.” In the end, we comfortably broke to the quarterfinals as the sixth-best ESL team out of 156, and I ranked a very good 37th out of 334 on the individual ESL speaker table. Many thanks to my teammate Marcus for this wonderful shared result at the World Debating Championships and a great time in the Philippines. You could not wish for a better “partner in crime”!