It’s tournament time! And you know what that means — that’s right, it’s your chance to challenge your DCist writers, editors and photographers in the annual reader-staff pool. This year, your sports editor will hope to improve on 2009’s 64th place finish, though I’m sure stiff competition will be provided by the whole lot of you.

But bracketeering is hard, man. Run out of ideas for how to keep the opposition at bay? Here’s some tried and true methods to completing your bracket:

• Always remember: What Would Davy DCist Do?
• Prognosticate all games based on the best player names on any given team. Highly recommended: Just-in’love Smith, Siena.
• Eliminate all 13,14,15, and 16 seeds in the opening round and proceed through brackets using twelve-sided die.
• Just pick all the number ones to advance to the Final Four, because you have stuff to do that, for some reason, doesn’t involve agonizing over an 8/9 matchup that no one will remember in three years.
• Go for a 17th century-themed Final Four featuring Musketeers, Demon Deacons and Monarchs. Or go for the historically impossible clashes (Aztecs versus Cowboys, or Fighting Irish against Seminoles, for instance).
• Maryland and Georgetown, all the way! (To the regional finals!)

There, now you should be all set to dominate.

Signup is easy: Create a CBS Sportsline profile and log in. Click here to access the DCist pool. The pool password is dcist. You’re still automatically signed up for this year’s tournament if you played last year, so just follow the link in the email you were sent to get to your brackets. (CBS, helpful folks they are, sent you an email reminder out last week.) There’s a bonus for upsets in the first round, but otherwise, scoring is pretty simple. So go, bracketize, and prepare yourself to claim ultimate bragging rights.

UPDATE: Okay, our first group is totally full. So we’ve launched a second DCist staff-reader group — you can sign up here and the password for entry is still dcist. We will consolidate the leaderboards of both groups as we progress through the tournament. Many, many apologies for the inconvenience.