ECSO
| ECSO East Coast Summer Open | |
|---|---|
| Competition season | 2005-2006 |
| Head editor(s) | Jerry Vinokurov |
| Difficulty | "around the level of ACF Regionals" |
| First mirror | June 24, 2006 |
| Announcement | link |
The East Coast Summer Open: Crime on Goat Island, or ECSO, was an open packet sub tournament held on June 24, 2006 at Carnegie Mellon. It was organized by Jerry Vinokurov, who edited half of the set and recruited Eric Kwartler to edit the other half. However, time management issues prevented Eric from editing his half of the set as he was in Italy, resulting in a half-edited set rife with repeats, incorrect clues, and speed-checks.
The origin of the tournament name is lost to history. The main site at CMU is 365 miles from the Atlantic Ocean at its closest point.
Per an old version of this page, "the set is largely remembered as being the singular bad tournament produced by Jerry." The UCLA mirror marked the return to quizbowl of Papool Chaudhari, who denounced questions on the Christian Bible as equivalent to trash in a notorious discussion thread.
Mirrors
The main mirror was won by Michigan, with Chicago B placing second, Chicago A third, and VCU fourth.
It was also mirrored at Cardinal Classic XVI, the only Cardinal Classic not associated with Stanford, where it was won by UCLA A.
Controversy
The ensuing discussion was marked by a number of posts by parody accounts, including one by "YourGenialQuizmasterProxy" (a "proxy" of Charlie Steinhice) which highlighted the supposed hypocrisy of the set's lack of editing given Jerry's recent diatribe against Steinhice's consistently poor editing of Sword Bowl. Andrew Yaphe chose to refrain from commenting on the questions in the main forum until he "had a lot more to drink."[1]
Nevertheless it was quickly established that, while the set was obviously bad, such comparisons were poorly founded: Jerry had demonstrated an ability to produce high quality sets like BUTT of the previous year, had clearly been put into a difficult situation by the total lack of editing by Eric, and made no excuses for the set's poor state.
ECSO 2
In 2010, Bruce Arthur and Doug Yetman ran ECSO 2 at Hunter College; this time around, it was run on a previously-written set (ANGST) instead of being packet-sub. The announcement can be found here and the stats here. Because the tournament was taking place at Hunter without the school's permission, the directions sent to the players outlined a circuitous route that was designed to avoid security guards. This included the statement, "In the words of Brown's Aaron Rosenberg, '[expletive] tha POH-leece.' Seriously, in this instance the fuzz are our worst enemies, so do all that you can to avoid contact with Hunter College security."