PIANO

PIANO Pre-ICT and ACF Nationals Open/Minnesota Open
Competition season	2018-2019
Head editor(s)	Jacob Reed
Difficulty	Nationals-minus
First mirror	March 9, 2019
Announcement	link
Packets	link

The Pre-ICT and ACF Nationals Open/Minnesota Open (PIANO/MO) was, as the name suggests, an open, pre-nationals set written by members of the Minnesota and Yale teams for Spring 2019. The tournament was head edited by Jacob Reed, with science editing from Adam Silverman and some philosophy and literature help from Joey Goldman and Will Holub-Moorman; the other writers were Sam Bailey, Michael Borecki, Stephen Eltinge, Adam S. Fine, Jason Golfinos, Matt Jackson, Wonyoung Jang, Michael Kearney, Moses Kitakule, Shan Kothari, John Marvin Sipp, and Derek So.

The set experimented slightly with the distribution, dividing 4/4 history into 1/1 each of American, European, and World, with a 1/1 distribution of (global) "Ancient history," archaeology, and "other". Partially following on 2016's MYSTERIUM, the 4/4 RMPSS distribution was reallocated to give 1/1 Philosophy, 1/1 Economics and Psychology, 1/1 Religious texts, myths, and legends, and 1/1 Other religion and other social science.

The set was largely very well-received, especially Adam Silverman's science, which was hailed as some of the best ever written. Most divisive were the sometimes offbeat topic selection (due especially to writers like John Marvin, Jacob Reed, and Derek So), including numerous questions straddling multiple distributions. The remaining criticism was directed at the set's difficulty, which was misleadingly advertised as somewhat easier than ACF Nationals; on the whole, the set turned out to be almost exactly the same difficulty as the 2018 ACF Nationals.

Region	Host	TD	Winner	Runner-Up	Individual High Scorer	Stats
Canada	Toronto	Paul Kasiński	Toronto A	McGill	Rein Otsason (Toronto A)	Stats
Mid-Atlantic	Johns Hopkins	Leland Held	Chicago A	"More Ravioli"	Jordan Brownstein ("More Ravioli")	Stats
Upper Midwest (Minnesota Open)	Minnesota	Shan Kothari	"hamburger university lab school"	BHSU A	Will Nediger ("hamburger university lab school")	Stats
Lower Midwest	Ohio State	Chris Ray	Columbia	Michigan State	Jakob Myers (Michigan State)	Stats
Northeast	Yale	Michael Kearney	Rutgers	Harvard	Kevin Wang ("That d---ed Aremihc")	Stats
Southeast	Georgia Tech	Justin Htay	"Dinosaurific"	Florida A	Mike Sorice ("Dinosaurific")	Stats
UK	Oxford	George Charlson	"Memphis Quizzlies"	Oxford	Joseph Krol (Cambridge)	Stats
West Coast	Stanford	Jennie Yang	Berkeley A	"stephen sux"	Natan Holtzman (Stanford)	Stats
Online	[Discord]	Jason Golfinos	"Team 4"	Berus–Lie Bleen	Hari Parameswaran (Berus–Lie Bleen)	Stats