Every year, there is an economics final, where teams from different high schools all around Oregon come together to compete for the win. Last year, Mr. Eizyk took a handpicked group of kids to the final, and they won! This year, Mr. Eizyk took his economics team to the economics competition again. They competed throughout multiple rounds, dominating the competition, until our LO team, the Econquistadors, got to the finals. But let’s go back to the start. In order to qualify, they first had to take the school test and be one of the top two teams in the school. They then had to go to state and compete against other schools. Finally, they then made their way to the finals and had a very intense game. They had buzzers that they had to hit in order to answer the questions. After 30 questions, the two teams were at a standstill, having gone back and forth the whole round, and both of them had 15 points. They then went to overtime, then again, then again. They even switched to a tiebreaker round where they had to write down their answers on paper and reveal them after. The teams were so good and well-matched that our team from LO wrote down a correct answer that wasn’t even in the booklet of answers. At first, they thought they had lost, until they realised that it was actually a correct answer that the judges just didn’t think of before. The teams were so good that they were actually making new answers. They finally decided to go back to the individual round scores to decide the winner, and luckily, the Econquistadors outscored the other team and pulled away with the win. When talking to one of the members of the Econquistadors, Arjun Ramakrishnan (12), he said that the reason they won was that they were “much more cohesive while working as a team” and that they all blended well together because they all had a broad depth of knowledge, thanks to Mr. Eizyk’s good teaching. So, congratulations to Arjun Ramakrishnan, Sahan Viyyuru, James Cui, Sichen Fan and Mr. Eizyk for winning this year’s Econ Finals and being back-to-back champions.