  We studied integration contour deformations in the chiral random matrix
theory of Stephanov with the goal of alleviating the finite-density sign
problem. We considered simple ans\"atze for the deformed integration contours,
and optimized their parameters. We find that optimization of a single parameter
manages to considerably improve on the severity of the sign problem. We show
numerical evidence that the improvement achieved is exponential in the degrees
of freedom of the system, i.e., the size of the random matrix. We also compare
the optimization method with contour deformations coming from the holomorphic
flow equations.
