The spreadsheet I used myself this time (but was too late to give others the chance to use) has worked really well, so that could be used to semi-automate things if people think it would help.

The way it would work would be:

- someone fills the player names into R1 after the draw and puts the sheet somewhere it can be downloaded from

- those who can download it do, then:
 
  - put a 1 against each player you think will win in R1
  - that automatically fills the winners into the next round
  - you can then do the same for R2 and so on
  - you can leave picks to come back to later, a counter shows how many picks you have missed out so you can't forget and send it back incomplete
  - send the spreadsheet back to whoever is running the competition

- those who can't download it for whatever reason send in a text list of winners, and the "just fill in 1s against winners" makes it easy for the competition organiser to translate text picks into the same format

- each entrants picks sheet is then copied and pasted into a separate tab in the organiser's spreadsheet

- there is a master sheet at the front which looks the same, and on that sheet, the organiser fills in the actual results
- the results are then calculated automatically withing the spreadsheet and summarised in a form that can be simply copied and pasted into the forum (I haven't finished this yet, but if people want to use it, I will) - this also makes it very easy to produce interim updates at any time
- all kinds of extra stats can be calculated from the data with relative ease

It may well be that those who have run these competitions so far are doing something like this already, but whether it goes quite as far as this, I don't know, and I imagine the more tournaments we run this for, the more automated it's going to have to be to avoid the organisers getting bored.

Published here http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pbxsSt4ar7iRMh5BDzS79PA

... though I'm not sure this is the easiest way to do it. It may be easier just to have a mailing list of entrants and email it to them.

Perhaps we should do a test run with just a few of us during a non-GA/AMS ATP event or even a Future, just to see if it all works.

Yes, I was going to look into that! In the end, any way that works is good, whether people get it off Google, by email, download it from the net or even send text picks that the organiser can then quickly input - it's getting the picks all into the same format to make the scoring a piece of cake that's the important thing.

Of course, looking further ahead, the ideal thing would be a web page that worked just like the spreadsheet but with radio buttons, like they use for the official pick em competitions - that takes a fair bit of work but is far from impossible.