TOURNAMENT PRODUCTION TEAM
I will be serving as head editor of this tournament. Ike Jose will be providing oversight. Subject editing will be handled by myself (history, music, social science, modern world/geo), Itamar Naveh-Benjamin (vis arts), Jonathen Settle (phys/other), Eric Mukherjee (bio/chem), and Brad McLain (beliefs and philosophy). Literature editing will mostly be handled by myself, with assistance and collaboration from other editors/writers and substantial contributions from freelancers. Jacob O'Rourke will be handling logistics.
PACKET SUBMISSION AND FEES
The base fee for this tournament will be $250 as with last year's event. There will be no late submission fees, as packet submission is not mandatory. We'd love to receive submissions from teams, though, and you can find information on packet submission here.
Please put your team name and members here! We will have a more official registration process outlined when future tournament information is made available.
The original submission schedule will be maintained here to give people an idea of what topics the final tournament will include:
Literature (4/4)
- 1/1 Long Fiction (novels)
- 1/1 Miscellaneous, with an emphasis on having more nonfiction and additional Long Fiction
- 1/1 Poetry (epic poetry goes here)
- 1 Drama
- 1 Short Fiction
- 1/1 US History
- 1/1 Post-500 CE European History (including Britain and Ireland)
- 1/1 Post-500 CE "World History" (non-US, non-Europe, excluding Canada, Australia, New Zealand)
- 1 /1 Other History (Commonwealth, Archaeology, Historiography, and inter-regional questions)
- 1/1 Biology
- 1/1 Physics + Astronomy
- 1/1 Chemistry + Earth Science
- 1 Applied Science (including topics such as engineering and data science)
- 1 Math and Computer Science
- 1/1 Classical + Opera (Either two classical music or one classical music and one opera; non-western "classical" traditions go here)
- 1/1 Painting + Sculpture (Either two painting or one painting and one sculpture)
- 1/1 Other Arts (Anything not covered above. Do not write two of the same sort of other arts)
- 1 Non-Abrahamic Legends (traditional quizbowl "mythology" focused on stories - don't write a purely worship-focused tossup here)
- 1 Theology and Practice (scripture goes here, unless it's narrative-oriented)
- 1 Other or Misc (questions focused on Biblical or Qur'anic narratives go here, as well as mixed questions)
- 1/1 Philosophy + “Soft Thought” (ala Nats 2018)
- 1/1 Social Science
- 1 Geography (including human geography)
- 1 Modern World (interesting current events and/or topics that are important to the current state of human affairs)
- 1 Other Academic (either interesting mixed academic or topics that don't fit in well above)
Tossups will be split roughly 40/60 between more challenging answerlines and ones that would be well-converted at ACF Regionals, respectively. Please note, though, that this does not mean that the "conceit" of the easier answers will necessarily be similar to those found at ACF Fall - we firmly believe that Chicago Open is the best place to push the boundaries of the academic canon. To keep difficulty in line, this set will aim to roughly replicate the bonus difficulty of the 2014, 2015, and 2019 editions of Chicago Open. In addition, there will be greater attempts to smooth out both tossup and bonus difficulty within and across categories more than previous COs, to maintain a more coherent set "feel" and player experience.
The distribution outlined above is highly specific in order to ensure that a wide range of subject matter is covered. Nonetheless, we're choosing not to experiment too much - a little less religion/myth, a little more Geo/MW/OAc, and some dedicated space for applied math, data science, and engineering questions. We mean to incorporate a lot of the best trends in modern writing and highlight topics that people have enjoyed hearing in many successful recent hard tournaments without sacrificing much.
We look forward to creating an awesome tournament experience for you all!