The Quizbowl Resource Center

From the creative team that brought you That's Armageddon! comes a natural disaster of galactic proportions!

I speak of course of Chicago Open 2015, which, as previously announced, will be edited by myself, Eric Mukherjee, Aaron Rosenberg, and Jonathan Magin, with guest appearances by Rebecca Maxfield and Zeke Berdichevsky. The tournament will take place on the weekend of July 18-19.

Chicago Open is a packet-submission tournament. A few words about difficulty: other than the playoff/finals packets, which will be written by the editors, the difficulty of this tournament is going to be largely controlled by the difficulty of the submissions. I trust that anyone coming to CO either already has a good sense for what kinds of things work at an event like this, or can, in concert with more experienced teammates, acquire said sense by perusing past packets. We do not demand that your questions be outrageously hard; we'd much rather you wrote good questions that were less adventurous rather than bad questions that were very adventurous. That said, we encourage you to write good, adventurous questions. Take care that your bonus parts reasonably distinguish between tiers of knowledge and also allow for the legitimate possibility of 30 points. In editing, we'll be guided by our sense of what belongs in a CO and some nonzero amount of whimsy.

The base fee for CO is $120. The schedule of discounts and penalties is as follows, all date ranges inclusive:

On or before May 3: -$60.
Between May 3 and May 24: -$30
Between May 25 and June 7: $0
Between June 8 and June 21: +$30
Between June 22 and July 5: +$60
On or after July 6: +$10/day additionally

Get your packets in early! Save yourself money and save us editing time! Once you have finalized your team, please register for the tournament at this link. In the past, CO has featured on the order of 15 or 16 teams, give or take, and we anticipate a similar number this year. We hope to avoid having to cap the field due to staff shortages, but do encourage you to register as soon as you have a team formed. We look forward to seeing your shiny, happy faces at Chicago Open this summer.

Oh, an additional note about packets and distributions. Obviously your packets should be properly formatted, divided by category, with tossups and bonuses in each category separately. Please follow all the other standard formatting conventions as specified on the ACF website. The distribution is identical to the normal ACF distribution, except that there will be no trash and no explicit geography requirement. In place of those categories, we invite you to write questions on relevant current events/recent history (i.e. last 10 years) or 1/1 of any categories you choose (spread the two questions across different categories) and an additional 1/1 social science or "other thought". If you opt for social science, try to hit lesser-asked fields like ethnography and linguistics; if you opt for "other thought," that includes pretty much any sort of cultural criticism or similar type of work. Be judicious about what might better belong in philosophy; in other words, don't write 1/1 French deconstruction and then submit another 1/1 literary theory or whatever. As always, make sure you are diverse in your choice of topics.

I really question having 1/1 Other Thought on a CO level when we already have 1/1 Philo and 1/1 Social Science.

Cheynem wrote:I really question having 1/1 Other Thought on a CO level when we already have 1/1 Philo and 1/1 Social Science.

If people think this is too much, I'm happy to make this optional, but I enjoy exploring weird topics that don't necessarily get that much play in other tournaments.

grapesmoker wrote:

Cheynem wrote:I really question having 1/1 Other Thought on a CO level when we already have 1/1 Philo and 1/1 Social Science.

If people think this is too much, I'm happy to make this optional, but I enjoy exploring weird topics that don't necessarily get that much play in other tournaments.

Do you have answers or topics in mind that can't be explored in Philo or Social Science? I definitely don't appreciate you foisting Sun n' Fun on your captive audience.

grapesmoker wrote: A few words about difficulty: other than the playoff/finals packets, which will be written by the editors, the difficulty of this tournament is going to be largely controlled by the difficulty of the submissions.

Nobody was happy the last time this happened. And the prospect of wild swings in difficulty between packets with different intended difficulties is also not thrilling. I suspect I should read this charitably as "the editors will look over the first few submissions, then determine a consistent and sane difficulty for this tournament across the board from there, tempering the literally impossible stuff regardless".

I trust that anyone coming to CO either already has a good sense for what kinds of things work at an event like this, or can, in concert with more experienced teammates, acquire said sense by perusing past packets.

As nice as this would be, I wouldn't get your hopes up...

vcuEvan wrote:

grapesmoker wrote:

Cheynem wrote:I really question having 1/1 Other Thought on a CO level when we already have 1/1 Philo and 1/1 Social Science.

If people think this is too much, I'm happy to make this optional, but I enjoy exploring weird topics that don't necessarily get that much play in other tournaments.

Do you have answers or topics in mind that can't be explored in Philo or Social Science? I definitely don't appreciate you foisting Sun n' Fun on your captive audience.

Sure. There are lots of things that get written that don't neatly fall into any of those categories: film criticism, longform journalism, essays. I mean, Joan Didion is a quizbowl staple, but I'd be hard pressed to see how she fits into either philosophy or social science. People normally shoehorn her into the literature distribution, despite the fact that much of what she writes has nothing to do with literature. David Foster Wallace (his non-fiction work) is another. I think those kinds of things ought to get a category of their own from time to time rather than be relegated to second-class citizen status in larger categories that don't nicely accommodate them.

edit: I definitely do not want this 1/1 to become all about any one particular subtype of non-fiction writing, e.g. contemporary European Marxists or whatever. That's not what this is about at all.

Matthew Jackson wrote:

grapesmoker wrote: A few words about difficulty: other than the playoff/finals packets, which will be written by the editors, the difficulty of this tournament is going to be largely controlled by the difficulty of the submissions.

Nobody was happy the last time this happened. And the prospect of wild swings in difficulty between packets with different intended difficulties is also not thrilling. I suspect I should read this charitably as "the editors will look over the first few submissions, then determine a consistent and sane difficulty for this tournament across the board from there, tempering the literally impossible stuff regardless".

It's Chicago Open. It's going to be hard. I'm not sure what you want me to say. We're going to do our best to produce a tournament that matches the difficulty of what we think a CO should be, but at the same time, we can't do that job effectively if everyone submits 15 packets of impossible things or 15 packets worth of ACF Regionals content. This is not, I hope, any sort of revelation; we're just not going to have time to rework every single question to stringent difficulty rubrics, so my statement is a suggestion to writers to think about what kind of tournament they'd like to see, rather than submitting whatever the hell they feel like and counting on us to spin straw into gold.

I trust that anyone coming to CO either already has a good sense for what kinds of things work at an event like this, or can, in concert with more experienced teammates, acquire said sense by perusing past packets.

As nice as this would be, I wouldn't get your hopes up...

Again, not sure what I'm supposed to tell people. I don't have a long manifesto composed outlining point by point what CO should be. If anyone's unsure about an answer choice or question, they're free to email the editors and we'll let you know if we think it works or not.

Yeah, it's unrealistic to expect Chicago Open to be modeled to anything as strenuously as we would expect ACF Nationals/Regionals to be modeled to. I enjoyed Jerry's last CO go-round and assume he and his talented editing crew will produce a fine set. I really don't have a problem with the last few years of CO difficulty; I would say maybe a good difficulty base to shoot for would be the last two years Nationals with a little leeway for one or two wackier (but accessible and well written) things.

Is there an order for the side events on Sunday yet?

Mike Bentley wrote:Is there an order for the side events on Sunday yet?

There is not. I will email the various organizers of the side events this weekend to try and figure out how to make all this happen.

grapesmoker wrote:

Mike Bentley wrote:Is there an order for the side events on Sunday yet?

There is not. I will email the various organizers of the side events this weekend to try and figure out how to make all this happen.

Thanks. Getting this sorted out sooner rather than later helps me weigh flight costs / vacation days against how much I want to play certain tournaments.

Is there any way to view registered teams? Can there be?!

Captain Sinico wrote:Is there any way to view registered teams? Can there be?!

You're with us!

I know that! I was just wondering for, like, other people and so I can see whom we're playing against and stuff.

Captain Sinico wrote:Is there any way to view registered teams? Can there be?!

There can but is not. I'll get on that.

Captain Sinico wrote:I know that! I was just wondering for, like, other people and so I can see whom we're playing against and stuff.

Your wish has been granted.

Any chance we could go back to when teams could provide their own team names? Or do we need to accept some weird allusions to something I've never heard of? (Yes, I know it's the latter, but I'm asking anyway).

Also, sorry, with my AOL dial-up account I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to edit that document linked above, but a team of me, Billy Beyer, Ryan Westbrook, and Jordan Palmer is going to have a packet submitted before May 3.

ValenciaQBowl wrote:Any chance we could go back to when teams could provide their own team names? Or do we need to accept some weird allusions to something I've never heard of? (Yes, I know it's the latter, but I'm asking anyway).

Also, sorry, with my AOL dial-up account I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to edit that document linked above, but a team of me, Billy Beyer, Ryan Westbrook, and Jordan Palmer is going to have a packet submitted before May 3.

There's a link in the announcement that leads you to a registration form. If you can fill that out, that would be great.

As for the names thing, the assignment of team names by the editor is a fairly longstanding tradition and is part of the fun. Of course, if next year's editor wants to go back to self-assigned team names, that's their prerogative.

Thanks, Jerry--I missed the registration link in the original post but have registered us.

No worries about the naming convention. But we picked our own names for the first 6-7 COs, at least. Still, I imagine that means we've had more with editor-provided names than not. And whatever I'd come up with would suck, anyway..

ValenciaQBowl wrote:...do we need to accept some weird allusions to something I've never heard of?

Congratulations: you've inadvertently created the world's best half-sentence question about quizbowl!

Or maybe advertently?

A couple of people asked me to update the public-facing part of the registration form, so I did that. There are currently 13 teams registered. I think 15 or 17 would be nice numbers for a full round-robin, or 18 for 2 brackets of 9 with re-seeding. I don't know that we'll be able to do much to avoid double byes if we end up with an even number like 16, but we'll probably figure something out.

grapesmoker wrote:A couple of people asked me to update the public-facing part of the registration form, so I did that. There are currently 13 teams registered. I think 15 or 17 would be nice numbers for a full round-robin, or 18 for 2 brackets of 9 with re-seeding. I don't know that we'll be able to do much to avoid double byes if we end up with an even number like 16, but we'll probably figure something out.

Part of the appeal of CO, given the vagaries of regular-season packet submission, is the assurance that a big chunk of your team's packet will get used and not combined if you write it responsibly, and the feel of what Bruce called a "Hobbesian war of all against all" playing every other team in the field. As such, I'd much prefer not to go to a number requiring multiple brackets unless there's an EXPLOSION of interest that utterly forces it. (Plus it shifts the burden to editors to write a ton of editors' stuff for crossover rounds or jerry-rig a schedule with byes in the playoffs.) Can we do something like cap the field at 17, count the submission of a full packet as one's "official" registration, and maintain a wait list in the event that 17 is a horribly deficient number compared to demand?

Having a double bye in a day as long as CO does not strike me as that awful and might actually be nice.

While I don't know if we would exceed the limit, I'd rather not see a "race to the packet submission" again for CO.

Matthew J wrote:

grapesmoker wrote:A couple of people asked me to update the public-facing part of the registration form, so I did that. There are currently 13 teams registered. I think 15 or 17 would be nice numbers for a full round-robin, or 18 for 2 brackets of 9 with re-seeding. I don't know that we'll be able to do much to avoid double byes if we end up with an even number like 16, but we'll probably figure something out.

Part of the appeal of CO, given the vagaries of regular-season packet submission, is the assurance that a big chunk of your team's packet will get used and not combined if you write it responsibly, and the feel of what Bruce called a "Hobbesian war of all against all" playing every other team in the field. As such, I'd much prefer not to go to a number requiring multiple brackets unless there's an EXPLOSION of interest that utterly forces it. (Plus it shifts the burden to editors to write a ton of editors' stuff for crossover rounds or jerry-rig a schedule with byes in the playoffs.) Can we do something like cap the field at 17, count the submission of a full packet as one's "official" registration, and maintain a wait list in the event that 17 is a horribly deficient number compared to demand?

Having a double bye in a day as long as CO does not strike me as that awful and might actually be nice.

I'm amenable to a cap suggestion; I don't know that CO has ever had 18 teams, and I only put that number out there to suggest what could be done with it. Is there sufficient unrealized potential for 5 more teams? It seems like all the usual suspects have more or less committed at this point.

Where should these packets be sent? We will send ours in tomorrow although it may be rather late on Sunday. I am assuming we send them to at least Jerry and Eric?

In the absence of instructions as to where the packets should be sent, I just sent the Adams/Cheyne/Manners/me packet to the email addresses I have for Jerry and Eric.

SUCK IT.

Packets Received:

First Deadline (-60$):
Ike and Co
Mike Cheyne/Evan Adams/Ashvin Srivatsa/Chris Manners

Second Deadline (-30$):
Andrew Wang/ Richard Yu/Will Alston/Jason Asher
Jordan Brownstein/Selene Koo/John Lawrence/Seth Teitler
Seth Ebner/Will Mason/Gordon Arsenoff/Charles Hang
Foster Hughes/Gaurav Kandlikar/Athena Kern/Jason Zhou
Rob Carson/Shan Kothari et al

Thanks for updating, Eric. Packets should be sent to myself ([email protected]) and Eric ([email protected]).

Also: we've decided to cap the field at 17 teams (presently 15 teams are registered). Hopefully this will not cause undue hardship to anyone.

We're holding steady at 15 teams; I would like to close the field ASAP, at the very latest by the end of this week. Please let me know if you're assembling a team by this Friday, so that we can discuss what to do.

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:We're holding steady at 15 teams; I would like to close the field ASAP, at the very latest by the end of this week. Please let me know if you're assembling a team by this Friday, so that we can discuss what to do.

We are now at 16 teams. We would like to get to 17, for scheduling reasons (to be able to run a full RR and finals, as is CO tradition). Please sign up!

Oh, as far as payment is concerned, please be ready with check, cash, or Venmo (Venmo's great, everyone should get it) on the day of the tournament.

It would help if you could send out payment notices to each team sometime before the tournament listing how much they owe.

Cheynem wrote:It would help if you could send out payment notices to each team sometime before the tournament listing how much they owe.

We'll do that.

Hey everybody, don't forget that the -30 deadline for packets ends tomorrow at midnight EST (24 hours 54 minutes from now). Hope to see a few more in my inbox.

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:We are now at 16 teams. We would like to get to 17, for scheduling reasons (to be able to run a full RR and finals, as is CO tradition). Please sign up!

We are still at 16 teams, and very much need 17. Please get in contact with me if you are able to play this tournament - we can work something out.

The post above has been updated with received packets. Furthermore, Team 17 (Michael Coates, Naveed Chowdhury, Ramapriya Rangaraju, and Cory Haala) has signed up. The field is now closed.

Looking forward to getting the rest of your packets.

I don't know if this should have its own thread or not, but the Sunday schedule, which is buried in a post in another thread is currently this as far as I know:

1. Fine Arts (10 packets)
2. RILKE (something like 9.5 rounds)
3. History (11 packets)

Might be worth as we approach things to have some discussion about times, lunch schedule, etc. This also seems like a fairly supersized schedule, which is cool, but people with travel plans that are less flexible should note this.

History's actually 11 packets plus finals if necessary. I would not recommend travel plans that call for an early departure from Hyde Park.

I don't know what the staffing situation looks like right now, but I will be in the area this summer and would be willing to help, should more staff be needed.

Not that I'll be winning one anyway, but are there prizes (books I would assume) at CO?

minusfive wrote:Not that I'll be winning one anyway, but are there prizes (books I would assume) at CO?

first prize is a copy of "a frolic of his own"
second prize is a set of steak knives
third prize is you're fired

Top Negger is sacrificed to the Quizbowl Gods

Cheynem wrote:Top Negger is sacrificed to the Quizbowl Gods

The halls of Valhalla await me! I buzz. I neg. I buzz again!

Immorten Jerry says not to get addicted to scoring points.

Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy of Arts wrote:

Cheynem wrote:Top Negger is sacrificed to the Quizbowl Gods

The halls of Valhalla await me! I buzz. I neg. I buzz again!

Finally something I can beat Dylan at. Tlaloc, I am yours!

Hey if anyone is coming into Midway and is interested in splitting a hotel / car let me know.