A primer on card betting

Many professionals shy away from card betting, deriding it as «amateurish». I couldn't disagree more. Let me explain.

The pros

There's primarily two advantages with betting on yellow cards:

• Value: The odds are difficult to set for the bookie. That is why bookings often offer great value
• Limitation resistant: Because you are betting on odds that's relatively high compared to goal/corner lines you can win a lot of money without getting limitations on your account (all profitable bettors struggle with limitations)

The cons

• Statistics: You have to do the work. That means looking at numbers and statistics (that's what this article is about)
• Many small losses: Winnings are big, but in between there are losses. That means you need a proper system for staking and bankroll management. Dont worry. Its not rocket science. Read how here.

Statistics

Lets have a look at the yellow card stats for the 2023/24 season for the top three leagues in Europe: Premier League, Serie A and La Liga.

There is 20 teams and a total of 380 games per season in all three leagues. Despite the similarities, we can see that the Spanish sides gets booked about 10 percent more often than in England and Italy:

This observation is the beginning of what's called an edge. An edge is a piece of information that tilts the odds in our favor. Knowing that there's 10 percent more cards in Spain is nice, but far from enough.

Looking closer

If you think midfield is a crowded place with lots of players and tough tackles, you would be right. Midfield is a good hunting ground for players getting booked.

However if you were to pair your midfield-reasoning with the previous bit of information and put money willy-nilly on Spanish midfielders to get booked, you would be wrong.

As the chart below clearly shows, La Liga midfielders are the least booked of the three leagues in our selection:

When the midfielders in the most carded league (La Liga) gets the least cards, that means Spanish attackers and defenders makes up the difference.

Lets have a look:

As we can se the ones doing the real meat grinding in Spain is the defenders. In fact, Spanish defenders gets 25 percent more cards than their British brethren.

So far we have uncovered that:

• La Liga has the most bookings
• The bookings are not evenly distributed
• In general, we want to stay away from the midfielders and focus on the defenders

The edge is getting closer.

Digging deeper

To further better our chances we'll turn to the individual Spanish teams. The next table shows the most and least carded sides in La Liga in the 2023/24 season:

We can see that the most carded sides gets booked over twice as much as the bottom five. We now know which teams to keep an eye on.

Summary

The above research is done using freely available data scraped from the web and processed in Google Sheets (also free). Simply repeating these steps will put you ahead of 98 percent of the punters out there.

However, what you've just learned should be refined further by looking at the individual players. I would start with the defenders on the top 5 most booked sides.

After you've found the worst of the worst (personally I like to think of them as the best) you need to check the odds. You'll be surprised to see how often there is real value.

The icing on the cake would be to find an aging, frequently booked fullback with sagging tempo and a speedy winger on the opposing team (think Ashley Cole).

If all this seems like a lot of work, it's because it is. If you want to reap the rewards without getting bogged down in spreadsheets, consider joining our service.

For just $14,95/month it really is a steal.