Chicago Open Trash Tournament

In recent history, the Sunday following the Chicago Open has featured a trash tournament.

The Tournaments

Year	Tournament name	Writers/editors	Winning team	Stats
2005	Mordechai Richler Trash Tournament	Andrew Yaphe	Ezequiel Berdichevsky, Matt Lafer, Paul Litvak, and Matt Weiner	n/a
2006	Gottfried Keller Open	Andrew Yaphe and Ezequiel Berdichevsky	Greg Sorenson, Brian Hight, Jeremy White, and Mike Burger	Stats
2008	Erik Axel Karlfeldt Memorial Open	Andrew Yaphe (head editor), David Seal and Michael Arnold	Greg Sorenson, Brian Hight, Colby Burnett, and Jeremy White	n/a
2009	Ferdinand Tonnies Memorial Trash Tournament	Andrew Yaphe (head editor), David Seal, Michael Arnold, and Mike Sorice	Greg Sorenson, Brian Hight, Colby Burnett, and Jeremy White	n/a
2010	Ferdinand Tonnies Memorial Trash Tournament	Michael Arnold with help from Susan Ferrari, Auroni Gupta, Andrew Yaphe and Sam Medley	Greg Sorenson, Brian Hight, Colby Burnett, and Jeremy White	Stats
2011	COLT	Mike Bentley	Brian Hight, Colby Burnett, Jeremy White, and a mysterious individual identified only as "Jimmy?"	Stats
2013	Seth Teitler Presents: An Intimate Engagement with Trash	David Seal, Brian McNamara, Owen Cooper, and Nolan Esser	Brian Hight, Colby Burnett, and Yogesh Raut	Stats]
2016	Chicago Open Trash	Rob Carson, Carsten Gehring, and Andrew Hart	Mike Cheyne, Tejas Raje, Kenji Golimlim, and Chris Manners	Stats

Victories by Player

Number of Victories	Players
One Win	Ezequiel Berdichevsky, Matt Lafer, Paul Litvak, Matt Weiner, Mike Burger, Jimmy?, Yogesh Raut, Mike Cheyne, Tejas Raje, Kenji Golimlim, Chris Manners
Two Wins	n/a
Three Wins	n/a
Four Wins	Greg Sorenson
Five Wins	Jeremy White, Colby Burnett
Six Wins	Brian Hight

Style

The Chicago Open Trash tournament has brought about the development of the term-of-art "Yaphe trash" after the name of the usual driving force. Though each iteration of the tournament has been slightly different because of the various collaborators, tournaments have reflected the core principles of Yaphe trash:

- Meta quizbowl. Much to the chagrin of the some of the TRASH people who show up to the tournaments, questions about quizbowl events and individuals join meta clues in regular tossups.

- Academic content. Yaphe trash contains a higher proportion of academic content in questions. This manifests itself occasionally as trash clues about academic subjects, academic clues about otherwise trashy subjects or just plain academic questions. Curiously, in 2008 this proved more controversial among academic players than among the so-called "TRASH people," who more or less shrugged it off.[1]

- High proportion of "other" questions outside the Big 3 of trash of Sports, Music and Film/TV. Literature questions are much better represented than in TRASH or other trash tournaments while other pet topics of editors frequently come up (fashion, for example). This also allows for multidisciplinary clues to be used in common-link questions, which are themselves well-represented in Yaphe trash. Some claim the "other" distribution stints video games or other fields, while some claim it means the Big 3 are relatively underrepresented.

Commentary

While Matt Weiner has referred to the first two events and the two Maryland trash tournaments head-edited by Mike Bentley as the only four good trash tournaments ever produced, others, such as Greg Sorenson, have alleged that the Chicago tournaments featured even more 1980s content than trash usually does, notably in music. The 2008 edition was met with somewhat more praise from the usual TRASH people.