2019 Chicago Open (8/3/2019) at Northwestern University
Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:32 am
I am pleased to formally announce the 2019 Chicago Open, which will take place on Saturday, August 3. Unfortunately, a series of creative attempts to secure a location in Hyde Park (which accounted for some but by no means all of the delays in this announcement) ultimately fell short. Thus, this tournament will take place at Northwestern University. We will make every effort to find a better building than last year's... acoustically complex experience.
Editing Team:
I will be serving as head editor, with Jacob Reed ably assisting (as well as editing the Fine Arts and Religion). The rest of the editing team includes Sriram Pendyala (Science), Alston Boyd (Philosophy and some Lit),Will Holub-Moorman (SS and some Lit), and Jonathan Magin (assisting on Lit). In keeping with my general editing philosophy for high-level events, though, many of us will hopefully be contributing across categories. Especially me, in Science.
Submission Schedule and Fees:
Base fee: $250
June 1: -$50
June 15: -$25
June 22: $0
July 6: +50
July 20: +$100
Each day after July 20: +$20/day
After July 27: You will be dropped from the tournament barring extenuating circumstances that have been cleared with the editors.
The weekend of May 25: +$500, this is my wedding weekend, do not do this to me
Incentives: We will again be using packet quality discounts. However, note that properly adhering to the target difficulty (see below) will be a significant component of this metric - almost certainly more so than in years past.
-Excellent packet (almost all questions usable with minimal to no editing): -$100
-Good packet (many questions usable with minimal to no editing): -$50
Buzzer discounts:
-$10 per working buzzer
-$20 per approved moderator
Set Philosophy
1) This CO will not be as hard as recent years. I just don't see a reason to justify the recent difficulty creep; it seems to be brutalizing the field for no apparent reason. I do not mean to discourage people from asking about awesome, worthwhile content that can't really come up elsewhere; just understand that such content, following my long-endorsed Bell Curve model of difficulty, will represent a very small minority of questions. I'm not unconflicted about this - there are trade-offs to having an easier event, and it's less likely you'll hear that amazing tossup that makes your day because you love it and nobody else knows it. But I'm hopefully that making the remaining literally 99.75% of the tournament more accessible will make up for it.
[In conjunction with this, I think it would be totally great to see the return of some suitably IMPOSSIBLE side event (in the vein of Impossible Speedcheck, Experiment, or even Arrabal), to take place at the other summer event or some other time. I just don't think the hallmark open event of the year needs to also be the most experimental one.]
What does this mean for you? Mainly, please don't submit packets modeled on the harder parts of the past several years of CO. Tossups should resemble ACF Nationals or a tick harder. Bonuses should be along the same lines, except that I'd like people to really think carefully about choosing hard parts. I have a suspicion that many, many hard parts at CO (or even Nats) are just going totally unanswered by the field. Again, novel and important content is ok in a hard part, but (a) not all the time and (b) you still want to have some reasonable expectation of someone actually, you know, answering it. If you just want to make people feel humbled, tape-record a monologue instead.
2) I'm choosing not to repeat last year's experiment with dialing up the non-Western arts, which I (and most everyone else I spoke to) felt did not work. I'm not at all averse to different (and ideally less plentiful) attempts to deal with this acknowledged bias in the canon, but I do think we need other ways to go about it. This does not, of course, mean there will be 0 non-Western arts - but there will certainly be much less than 33%.
3) This CO will feature a set sub-distribution for "modern world" content. (Note: Lower-case; not to be confused with Modern World content, of which this tournament will impose a hard 0/0 maximum). What do we want here? Good current events, good questions about geography, and a healthy dose of thought regarding the last 25 years of human civilization. It is my hope that this will rehabilitate the geography/CE distribution at higher levels of difficulty, which is something that we've been trying to figure out for a while now but are still having trouble getting a handle on. I'm going to hold a community conversation in the next month or so in the Discord to generate ideas and debate what this should look like, so I'll amend some details here after that happens.
4) Lastly, I want anyone in the community to feel very encouraged to drop us a line if you have thoughts on the event, the changes, etc. In particular, I welcome feedback/opinions on CO content by players of ALL EXPERIENCE AND SKILL LEVELS. I suspect there are a number of really great members of our community who don't feel that they are "allowed" to weigh in on something like CO for reasons of seniority/ppg/whatever. I vehemently disagree with this philosophy, so if that's the case, I want you to feel particularly welcome to contact us.
Distribution:
Literature (5/5)
1/1 American
1/1 British
1/1 European
1/1 World
1/1 Any literature (you should feel encouraged to do creative things in this part of the distribution)
History (5/5)
This tournament will slightly modify the way the history distribution is interpreted. This actually isn't a big change; I don't expect it will end up feeling different than the regular variation of the "2/2 Euro" we get across all events. But that variation right now is quite large and somewhat ad hoc, and I'd like to take a step at (imperfectly) formalizing it a bit better.
1/1 American
1/1 "European" (Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, modern history that's part of the European tradition like much WWI/WW2 content, etc. Commonwealth history also goes here)
1/1 Mediterranean-Plus ("Euro" history that is more Mediterranean in nature, Islamic world and things that were adjacent to the Islamic world, Ancient and Classical, Central Asian)
1/1 Non-Western (Latin American, African, East Asian, and otherwise global or transregional history; you can also write questions on the Islamic world here if you do not write them in the Med+ distribution)
1/1 Choice (include at least .5/.5 questions that go outside the bounds of the usual history distribution in some way, including historiography)
Science (5/5)
1/1 Biology
1/1 Chemistry
1/1 Physics
1/1 Other Science
1/1 Any Science (At least one of these questions should be "science history"; for the other, try to emphasize interdisciplinary or creative questions here rather than just writing an extra topic in a base category)
Fine Arts (3/3)
1/1 Visual Arts
1/1 Music
1/1 Other Arts (one visual and one auditory; you may count sculpture either here or as visual, as a judgement call on where it fits better given the specific topic)
Religion 1/1 (This can include beliefs that are myth-y, particularly in terms of folklore or practices associated with mythologies)
Thought (2/2)
1/1 Philosophy
1/1 Social Science
Modern World (1/1)
Try to aim for one of these sub-categories (don't write two questions from the same one):
-Significant current events that are adjacent to phenomena people actually study
-Good questions about geography (meaning they incorporate human, cultural, historical, and other academic content; do not be afraid of category cross-contamination as long as the entire question isn't about the same non-MW category)
-Thought regarding the last 25 years of human civilization (research from sociology, political science, international relations, anthropology, etc. that has focused on recent developments in human societies, government, and beliefs)
Some notes here: You do not need to write an entire question that is thematically "pure"; indeed, you will often want to avoid doing so. For example, if you use clues about ethnographic and political science studies that have been done in Nigeria, you don't need to make the rest of the question about other academic studies that have been done in Nigeria (since that question would be very hard). You can draw from other geography or CE material to properly construct a difficulty curve - and, again, you probably should do this.
Other Academic (1/1)
This category should mainly include:
-Other social science or thought that is not pure philosophy
-Interdisciplinary questions, including things that might touch on culturally significant aspects of popular culture (though no more than 1 of the latter)
-Creative topics that don't fit cleanly into a particular sub-category
This category should NOT be used for "something that could easily go in a base category and I just felt like writing more of"
1/1 Choice
All inquiries/packet submissions should be sent to [email protected].
We're grateful for being entrusted with the responsibility of not ruining your CO experience; really looking forward to seeing everyone in August.
EDIT:
To register, please fill out the form found here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link
Field Update:
Billy Busse, Rob Carson, Andrew Hart, Tejas Raje
Zach Foster, Zhenglin Liu, Chris Sims, and Ian Dewan
Chris Borglum, James Lasker, Dylan Minarik, Ryan Rosenberg
Aidan Mehigan, Daniel Hothem, Ryan Humphrey, Jason Zhou
Mike Bentley, Matt Bollinger, Mike Cheyne, Shan Kothari
Charles Hang, Chinmay Kansara, Rohan Rai, Erik Tomasic
JinAh Kim, Selene Koo, Olivia Lamberti, Lauren Onel
Joey Goldman, Jason Golfinos, John Lawrence, and Mike Sorice
Caleb Kendrick, Will Alston, Kai Smith, Andrew Wang
Jason Asher, Jonathan Mishory, Brian Kalathiveetil, Will Bordowitz
Tracy Mirkin, Taylor Harvey, Alex Shaw, Jonathen Settle
Aseem Keyal, Weijia Cheng, Graham Reid, Stephen Liu
Mike Etzkorn, Mitch McCullar, Matt Lafer, Ryan Westbrook
Kevin Wang, Matthew Lehmann, Rahul Keyal, Sam Bailey
Aayush Rajasekaran, Tamara Vardomskaya, Jay Misuk, Alex Fregeau
Halle Friedman, Emmett Laurie, Matt Mitchell, Vishwa Shanmugam
Eric Chen, Michael Coates, Grant Li, Tim Morrison
Jordan Brownstein, Jaimie Carlson, Ophir Lifshitz, Eric Mukherjee
Auroni Gupta, Jakob Myers, Clark Smith, Adam Fine
Matt Weiner, Sean Smiley, Boyang Jiao, Jerry Vinokurov
Editing Team:
I will be serving as head editor, with Jacob Reed ably assisting (as well as editing the Fine Arts and Religion). The rest of the editing team includes Sriram Pendyala (Science), Alston Boyd (Philosophy and some Lit),Will Holub-Moorman (SS and some Lit), and Jonathan Magin (assisting on Lit). In keeping with my general editing philosophy for high-level events, though, many of us will hopefully be contributing across categories. Especially me, in Science.
Submission Schedule and Fees:
Base fee: $250
June 1: -$50
June 15: -$25
June 22: $0
July 6: +50
July 20: +$100
Each day after July 20: +$20/day
After July 27: You will be dropped from the tournament barring extenuating circumstances that have been cleared with the editors.
The weekend of May 25: +$500, this is my wedding weekend, do not do this to me
Incentives: We will again be using packet quality discounts. However, note that properly adhering to the target difficulty (see below) will be a significant component of this metric - almost certainly more so than in years past.
-Excellent packet (almost all questions usable with minimal to no editing): -$100
-Good packet (many questions usable with minimal to no editing): -$50
Buzzer discounts:
-$10 per working buzzer
-$20 per approved moderator
Set Philosophy
1) This CO will not be as hard as recent years. I just don't see a reason to justify the recent difficulty creep; it seems to be brutalizing the field for no apparent reason. I do not mean to discourage people from asking about awesome, worthwhile content that can't really come up elsewhere; just understand that such content, following my long-endorsed Bell Curve model of difficulty, will represent a very small minority of questions. I'm not unconflicted about this - there are trade-offs to having an easier event, and it's less likely you'll hear that amazing tossup that makes your day because you love it and nobody else knows it. But I'm hopefully that making the remaining literally 99.75% of the tournament more accessible will make up for it.
[In conjunction with this, I think it would be totally great to see the return of some suitably IMPOSSIBLE side event (in the vein of Impossible Speedcheck, Experiment, or even Arrabal), to take place at the other summer event or some other time. I just don't think the hallmark open event of the year needs to also be the most experimental one.]
What does this mean for you? Mainly, please don't submit packets modeled on the harder parts of the past several years of CO. Tossups should resemble ACF Nationals or a tick harder. Bonuses should be along the same lines, except that I'd like people to really think carefully about choosing hard parts. I have a suspicion that many, many hard parts at CO (or even Nats) are just going totally unanswered by the field. Again, novel and important content is ok in a hard part, but (a) not all the time and (b) you still want to have some reasonable expectation of someone actually, you know, answering it. If you just want to make people feel humbled, tape-record a monologue instead.
2) I'm choosing not to repeat last year's experiment with dialing up the non-Western arts, which I (and most everyone else I spoke to) felt did not work. I'm not at all averse to different (and ideally less plentiful) attempts to deal with this acknowledged bias in the canon, but I do think we need other ways to go about it. This does not, of course, mean there will be 0 non-Western arts - but there will certainly be much less than 33%.
3) This CO will feature a set sub-distribution for "modern world" content. (Note: Lower-case; not to be confused with Modern World content, of which this tournament will impose a hard 0/0 maximum). What do we want here? Good current events, good questions about geography, and a healthy dose of thought regarding the last 25 years of human civilization. It is my hope that this will rehabilitate the geography/CE distribution at higher levels of difficulty, which is something that we've been trying to figure out for a while now but are still having trouble getting a handle on. I'm going to hold a community conversation in the next month or so in the Discord to generate ideas and debate what this should look like, so I'll amend some details here after that happens.
4) Lastly, I want anyone in the community to feel very encouraged to drop us a line if you have thoughts on the event, the changes, etc. In particular, I welcome feedback/opinions on CO content by players of ALL EXPERIENCE AND SKILL LEVELS. I suspect there are a number of really great members of our community who don't feel that they are "allowed" to weigh in on something like CO for reasons of seniority/ppg/whatever. I vehemently disagree with this philosophy, so if that's the case, I want you to feel particularly welcome to contact us.
Distribution:
Literature (5/5)
1/1 American
1/1 British
1/1 European
1/1 World
1/1 Any literature (you should feel encouraged to do creative things in this part of the distribution)
History (5/5)
This tournament will slightly modify the way the history distribution is interpreted. This actually isn't a big change; I don't expect it will end up feeling different than the regular variation of the "2/2 Euro" we get across all events. But that variation right now is quite large and somewhat ad hoc, and I'd like to take a step at (imperfectly) formalizing it a bit better.
1/1 American
1/1 "European" (Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, modern history that's part of the European tradition like much WWI/WW2 content, etc. Commonwealth history also goes here)
1/1 Mediterranean-Plus ("Euro" history that is more Mediterranean in nature, Islamic world and things that were adjacent to the Islamic world, Ancient and Classical, Central Asian)
1/1 Non-Western (Latin American, African, East Asian, and otherwise global or transregional history; you can also write questions on the Islamic world here if you do not write them in the Med+ distribution)
1/1 Choice (include at least .5/.5 questions that go outside the bounds of the usual history distribution in some way, including historiography)
Science (5/5)
1/1 Biology
1/1 Chemistry
1/1 Physics
1/1 Other Science
1/1 Any Science (At least one of these questions should be "science history"; for the other, try to emphasize interdisciplinary or creative questions here rather than just writing an extra topic in a base category)
Fine Arts (3/3)
1/1 Visual Arts
1/1 Music
1/1 Other Arts (one visual and one auditory; you may count sculpture either here or as visual, as a judgement call on where it fits better given the specific topic)
Religion 1/1 (This can include beliefs that are myth-y, particularly in terms of folklore or practices associated with mythologies)
Thought (2/2)
1/1 Philosophy
1/1 Social Science
Modern World (1/1)
Try to aim for one of these sub-categories (don't write two questions from the same one):
-Significant current events that are adjacent to phenomena people actually study
-Good questions about geography (meaning they incorporate human, cultural, historical, and other academic content; do not be afraid of category cross-contamination as long as the entire question isn't about the same non-MW category)
-Thought regarding the last 25 years of human civilization (research from sociology, political science, international relations, anthropology, etc. that has focused on recent developments in human societies, government, and beliefs)
Some notes here: You do not need to write an entire question that is thematically "pure"; indeed, you will often want to avoid doing so. For example, if you use clues about ethnographic and political science studies that have been done in Nigeria, you don't need to make the rest of the question about other academic studies that have been done in Nigeria (since that question would be very hard). You can draw from other geography or CE material to properly construct a difficulty curve - and, again, you probably should do this.
Other Academic (1/1)
This category should mainly include:
-Other social science or thought that is not pure philosophy
-Interdisciplinary questions, including things that might touch on culturally significant aspects of popular culture (though no more than 1 of the latter)
-Creative topics that don't fit cleanly into a particular sub-category
This category should NOT be used for "something that could easily go in a base category and I just felt like writing more of"
1/1 Choice
All inquiries/packet submissions should be sent to [email protected].
We're grateful for being entrusted with the responsibility of not ruining your CO experience; really looking forward to seeing everyone in August.
EDIT:
To register, please fill out the form found here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link
Field Update:
Billy Busse, Rob Carson, Andrew Hart, Tejas Raje
Zach Foster, Zhenglin Liu, Chris Sims, and Ian Dewan
Chris Borglum, James Lasker, Dylan Minarik, Ryan Rosenberg
Aidan Mehigan, Daniel Hothem, Ryan Humphrey, Jason Zhou
Mike Bentley, Matt Bollinger, Mike Cheyne, Shan Kothari
Charles Hang, Chinmay Kansara, Rohan Rai, Erik Tomasic
JinAh Kim, Selene Koo, Olivia Lamberti, Lauren Onel
Joey Goldman, Jason Golfinos, John Lawrence, and Mike Sorice
Caleb Kendrick, Will Alston, Kai Smith, Andrew Wang
Jason Asher, Jonathan Mishory, Brian Kalathiveetil, Will Bordowitz
Tracy Mirkin, Taylor Harvey, Alex Shaw, Jonathen Settle
Aseem Keyal, Weijia Cheng, Graham Reid, Stephen Liu
Mike Etzkorn, Mitch McCullar, Matt Lafer, Ryan Westbrook
Kevin Wang, Matthew Lehmann, Rahul Keyal, Sam Bailey
Aayush Rajasekaran, Tamara Vardomskaya, Jay Misuk, Alex Fregeau
Halle Friedman, Emmett Laurie, Matt Mitchell, Vishwa Shanmugam
Eric Chen, Michael Coates, Grant Li, Tim Morrison
Jordan Brownstein, Jaimie Carlson, Ophir Lifshitz, Eric Mukherjee
Auroni Gupta, Jakob Myers, Clark Smith, Adam Fine
Matt Weiner, Sean Smiley, Boyang Jiao, Jerry Vinokurov