Hi everyone

There was originally another pick 'em competition scheduled for Montréal (and Cincy was going to be missed out), but Bethan and I have decided to do Cincy instead, for the following reasons:

1) There is another $1 million pick 'em for Cincy on the ATP site this year. I am sure lots of us will enter it, but the way they present the results isn't very interesting unless you one of the people right at the top. If we run our pick 'em for Cincy too, that will mean that any 'research' you do when the draw comes out can be used for both competitions, i.e. the ATP one and our inter-board one, and you'll be able to see exactly how you are doing compared to at least the people in our competition.

2) It'll be interesting to see how close our winners get to the top scores in the ATP comp!

3) The main draw in Montréal is starting on Sunday, so people would have had to enter wthout knowing who any of the qualifiers are. I don't know the exact schedule for Cincy, but I am hoping that if there is a big ATP pick 'em for Cincy, they will take that into account in deciding when to do the draw and when to start the main draw.

4) Bethan is unavailable for part of Cincy and I have been working 16 hour days for the last week and half  and was away before that (which means things are going well, but doesn't fit in well with trying to run a pick 'em single-handedly and is also the reason why I haven't posted anything on here for ages ), we should both have more time by the time Cincy comes around.

5) This wasn't a reason for the postponement, but clearly deciding how to pick for Andy's matches would have been an even bigger minefield than usual this week given that we have no idea how quickly he's going to be able to get back in the groove - by next week, we should all have a much better idea.

Apologies for the late notice of this change though - we were having work done on our network on Saturday, which was scheduled at the last moment and meant that my Internet access was very limited. With the main draw starting on Sunday, that also put paid to any realistic chance of running a training pick 'em for Cincy.

Anyway, keep an eye on the first North American hard court masters this year and then use what you learn when you make your picks next weekend.

P.S. I think we will probably make the Cincy pick 'em just a BT v AM contest as far as the teams go - anyone who represented one of the other boards at Wimby will be able to enter and will be able to choose whether they play for BT, AM or just as an individual, so nobody will be denied the chance to move up the overall pick 'em rankings.

Whichever team people play for in the Cincy pick 'em, they will continue to be shown as representing the teams they play slam pick 'ems for in the overall rankings. And yes, as that implies, the USO pick 'em will be another multi-team event.