The vast majority of football bettors are happy enough with betting on the usual markets like Over/Under 2.5 goals and the Home/Draw/Away markets. However, those of us who are more interested in finding value in the football betting markets are happy to look towards new haunts. In previous articles we’ve written about strategies for scorelines, corners and even using Social Media for finding value. Today we want to look at a market that is often overlooked and underused by people looking for value in the football betting.

Betting on Cards

Just like with most markets when it comes to betting on football there are a few different options when it comes to betting on cards. The options include: Betting on the Number of Cards, Betting on the Number of Yellow Cards, Betting on the Number of Yellow Cards, Betting Index, Over/Under Cards and also, betting on those markets in terms of the home or away team.

As you can see then there are many, many options when it comes to the cards markets in football and it’s worth remembering too that the bigger the game the more markets the bookmakers offer. Saying that, for the majority of games now covered by the traditionally ‘bigger’ bookmakers they will at least offer markets like Over/Under X cards and a Card Index or Points bet.

Betting Points/Indexes

You might well be wondering what are betting points? Well, it’s pretty easy. Some bookies offer the Betting Points, sometimes called the Betting Index bet. Rather than the Under/Over market, which we’ll get too soon, this market give the yellow and red cards a different ‘value’ Yellow Cards are 10 points and Red Cards are 25 points. Let’s give you an example from an upcoming Premier League match.

In this games, two teams that don’t usually get many bookies are playing; Arsenal and Leeds. In many matches the points will be set to 40, in derbies it can be as high as 50, even 60 in some cases. Anyway, as you can see, the market is only expecting a few bookings here. Under 30 points would mean 0 cards, one yellow card, two yellow cards, or one red card. Anything more than those and we’re either at 30 or above it. Pretty simple isn’t it? So, basically all you need to remember is that a Yellow Card is 10 points, a Red Card is 25 points.

This bet can also apply to just the home or away team. In the screenshot you’ll see a few of the markets available for the bet involving the home team; Arsenal.

As you can see there are more options here and this is certainly a market that should be looked into a bit more as the odds are pretty decent. Of course, as usual you’re going to need to spend some time getting to know the teams and their stats. Luckily, as a Bet Dynamo Subscriber you can delve into team stats and see exactly how many cards a team gets per average home/away game:

Betting on Over/Under Cards

Over/Under betting in cards is quite simple then, there are no points per cards, it’s simply betting on how many cards were issued during a game by a referee. In an upcoming games between Villarreal and Cadiz in Spain La Liga the current odds for Over 4.5 Cards is 1.80, for Under 4.5 Cards is 1.95 with one of the big bookmakers. From the Bet Dynamo Insights Page we can see this:

Let’s decode this image for you then. On average Villareal receive 2.0 cards per home La Liga games, Cadia receive 1.75 cards per away league games. The Game Cards stat is a little different, with this stat we see the average for the total number of cards per game. In Villarreal’s case, home games usually produce 5.0 cards while away games for Cadiz in the league usually see 4.25 cards. While the average for both teams only adds to 3.75, the average for Game Cards adds to 9.25 which means an implied average of 4.60. There’s little value to be found in this market unfortunately but now that you know how to read the odds you can go looking for value in other games in this market.

To view these stats, and more, sign up to Bet Dynamo here