by dave g Suicide pools are a very simple concept that test your ability not only to pick a winner, but to project your winner through the ups and downs of a draw. You'll also have to know what players can easily win an early round match for you but can be counted on (at least by yourself) to falter as you go through the 14 days of a Slam.

For each day of play, you have to pick one player to win from the matches played that day. But once you pick someone, you cannot choose them again for the rest of the tournament. So you really don't want to pick a top player to win in early matches (unless you know something we don't). The ATP and the WTA have separate pools.

To survive in the suicide pool, you will have to have gone through up to 14 successive days of picking a winner. Sure it may sound easy (and probably will be) on the first few days of play - but as you get deeper into the draws, you have to start picking based on not only who you think will win, but who is likely to lose down the road. If you are still alive come semi-final time, you are not only picking who you think would win a semi, but also who would lose the final, since you could not pick the same player again.

On our website, you are not only competing against the draw, but also with the other users. Therefore, once you have picked someone who loses, you are out of the suicide draw pool. We realize that there are other websites that will allow you to continue to make picks after one of you picks have lost, but we do not.

In order to reply to the thread, you will have to register as a user. If you can not register, you can send your picks to picks@talkabouttennis2.com, but please include some type of user name.

When posting your pick, please start your post with the family name of the player you are picking. For Chinese players, this would be their first name. For almost everybody else, this would be their last name. We will need to sort the picks by the player's names, and having the family name show up first will cause all of the picks for a given player to show up together. Also, please include just your pick's name.

Our parser will find your last post and report its contents. So, if you decide to change your pick, all you have to do is post your new pick. However, if you are going to post a friend's pick, please add their pick as a second line in the post with your pick. If you put your friend's pick in another post, the first post will be ignored by the parser, which will create problems.

There will be a "Picks and Results" thread for each draw pool (ATP and WTA). The first several posts in those threads will include a listing of the picks by user name. These picks are usually updated shortly after the end of play for each day. If you ever forget who you have picked, these posts should hold almost all of the information you will need.

NOTE: The new TAT2.0 has a feature that is you are composing a post (or a reply), if new posts are added to the topic while you are composing, YOU WILL BE INFORMED OF THOSE NEW POSTS PRIOR TO POSTING YOURS. Therefore, the SUBMIT action may require TWO clicks (original plus confirmation because new posts have been added while you composed your post). Therefore, at times of great use, as in the few hours before the SP starts, make sure that you have posted properly; do not click submit and sign-out or dash to another topic, as your post may not have been recorded. Make sure it was.

Check this board daily for any updates or rule changes that might be made due to irregularities in the tournament (such as rained out days, etc.).