Chitin Classic

The Chitin Classic was a high school tournament run at the University of Minnesota on April 5, 2008 that was played on packets written by Minnesota, Maryland, and Vanderbilt that were also mirrored at other sites. The games were played on packets of 20 tossups/bonuses.

Field

The field for Chitin included DCC and Dorman along with Eden Prairie, making it perhaps the strongest field ever seen in Minnesota if one does not factor in skill inflation from future years. At one point the tournament was expected to have more teams from outside of Minnesota than within, but the final field had a Minnesota majority.

Results

The 15-team field, which consisted of 14 actual teams with one dropout, was split into three divisions of five teams. A round robin within these pools was played, with Dorman, Eden Prairie A, and DCC winning their respective divisions. The playoff round robin was set up with three brackets, the top two with six teams and the bottom bracket with the three lowest teams. However, another team left before the playoffs started, causing the lowest bracket to have one team and necessitating some schedule shuffling. In the top bracket, a five game round robin was played, with Dorman coming out undefeated and Eden Prairie A in second. This lead to an advantaged final, in which Dorman won the first match to win the first Chitin Classic. The leading scorers at the tournament were Carsten Gehring of Wayzata, Michael Wright of Eden Prairie A, and Nick Clusserath of Dorman.

Lit Singles Side Tournament

After the regular tournament, an informal lit singles tournament was run using packets from the First Annual Wallace Stevens Literature Singles Tournament. Michael Wright essentially won and Carsten Gehring came in second, but Rob Carson also played some of the packets and was the top player on the tossups he heard. The final packet saw Andrew Hart beat Quentin Roper and Carsten Gehring by a considerable margin, with Andrew adding insult to injury by noting that he wrote and could not compete on four of the twenty tossups.

Formal Announcment

The announcement and other information about the Chitin Classic can be found at this link. Sadly, the stats have likely been lost to history as they are no longer accessible on the University of Minnesota website on which they were stored.