Copying without understanding seems like a bad plan either way. Because without understanding, you don't know whether someone good has bet the probability up or down to what they think is right, after which point betting more in the same direction is a losing move.

Gotta form your own opinion and bet based on that, even if you're in a market with very smart people participating. Probably it's smart to pause and think if someone with a good track record is betting against you, but like, you are not risking much if you bet wrong, unless you're very good and have earned tens/hundreds of thousands of mana to bet with which you are now betting on some single outcome, so, the winning strategy for most people seems to be "treat this as a learning experience where being wrong is an opportunity to improve your understanding, not a threat". For most people, the mana they will win is a trivial sum when converted to USD, so this is a low-risk learning playground where you can develop skills to use for much greater profit in other areas of life.

Neither is a good strategy.

Bad "players" are only wrong about 50% of the time so betting against them is going to leave you with about 50% odds. That would make your performance just as bad or worse than theirs. Even if you copy every single bet a good "player" makes, a few seconds after they make them, every day, you're never going to get the same results they do. Being successful, they have lots of mana and are going to move some markets in ways that make repeating those same bets much less profitable for you.

Another strategy: Don't bet against a clear majority of consistently good "players".

Given the tech crazy, hyper-lib audience of this site, where there are objective resolution criteria, it is enough to bet against the AI and against all things lib (Biden, climate, etc.) to make mana.

There are many ways to trade wrong, and a few ways to trade right, so I think copying good players is a better bet

I normally find my own positions, since my net worth is such that it's worth fighting for a few mana in smaller markets. Otherwise I'm 80/20ish towards looking at the positions of those in the upper ranks of masters since that's a great way to find safe and liquid markets to stash money.

Normally people with bad track records at predicting don't stick around long enough to be useful. But if you're lucky enough to find someone who bets on their beliefs rather than their observations, they can point you to markets where like-minded people have created a distortion. Something with a realistic 5% chance gets hopiumed up to 15%, creating a nice arbitrage opportunity.