Chicago Open Trash Tournament
In many recent years, the Sunday following the Chicago Open has featured a trash tournament.
The Tournaments
Victories by Player
| Number of Victories | Players |
|---|---|
| One Win | Ezequiel Berdichevsky, Paul Litvak, Matt Weiner, Mike Burger, Jimmy?, Chris Manners, Sam Bailey, Conor Thompson, Tony Chen, Charlie Fritz, Dylan Minarik, Drew Scheeler, Andrew Ullsperger |
| Two Wins | Mike Cheyne, Tejas Raje, Kenji Shimizu, Yogesh Raut, Matt Lafer |
| 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.