Still agonizing over your bracket?  Field Notes is one college hoops writer’s attempt to guide you through the process as the Thursday deadline looms. Note: Said writer may or may not have a horrendous recent tourney history, which is why he’ll rely so much on advice from others in this series. Consider it a thinking fan’s guide to the bracket. We’ve already discussed the importance of having one bracket to rule them all , as well as how to use tempo-free stats to your advantage . Last but not least, let’s dig into some of the best advanced bracket tips from folks much smarter than I. Now that you have a base understanding of a) what tempo-free stats are and b) how much easier they make the agonizing bracket selection process, it’s probably time to move on to slightly more advanced* stuff, some of which builds on tempo-free stats to help you find that all-important value in selections. (*By the way, “advanced” doesn’t mean this stuff is all that tricky. Most of it is common sense. But compared to yesterday’s “best shorts” strategy, the adjective certainly fits.) Why does value matter? Because value is how you win your bracket. The scoring in the ESPN.com Tournament Challenge is as follows : First round: 10 points per pick Second round: 20 points per pick Sweet Sixteen: 40 points per pick Elite Eight: 80 points per pick Final Four: 160 points per pick Championship: 320 points per pick That’s how most bracket pools work: You get a few points for picking the first-round games correctly, but even if you miss a huge number of first-round games, you can still nail the Elite Eight, Final Four, and national championship and win your pool. The national championship is especially crucial. The problem is that if you pick the same team as everyone else to win the title — as of Tuesday night, 25.9 percent of ESPN.com bracket-pickers selected Ohio State to win it all — you’re not leaving yourself much room for error. You’re stuck hoping Ohio State wins it all, but if you flub the rest of the bracket, predicting an obvious winner might not help you all that much. Of course, going off the beaten path also requires a huge amount of risk. (What if you nail the majority of the bracket but lose because you picked the wrong champ? Ouch.) That means balancing risk by finding value. Who is the crowd picking? Who is the crowd overlooking? Where do the value gaps exist? Allow Slate’s Chris Wilson to explain : As it turns out, the wisdom-of-crowds information is extremely useful. The statisticians and expert bracketologists I talked to all urged one central point: Don’t think about guessing the most games correctly. Instead, think about finding “bargains” in the bracket where collective wisdom runs askance of more objective measurements. Exploiting games where your fellow bracketologists are likely to guess wrong — even if the odds of that happening are still against you — will give you the best shot at jetting ahead of the pack. An NCAA bracket, then, is more like a long-shot stock than a game; the odds of winning may be low, but the big pot makes the gamble worth it — if you know how to maximize your investment. In other words, check out the national bracket and see who most people are picking to advance to the Elite Eight, Final Four and national title game. Chances are they’re picking teams primarily based on seeds. Chances are there are other teams in the field that could win the tournament and stand a pretty decent chance of doing so, but thanks to their seed or their recent play aren’t getting a whole lot of love. How do you recognize such teams? That’s step two, in which we refer to Ken Pomeroy’s log5 projections for the NCAA tournament . According to Pomeroy, the No. 1 seeds are the obvious favorites to advance to the Final Four — no surprise there — but two teams, Texas and Purdue, both present really intriguing values. Provided you live outside Texas and northern Indiana, I’d guess you don’t have too many friends picking Texas or Purdue to win the national title. But they’re not exactly longshots. In other words, as Wilson wrote at Slate, a solid bracket-picking strategy embraces risk, but focuses that risk on the later rounds. For example, you might feel really good about a particular 5-12 upset, but even if that upset pans out, all you get is a measly 10 points. But if you pick Texas to beat Ohio State in the Final Four and Kansas in the national title, you could totally finish in last place … but you’ll be in pretty solid winning position even if you don’t rack up points in the rounds of 64 and 32. Really, why not take the risk? The bracket game is zero-sum: Either you win or you don’t

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Field Notes: Picking for value, other tips