2015 Oxford Open Tournament

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2015 Oxford Open
Competition season 2014-15
Series Oxford Open
Head editor(s) Oxford
Difficulty College regular
First mirror January 31, 2015
Announcement [N/A link]
Packets link


2015 Oxford Open was the third iteration of the tournament, and the third to be won by a Chicago team. It was edited by Kyle Haddad-Fonda, Joey Goldman, George Corfield, Ewan MacAulay, Charlie Clegg, Peter Berry, Oliver Clarke and Daoud Jackson.

Chicago split their strongest players between their two teams to engineer a Chicago A vs. Chicago B final, as they had done the previous year. However, the tournament format had two playoff brackets not one, with the winners of each playoff bracket scheduled to play each other in the final. Despite the fact that the two Chicago teams were the one- and two-seeds for the tournament, and had the strongest prelim stats, the tournament organizers attempted to prevent an all-Chicago final by deliberately mis-seeding the Chicago teams, so they would be in the same playoff bracket. Once this rigging was pointed out to the organizers, they relented and placed the two Chicago teams in separate playoff brackets.

Chicago B (John Lawrence, James Lasker, Kay Li, and Jason Zhou) took a loss to the Quiz League of London in the playoffs, but this loss was wiped, and they played Chicago A (Chris Ray, Max Schindler, Marianna Zhang, and Athena Kern) in a one-game final. B upset A to win the tournament on the final bonus part.

The aftermath of the tournament yielded several photos of John Lawrence using the Oxford Open trophy as a shovel to help dig James Lasker's car out of the snow bank in which it was stuck in the O'Hare parking lot.