Booking Points Betting Sites

It’s a pretty boring match, Liverpool go 2-0 up to kill the game fairly early on and the second half is played out at a snail’s pace. Two Leicester players are booked and no Liverpool players pick up yellows.

That means the total booking points for the match = 20. If you backed under 30 points: congratulations, your bet won!

Leicester take the lead just before half-time with a goal that Klopp is adamant should have been ruled out for handball. He’s in the referee’s face as the teams and officials trudge back to the changing rooms at half time, doing the VAR gesture and generally being angry. The ref has had enough and shows Jürgen a yellow card! What drama.

Liverpool turn the game around in the second half without too much controversy and the teams on the pitch pick up three yellow cards between them.

That means the total booking points for the match = 30, so any bet on ‘exactly 30 points’ is a winner. Remember: At Paddy Power, only cards shown to players currently on the pitch count towards the total, so Klopp’s booking is not included.

It’s a tight match but played in a fair manner by both sides. Top football all round. Liverpool gets a penalty in the sixth minute of added time at the end of second half. The ref books the Leicester player for the foul, and the Foxes man is absolutely apoplectic - he’s adamant that the Liverpool striker dived. The Leicester player boots the ball into the Kop in anger and the ref shows him a second yellow for dissent and he’s off.

Liverpool score the penalty and the ref blows for full time straight after. Leicester players remonstrate with the ref after the final whistle and one of them is shown a straight red card!

The total booking points for this match = 35, so if you’d backed over 30 points, your bet would have won again! Remember, though, that (a): even though there were only two yellow cards shown, the resulting red card upped the total to 35 points; and (b): The red card shown to the Leicester player after the final whistle does not count towards the total.

It’s the last match of the season and it’s absolute chaos as the teams line up for the pre-match handshakes. A Liverpool player declines to shake the hand of a Leicester player who put a horror tackle on him the last time these sides met. Both managers start arguing and the bad blood spills over onto the benches. A Liverpool sub swings a punch at the Leicester physio and the physio responds by head-butting the Liverpool substitute. Both men are shown straight red cards.

The ref does a great job regaining control of the situation and the match starts. It’s a total disappointment - a 0-0 that’s more boring than watching paint dry. Not a single player picks up a booking and no one looks remotely interested.

That means the total booking points for the match = 0. Remember - the two red cards shown to the substitute and the physio don’t count towards the total.

Not every time is equally likely to pick up yellow cards. Some teams regularly start players who have what we could say is a ‘creative’ interpretation of the Laws of the Game. Other teams simply play a more physical style which makes them more likely to pick up cards.

Whether teams are well-matched or not is another consideration. If you aren’t able to call a match between two fully committed teams, it might be the sort of match that gets feisty and sees plenty of cards. On the other hand, a match where one team totally outclasses the other might also feature numerous cards if the inferior team starts to get frustrated. That would leave a ‘low-card sweet spot’ in matches that are uncompetitive but not total walkovers.

They say that the best refs are the ones you don’t even notice. I haven’t done the math, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the correlation between ‘referee celebrity status’ (looking at you, Mike Dean) and number of cards shown per game is statistically significant.

Even if that isn’t true, the more general point of doing some research on the referee before you place a booking points bet definitely stands. In the 2020/21 Premier League season, for example, our mate Mike Dean showed 8 red cards and 91 yellows in his 28 games whereas Andre Marriner showed just 1 red and 59 yellow cards in the same number of matches.

The competition is definitely an important factor in booking points betting. Just as with goals, certain divisions and competitions tend to feature more cards than others.

Referees in different football associations may be following slightly different guidance which encourages them to be more card-happy in certain situations, or teams in particular division might simply play more aggressively and pick up more cards on average.

In addition to thinking about which competition the match is in, it’s also well worth reviewing the context of the match and its importance.

Matches toward the end of the season, for example, are more likely to lack intensity as plenty of teams have little to play for and players are already in their flip flops on the beach. On the other hand, you’d imagine players would do absolutely anything to win a cup final.

The final round of the Champions League group stage is a funny one: Ostensibly there’s nothing to play for but players have in the past got themselves booked on purpose so as to avoid a suspension in the later stages of the competition.

This factor might become less important over time as more leagues and competitions begin to implement VAR technology.

Again, this could go both ways. VAR checks may pick up on yellow- and red-card offenses that were missed by the on-field officials, but they may also reverse obviously incorrect decisions to book or send a player off. It’s up to you to decide which side of that argument you’re on!

Us footy fans and punters all love a good slide tackle - and so do plenty of players themselves - so there’s always a slightly different element in play when the match is taking place in or around a deluge from the heavens.

On one hand, certain weather conditions are more likely to encourage certain styles of play that are more ‘booking friendly’. On the other hand, you might get referees officiating with a little more leniency to take weather conditions into account.

Last but absolutely not least are the pesky terms and conditions for each booking points market. Terms and conditions are not always the same across different online bookmakers, so it’s well worth the time giving the rules a quick skim through so you know exactly what you’re betting on.

Being prepared in this way will help you avoid any silly slip ups where you think you’ve won a bet but the rules say otherwise (for example if you’d bet on the ‘overs’ booking points line in Scenario 4 above and were getting excited without realizing that cards shown to people off the pitch do not count).