2009: My first CO! I was bad and my team was bad (we went 2-10). Our best moment was almost certainly beating a team of Chris Ray/Ike Jose/Matt Lafer/Guy Tabachnick 175-170. Their 8 (8!) negs obviously helped. The round was capped by me getting a tossup on historical werewolves, followed by some bonus on Donald Duck. The question went like this:
I decided to make up the name "Super Duck." This was an acceptable answer. We won by 5 points.[10] Inspired by “Diabolik,” this is Donald’s acanonical crime fighting and avenging alter-ego. Its was initially made only for the Italian market.
2010: This is one of the craziest CO's I attended. A storm knocked the power out at our hotel on Friday night, and it remained out the entire weekend. The tournament went really long and we still tried to play a lit tournament on Saturday night that literally didn't start until like around midnight. Of our group's two cars, one wouldn't start leaving CO on Saturday night, so those folks didn't get back to the hotel extremely late. My team went 7-7--we won our first game, lost seven in a row, and then won seven in a row. We won the first game when I managed to get this tossup:
His strength derives from his large, fuzzy ears, and his name refers to his skill in dealing with certain marauding animals, whom he kills by grabbing their jaws and ripping them apart bare-handed. For 10 points, name this title badass of the Andrejs Pumpurs-penned national epic of Latvia.
I had no idea who this was, but decided that a Latvian guy might kill...bears, and so his name might be "Bearslayer." And yes, that is an acceptable answer for Lacplesis. We won 245-220.
2011: A solid 6-8 finish, but I thought we played well. The highlight was probably a 305-140 buttwhipping of a Rob Carson-led team. Mik Larsen went 5/4/1 that game and had an amazing tournament throughout.
2012: I actually thought that finishing 6-10 at this tournament was pretty good, considering I ended up as the team's top scorer which is usually a recipe for disaster (my team was very solid though). My highlight here may have been mercilessly playing with the team formation spreadsheet and "naming" most of the teams, which the editors accepted as their actual names. This is why in the stats, you have team names like "Dharma and Greg Bums," "Frankenstein Wolfed the Meat Man," and "Disgusting Human Stains."
2013: The first time finishing above .500 at a CO. The most satisfying result was probably a victory over a very good Mike Sorice-led team that would have been in the finals otherwise. I remember in that round getting a bonus whose first part asked for DJ Baby Bok Choi, a character from a recent SNL Stefon sketch. 30'ing that helped to put that game out of reach.
2014: I played with this Jordan Brownstein kid. He's not bad (my other teammates were all All-Stars as well)! We tied for third place in my best CO finish ever. The most painful moments were probably either Jordan beating me to a wrestling tossup on Andy Kaufman or when Jordan accidentally messed up the name of Kafka's "Report to an Academy," which helped us lose to Matt Bollinger's team. This would perhaps have been even more painful if I had been able to contribute at all that game.
2015: A good, solid performance. Unfortunately, another painful memory:
We were playing a stacked Jordan-led team. Things got off to an interesting start when Evan Adams got a tossup on David Miscavige even though the copy of Going Clear I was reading was literally next to me on the table (I hadn't gotten very far though!). We thought we won, but they got two protests upheld (both, I note, begrudgingly the right calls). This led to a tiebreaker tossup on "opera singers," where all the clues are about foods named after them, which is the shittiest tossup I have ever seen and should never be a tiebreaker tossup. Chris Manners buzzed around the first clue and said "ballerinas," I think just mixing things up. (Amusingly, that tossup is from packet 1 in CO 2015--look a few tossups earlier). I can't blame him.
2016: I helped edit this CO. It was entertaining. The best moment was, of course, winning CO Trash the next day (see that thread).
2017: This was a very tough CO for me. I wasn't feeling the greatest and I had some anxiety issues/depression that weekend. I got like no sleep the night before. To further aggravate things, two of my teammates had flights canceled, preventing them from arriving. The tournament was also very hard, but Shan Kothari's brilliant play got us into the top bracket anyway. I sadly remember almost nothing about this tournament, though (other than never getting to play CO with famous academic and Twitter bad boy Marshall Steinbaum).
2018: Man, in terms of overall weekends, this is probably up there. Things got off to a bad start: I had booked a hotel near Hyde Park prior to the announcement of the move to Evanston--I ended up keeping the Hyde Park one for Friday but opting to book another hotel closer to Evanston for Saturday to avoid a series of really long drives. Then, the weekend before CO, I passed out due to dehydration, and was still experiencing some lightheadness spells that week (so I was apprehensive about a long, fatiguing weekend). I went, and of course, had a fantastic time. My team was great, we shockingly tied for 4th place, and we had a lot of fantastic wins and experiences (and then I won CO Trash again). Just some perosnal highlights:
-one-cluing The Great Dictator tossup on a clue about FDR noting the picture "is causing trouble in the Argentine." Auroni noted that "Mike Cheyne is definitely a person who has used the phrase 'the Argentine.'"
-one-cluing a tossup on "Miss America" against BSHU. Inexplicably getting a visual arts tossup on "Mexico" that round, to set up a chance to win if we could 30 a bonus. We got the middle and hard parts and then totally screwed up an easy part on "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" by saying "Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" to lose by 5 points.
-in the most symbolic CO result ever, we beat 3rd place, 7th place, and 8th place teams...and lost to 21st place.
What say you, CO fans? What are your memories?