2016 Chicago Open

2016 Chicago Open
Edited by	Matt Jackson and John Lawrence, with Mike Bentley, Mike Cheyne, Adam Silverman, Ewan MacAulay, Shan Kothari, Jake Sundberg, and Aaron Rosenberg
Champion	Young Mukherstein
Runner-up	You can write your tossups from the Library of Babel, but you can NEVER! STRIKE! GOD!!!
Third	God of / Small Things / True Care / Truth Brings (t.2)
Fourth	The Kazakhstan Department of Health and Human Services
High scorer	Jordan Brownstein, Young Mukherstein
Site	Chicago
Field	20
Stats	Main Event Stats

The 2016 Chicago Open was won by Young Mukherstein, consisting of Jordan Brownstein, Eric Mukherjee, Will Nediger, and Jacob Reed, who cleared the field with a 14-0 record. Significantly, although the team included two previous Chicago Open high scorers (Brownstein and Nediger), only Mukherjee had won the tournament before, refuting John Lawrence's prediction that CO had become impossible to win without at least two previous champions on a team.

The tournament was edited by Matt Jackson and John Lawrence, with subject editing by Mike Bentley, Mike Cheyne, Adam Silverman, Ewan MacAulay, Shan Kothari, Jake Sundberg, and Aaron Rosenberg. Jackson and Lawrence were originally slated to head-edit the tournament but had to step down late in the process, necessitating the recruitment of additional editors.

Tournament results

For the fifth year in a row, the winning team cleared the field; moreover, its players had the first, second, and tied-fourth most powers in the field.

The tournament maintained detailed stats tracking the conversion of every tossup and bonus organized by their subject and collected them in a document that can be accessed here: Chicago Open 2016 Category Stats

Individual results

Jordan Brownstein single-handedly out-powered every other team in the field.

Question reception

The tournament was widely hailed as being of exceptional quality, while also having extremely steeply-constructed tossups, with very (but consistently) stingy powermarks to boot.

Side Events

• 2016 Chicago Open Trash, widely regarded as perhaps the greatest trash tournament of all time. Written by Rob Carson, Carsten Gehring, and Andrew Hart.
• The Act of Seeing with One's Eyes, a widely-praised visual film tournament written by Will Nediger.

External Links

• Main Event Stats
• Category Stats
• Tournament announcement thread
• Question discussion thread