By Mike McIntyre

For all you real tennis fanatics out there, check out the ATP World Tour Fantasy Challenge that is set to begin at Indian Wells this week.

Fans get to make their bracket picks in each of the nine Masters Series events on the tour. The winner at the end of the year gets a trip for two to the Barclays ATP Tour Finals event in London, England. The three runners-up will receive some nice gift cards to use on Head products.

I have always enjoyed these types of promotions and it's fun to see how you stack up against other tennis fans out there. You have to be quite knowledgeable but also a bit lucky to make a good run. You might also want to mark the dates of all nine events in your day-planner because if you miss registering for one of the tournaments in time you have pretty much blown your chances of staying in the hunt.

I've gone with a Djokovic/Roddick final in my bracket - how about you? I think Federer is going to be vulnerable due to his lack of match play since the Aussie Open and his recent lung infection. Nadal is also just returning from injury so count him out as a contender. Murray has been inconsistent, Del Potro is not playing due to his own injury issues and Davydenko is still dealing with the fact he blew it in Australia against Federer. To me that leaves Roddick and Djokovic to have a pretty good run this week.

You have until Thursday March 11th at 2pm ET to make your picks for the BNP Paribas Open. Good luck!

Comments

DO they do this at other tournaments as well? It seems like bad timing since everyone is into the NCAA basketball tournament. If it was at a different time I could have some time to research the brackets. Sounds like fun though.

Hi Tennis Shorts, this will be an on-going challenge where fans can pick the brackets at all 9 Masters 1000 Events on the tennis calendar. Indian Wells was just the first stop.

You can still sign up and start playing with the Miami tournament this week.