Apologies for the lack of prior notice (though happily there are still about 70 hours before entries close!), since we only decided at the last minute that we are going to run a BOTB for the AO this year. I am unlikely to have a big enough block of free time early next week to get all the results pages up and running but we want to try to keep BOTB going, at least for slams, and Bethan has kindly offered to deal with the entries and get some skeleton results up (i.e. the main individual table) as soon as she can after entries close. She will then do results updates once or twice a day, along with the odd tweet on the botb1 account.

I am likely to be very busy until the end of April, so there will no Masters BOTBs in between the Australian Open and Roland Garros. After the end of April, I will also try catch up with all the BOTB rankings backlog (I'm afraid the rankings shown on the tables are still end-2011 rankings but once I catch up, it should be possible to publish all the intervening lists, so if you got to number 1 at some stage, you will be able to see it!) and with luck, things will then get back to the way they were a couple of years ago.

Anyway, the important thing right now is that:

Entries for the 2013 Australian Open 'Battle of the Boards' pick 'em are now open at http://bit.ly/18Sbr5

Qualifiers are likely to be placed on Saturday afternoon (UK time), though you are welcome to enter earlier if you do not mind picking matches involving qualifiers without knowing who they are.

Entries close on Sunday at 23.59 GMT - that's Sunday 11.59 pm UK / 6.59 pm US Eastern and Monday 00.59 CET / 10.59 Melbourne time

Good luck!