2024 Chicago Open (July 27th at Northwestern)

[Jem Casey]

I am honored to announce the 2024 edition of Chicago Open. The tournament will be held at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, on July 27th.

Production Team

I, Jordan Brownstein, will serve as head editor and Young Fenimore Lee will serve as tournament director. The subject editors are:

Jordan Brownstein: Literature, History, Belief, Other Academic, and Other Culture
Ryan Humphrey: Biology
Kevin Park: Chemistry
Delia Cropper: Physics
Jeremy Cummings: Mathematics
Dan Ni: Computer Science and Earth Science
Eleanor Settle: Astronomy and “Other” Other Science
Joey Goldman: Painting and Sculpture, Philosophy, Social Science
Ophir Lifshitz: Classical Music and Opera
Ani Perumalla: Other Fine Arts
Ashish Subramanian: Geography

The writing team is: Jaimie Carlson, JinAh Kim, Young Fenimore Lee, Caroline Mao, Jack Mehr, Itamar Naveh-Benjamin, and Ivvone Zhou. Stephen Eltinge and Olivia Murton will be available to provide additional oversight and feedback.

Distribution

4/4 Literature
1/1 United States Literature
1/1 British Literature
1/1 European Literature
1/1 World Literature
4/4 History
1/1 United States History
1/1 Post-500 CE European History (including UK and Ireland)
1/1 Post-500 CE World History (non-US, non-Europe, excluding CA/AUS/NZ)
1/1 Other History (includes pre-500 CE, CA/AUS/NZ, and interregional)
4/4 Science
1/1 Biology
1/1 Physics
1/1 Chemistry
1/1 Other Science
3/3 Fine Arts
1/1 Painting and Sculpture
1/1 Classical Music and Opera
1/1 Other Arts
1.5/1.5 Belief
1/1 Religion
.5/.5 Mythology¹
2.5/2.5 Thought
1/1 Philosophy
1/1 Social Science
.5/.5 Soft Thought² / Other Academic³
1/1 Geography / Modern World / Other Culture⁴

¹ We plan to reward knowledge typically categorized as Mythology at a greater-than-usual clip in other humanities categories, with an upper bound of 1/1 per packet (in a distribution inspired by, but more informal than, CMST II’s).
² Soft Thought may include: historically influential theorizing that is not commonly researched or cited in its equivalent contemporary field; popular non-fiction that deals with philosophical or social scientific topics; and works of cultural and social criticism. Note that this is not an exhaustive list of possible topics and that these areas may come up in other parts of distribution as well.
³ Other Academic is meant for academic fields that don’t fit neatly into the rest of the distribution. With the same caveat as above, these might include: interdisciplinary research programs like cognitive science; Theory; the “studies” (gender, ethnic and race, science and technology, cultural, communication, etc.); and business/management.
⁴ Geography includes human and physical geography. Modern World includes current events and world affairs that are, in the words of Chris Ray, “adjacent to phenomena people actually study.” Other Culture is the stuff that’s traditionally gone in “Other Academic” that’s not about academic work, including: food, less “geographical” human geography, customs, folklore, and pseudoscience; “culturally significant” technology, pop culture, hobbies, and games; and cross-category tossups on important cultural figures and moments.

Difficulty and “Vision”

We will follow approximately the answerline difficulty distribution Alex outlined last year:

50% appropriate for ACF Regionals; 35% appropriate for ACF Nationals; 15% extracanonical/CO only.

Our goal is to write a set that’s hard enough to play well for the field and no harder. We’re aiming for an uptick in powers and 30s and would love to get back to or above CO 2019’s power rate of 16%.

The hardest parts of the set will be subject to strict notability and convertibility standards and focus on what we hope is untapped knowledge in the heads of players; I would like to be a bit surprised if a tossup goes unpowered or a hard part goes unconverted across all rooms. However, this will still be CO – as the above difficulty distribution suggests, expect a mix of generously clued questions on hard and – in Will Alston’s phrase – “not-necessarily-hard-but-unlikely-elsewhere” answerlines.

While aiming at “untapped knowledge” may require some experimentation – e.g. tinkering with received notions of category purity – we’d like the set to feel like a “culmination” of the rest of college quizbowl: a step up continuous with it, rather than a sharp divergence. Specialists who have worked hard to prepare for the game at the collegiate level (and traveled all the way to play our set) should feel that the distributions and topics mostly scaffold well with the material they’ve studied.

Packet Submission and Fees

Teams may optionally submit a packet of 12 tossups and 12 bonuses. The base fee with a packet will be $275; the base fee without a packet will be $350.

When registering, teams should say whether they are planning to write a packet and approximately when they plan to submit it. Each team that expresses intent to write a packet will receive a packet distribution in response to their registration email. If your team would like to submit more than 12/12, please let us know how much you’d like to write in your email and we can work out a discount if we’re interested.

There will be a 14-week-long packet submission window from March 2 until June 1, with the packet discount decreasing by $10 after each Saturday at 11:59 p.m. PT:



Discounts listed come off the $275 base fee. Feel free to submit earlier than March 2; however, packets after June 1 will not be accepted except in unusual circumstances.

Our hope is to get good questions early enough to use as many as possible. Please consider making your mark on the set by submitting early in the packet submission window and writing questions you’d be thrilled to work with if you were editing.

Team Formation and Registration

An unofficial spreadsheet for team formation and staff sign-ups is located here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing. To officially register for the tournament, please send an email that includes your teams’ roster and packet submission plans (whether you’re submitting a packet and when) to my gmail (jordanzbrownstein).

Field
Eric Bobrow / Seth Ebner / Alexander Nero / Walter Zhao (packet received 3/2)
Adam Fine / Taylor Harvey / Aseem Keyal / Tracy Mirkin (packet received 3/2)
Arya Karthik / Omkar Marathe / Sinecio Morales / TBA (packet received 3/9)
Matt Bollinger / Billy Busse / John Lawrence / Tejas Raje (packet received 3/16)
Amogh Kulkarni / Richard Niu / Raymond Wang / Nathan Zhang (packet received 3/2)
Henry Atkins / Milan Fernandez / Kais Jessa / Gareth Thorlakson (packet received 3/2)
Ethan Ashbrook / Joel Miles / Conor Thompson / TBA
Rob Carson / Andrew Hart / Kai Smith / Andrew Wang (packet received 3/16)
Vincent Du / Jim Fan / Ryan Rosenberg / Jonathan Shauf (packet received 3/9)
Will Alston / Matt Jackson / Nick Jensen / Eric Mukherjee (packet received 3/16)
Jacob Egol / Henry Goff / Kevin Thomas / Annabelle Yang (packet received 3/9)
Joy An / Jeffrey Fung / Jason Hong / Forrest Weintraub (packet received 3/2)
Eric Chen / Michael Coates / Ned Tagtmeier / Kevin Ye
William Golden / Raul Passement / Jason Shi / Jaskaran Singh
Iain Carpenter / Mitch McCullar / Dylan Minarik / Justin Wytmar
Jason Cheng / Richard Yu / TBA / TBA
Eve Fleisig / Swapnil Garg / Nathaniel Hull / Anuttam Ramji (packet received 3/16)
Alex Akridge / Justin Hawkins / Caleb Kendrick / Chris Ray
Anson Berns / Mazin Omer / Hari Parameswaran / Walter Zhang
Naveed Chowdhury / Michal Gerasimiuk / Natan Holtzman / Stephen Liu
Victor Pavao / Rahul Keyal / Doug Simons / Lou (packet received 4/7)
Sam Bailey / Mike Cheyne / Halle Friedman / TBA
Hazel DePriest-Sullivan / Robert Wang / TBA / TBA
Charles Hang / June Yin / TBA / TBA
Emmett Laurie / Kenji Shimizu / Jeremy Tsai / Anderson Wang
Beckett Gilmore / Omar Hamid / TBA / TBA
John Marvin / Vivek Sasse / Christopher Sims / TBA

[Jem Casey]

The tournament will be held July 27th at Northwestern!

[Adventure Temple Trail]

What is the field cap, and what's the procedure for waitlist/standby teams and/or expanding the field if it is reached? I understand that room reservations are unlikely to be finalized for a few months, but the field is almost halfway to its eventual final size from last year, and the situation was suboptimally handled last year so it's probably good to be on the firmer side now.

[Dantooine is Big!]

What is the field cap, and what's the procedure for waitlist/standby teams and/or expanding the field if it is reached? I understand that room reservations are unlikely to be finalized for a few months, but the field is almost halfway to its eventual final size from last year, and the situation was suboptimally handled last year so it's probably good to be on the firmer side now.

Hi Matt, I appreciate the question and concern. I agree that last year, things didn't go great, what with the last-minute issues with field size. I'd like to outline a transparent and equitable procedure for waitlist/standby teams/field expansion ahead of time. I will work on drawing up such a procedure with the rest of the CO team and get back to y'all as soon as we have concrete decisions. Thanks for bringing this up.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

What is the field cap, and what's the procedure for waitlist/standby teams and/or expanding the field if it is reached? I understand that room reservations are unlikely to be finalized for a few months, but the field is almost halfway to its eventual final size from last year, and the situation was suboptimally handled last year so it's probably good to be on the firmer side now.

Hi Matt, I appreciate the question and concern. I agree that last year, things didn't go great, what with the last-minute issues with field size. I'd like to outline a transparent and equitable procedure for waitlist/standby teams/field expansion ahead of time. I will work on drawing up such a procedure with the rest of the CO team and get back to y'all as soon as we have concrete decisions. Thanks for bringing this up.

Restating this question, given that the field continues to expand, including possibly with people who have not played quizbowl in a very long time.

[Auks Ran Ova]

is this real

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

is this real

It's real! We're featuring the $1 Vodka Raspberry Lemonade the entre month of June!

[Jem Casey]

What is the field cap, and what's the procedure for waitlist/standby teams and/or expanding the field if it is reached? I understand that room reservations are unlikely to be finalized for a few months, but the field is almost halfway to its eventual final size from last year, and the situation was suboptimally handled last year so it's probably good to be on the firmer side now.

Hi Matt, I appreciate the question and concern. I agree that last year, things didn't go great, what with the last-minute issues with field size. I'd like to outline a transparent and equitable procedure for waitlist/standby teams/field expansion ahead of time. I will work on drawing up such a procedure with the rest of the CO team and get back to y'all as soon as we have concrete decisions. Thanks for bringing this up.

Restating this question, given that the field continues to expand, including possibly with people who have not played quizbowl in a very long time.

Hi Matt, thanks for your questions and apologies for the wait. The initial field cap will be 24 teams. From there we can expand to a field of 27, then 30, as teams join the waitlist.

Once the initial field cap is reached, interested teams should join the waitlist by emailing me (gmail: jordanzbrownstein) with their roster, packet submission plans (if still applicable), and any restrictions on their end (for example, a hard deadline by which they'd need to know whether they're making the field). Since untimely communication was a problem last year, Young and I are committed to updating all teams on the waitlist about the current situation at least once a week via email and within 12 hours of any field-affecting change (for example, a team dropping or a field expansion). Prospective teams and free agents who have questions about field expansion plans and probabilities should feel free to email me and/or Young (gmail: youngflee99) or post here and can expect a quick response.

We are optimistic about meeting all interest up to the hard cap of 30 teams and will work hard to make sure no one is left hanging on the waitlist. We also want to note that one of the problems that's caused late field issues in the past--teams considering dropping due to mounting late packet penalties--will not occur since teams can play without submitting a packet for a reasonable base fee.

Feedback on any of this is very much welcome!

[Jem Casey]

We're currently at 23 teams, one under the initial field cap. After that, field expansion will follow the procedure outlined above.

[Jem Casey]

We've reached the 24 team cap and have 2 teams on the waitlist. With the next registration, the field will expand to 27 teams!

EDIT: the field has expanded to 27 teams. next (and final) stop: 30 teams