who to follow on X and Telegam for profits?
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3 Replies
Honest answer that nobody wants to hear: nobody to follow. The economics of public sports betting tipsters are fundamentally broken.
The reasoning:
1. **If a tipster is genuinely +EV**, they earn more from the bets themselves than from selling them. Posting picks publicly degrades the line - their own action plus follower action moves the price against them. So the only people selling picks publicly are the ones who can't make money betting them.
2. **Sample size delusion**. A 56% sports bettor (around break-even after vig) needs ~1000 picks to differentiate from a 50% bettor at p=0.05. Almost every "X% YTD!" tipster has under 200 picks recorded. The high YTD numbers you see are almost entirely small-sample variance, then they go cold and rebrand.
3. **Survivorship bias on Twitter/Telegram**. Tipsters who run hot for 3 months get amplified. Tipsters who run cold disappear and start a new account. The result you see on your feed is the survivorship-biased subset of tipsters who happen to be in a hot streak right now.
4. **The "fade the tipster" trade is more reliable than following them**. Especially after a hot run goes public - the public action they generate moves the line, and books often have soft squares on the same side. Sharps will fade. Net result: following late tipsters gets you the worst of both ends - bad lines and selected losses.
If you genuinely want better outcomes the actual edge is:
- Line shopping across 5+ books (free 0.5-1% EV)
- Avoiding parlays and prop bets
- Bankroll management (Kelly fractional)
- Pre-game line movement analysis (sharp money flow indicators - public closing line value matters more than any tipster's pick)
The "follow X for profits" framing is a category error. Profits don't come from following someone, they come from doing the work yourself - or accepting that sports betting isn't a profitable activity for ~99% of bettors and treating it as entertainment with budget caps.
Edit: also be wary of free Telegram channels that link out to specific sportsbooks - those are frequently aff-link operations dressed up as tipster channels. The "tipster" gets paid CPA for every signup regardless of whether you win.
This is a fallacious assumption for several reasons.
I'll just get into the main reason why.
One can be +EV in his long term selections but a horrible bankroll manager. Due to the nature of long term gambling, managing your roll correctly is more important than picking winners. Most people just can't do it.
Another reason is people do get limited and cut off. Or maybe they live in a state where sports betting is illegal and for whatever reason they can't or are unwilling to do offshore betting, or maybe they've been cut off or limited.
