Paul Litvak

Paul Litvak played quizbowl for Michigan as an undergraduate. Later, he went on to CMU and Harvard as a graduate student. He received a Ph.D. from CMU in 2011.

While at Michigan, Paul played on the team that won the 2002 ACF Nationals. Other highlights of his playing career include a win at the 2004 Chicago Open, playing alongside Andrew Yaphe, while he also played on teams that finished second at three consecutive Chicago Opens between 2001 and 2003. He also was a member of the winning team at what was then considered the hardest tournament ever written, 2005's Manu Ginobili. According to the Definitive Greatest Players List, he was considered the "Jeff Hoppes of social science questions."

No less important than his achievement as a top-level player were his contributions to the game as a question writer. Paul spearheaded some of the hardest and best-received ACF tournaments of the early 2000s, including 2000's Summer of Kleist, 2001's Antonin Artaud Tournament of Cruelty, and 2003's Auspicious Incident.

In his several years at CMU, Paul helped host tournaments such as ECSO, the East Coast Summer Open, which was half-edited by Jerry Vinokurov and Eric Kwartler, where Shady Side Academy's team, fresh off a fifth place finish at HSNCT, played its first college tournament (irreversibly influencing Andy Watkins's writing style towards twelve line tossups on Hamilcar Barca).