When tipsters agree, does it pay?

The side more tipsters back is usually the favourite, and favourites win more often at shorter prices. That is what a short price means, not evidence the crowd called it right — see the strike-rate/yield pair for the general case. Yield is the number that pays, so the verdict reads from it. Win rate stays visible because the gap between the two is itself the point.

Both are measured over advertised prices only. Some sources publish a probability rather than a price; a price derived from one carries no bookmaker margin and describes a bet nobody could have placed, so those tips are excluded from these four figures entirely.

Two tips are the same fixture when they share an event, or name the same two teams on the same UTC day. A crowd needs three or more tips on the same market, and one selection has to beat every other individually — a tie has no winner to name.

"Most-backed" is a plurality, not a majority: on a three-way market a selection only has to beat each rival on its own. A split of 5 home / 4 draw / 3 away reads as 5 against 7. The other side is a mixture of whatever different bets those tipsters made, never one shared opposing view.

These groups are backed by 747 distinct tipsters across 13 distinct sources.

These figures speak for 54.7% of the settled corpus — 21,993 of 40,201 rows carry a fixture identity we can group on. The rest carry neither an event nor a verified kickoff, and are excluded rather than guessed at.

Read the Crowds column before the yields. These buckets hold very different numbers of crowds, and a striking figure over a handful of them is a small sample, not a finding about that market. A row marked too few has under 30 priced picks on one side and cannot support the comparison at all.

Bigger crowds also gather on bigger matches, and bigger matches carry shorter prices. A difference across the crowd-size buckets can be the prices talking rather than the crowd.

Every crowd on this page has already played and been graded. A tip we observed on another site is never published before it settles: showing someone else's live pick would make this a substitute for the site we are checking rather than a check on it. That rule is in the methodology, and it is why there is no "tonight's consensus" board.

Advertised prices only. Some sources publish a probability instead of a price; deriving one from it (1/p) gives a number carrying no bookmaker margin, which flatters every return computed from it. Those tips still count towards who is in a crowd — an algorithm's tip is a real tip — but never towards a figure about money.

This page reads the live corpus, so its figures move as tips settle. The corpus study closes its data at the start of each month so a number quoted from it is still there when someone checks. The two will report different figures for the same measurement, and neither is wrong. Cite the study; read this page.