I was 10 for 16 picking winners for the second round of the Rome Masters Series. Not bad. Of course, it’s much easier to pick winners in the second round because there are so many more unknowns in the first round.

Just out of curiosity, I did a few probability calculations today. There are four possible outcomes of the semifinal round of a tournament. Think of it this way: if Nadal and – I can’t believe I’m suggesting this – Andy Roddick played in one semifinal and Federer and Nalbandian – more likely – played in the other, there are four possible final pairings: Roddick vs. Federer, Roddick vs. Nalbandian – nah to either of those, Nadal vs. Nalbandian and Nadal vs. Federer.

So, in the semifinal, there are two matches and each match will have one of two winners. That means that there are 2 to the power of 2 possible outcomes which equals 4. In the second round today, there were 16 matches. That means that there were 2 to the power of 16 = 65, 536 possible outcomes. The draw could have had 65,536 different configurations after today.

In the first round there were 32 matches and that gave you a total of 4,294,967,296 (that is over 4 billion) possible configurations. All by way of saying that filling out brackets for a tennis tournament is not so very easy. Remember the craziness of March Madness? I assume it’s the same this with World Cup. Everyone and their second cousin once removed is jabbering away about which team unexpectedly lost and completely messed up their bracket.

In fantasy tennis, fanatical team owners fill out a bracket every week. Fantasy football players only have to pick which players to activate for their team on Sundays and baseball team owners make trades now and then, but we have to fill out a 32 player, 64 player, or, on a slam week, a 128 player drawer and fill it in 44 weeks a year. Fantasy tennis addiction groups are forming now.

One of the picks I missed today was Roddick vs. Baghdatis. Baghdatis should have won the match, he had the correct strategy. He hit drop shots to Roddick to get him to the net. Roddick got there as quickly as he could but he kept putting the ball down the line whereupon Baghdatis passed him. Easy as pie. Except that Baghdatis couldn’t keep the ball in the court. It was a golden opportunity for Baghdatis because Monfils, Santoro, and a qualfier are the only remaining players in his quarter.

Federer rolled over Potito Starace but that wasn’t the news of the day for him. He met Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s square earlier in the day – what, the Pope didn’t invite him inside? – and spoke a few word in German to the former Cardinal Ratzinger. I would consider that just as important as playing a match against Potito Starace except that I don’t believe in God and whenever I think of the current Pope I remember a cartoon that came out when he was elected to his current position that shows him partying with a large crowd and yelling out, “Let’s party like it’s 1299!” That is a hilarious and astute comment about Benedict’s views on women and gays and lesbians.

Anyway, back to tennis. Almagro vs. Davydenko is an interesting matchup. Davydenko is the higher ranked veteran but Almagro has made it to the quarterfinals and further in his last four clay ATP events so I’m switching to Almagro. I wanted to put him in to the quarters as soon as I saw that he had qualified into the tournament but I forgot.

Monfils has beaten Santoro on clay, Gonzalez is the clay court player not Berdych, both of the Brits – Heman and Rusedski – go down, and Ancic has never done much on clay.

Closer and closer to another Federer-Nadal dustup.