The start of the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament is less than a month away, and it's time to start studying up on the field in preparation for watching the action live from South Africa. Back in '06, we ran a prediction pool, which TRP won, entitling him to free drinks at our expense. We're going to do it again, but this time, we're going to let the good folks at Yahoo do the work.

If you'd like to play, get yourself a Yahoo account, then send me an e-mail message indicating you'd like to join the group. Over the next day or two, I'll send you instructions on how to enter.

We'll chat about the standings on this blog, along with some play-by-play and cheerleading, but the guts of the tournament-keeping will be handled by the gods at Yahoo.

Speaking of which, the scoring will be as follows:

The Yahoo system also provides for possible "bonus points" for picking correct scores of games, but that feature will be turned off in our pool.

Apparently, this isn't exactly a "bracket," the way a lot of the college basketball pools are. As far as I can tell, players will get to pick the outcome of each game, right up until 5 minutes before the start of each game, throughout the tournament. In the "knockout" stage of the tournament, that means that one will get to pick the outcome of each game all the way to the championship, even if one's earlier picks were all wrong.

It's possible that we could end up in a tie, and the Yahoo system does not appear to provide a tiebreaker. We'll buy beverages for everyone at the top in the event of a tie, and maybe we'll come up with some sort of tiebreaker just for bragging rights.

Anyway, everybody's invited to play. It's free, and worth every penny.