Every sport has its main event which usually acts as the grand finale to a season. In American Football it’s the Super Bowl, in baseball it’s the World Series, in tennis it’s the US Open.
While horse racing in the UK is very different from all of these sports it, too, has its crowning moment, certainly in the world of steeplechasing. For the uninitiated, steeplechasing is the form of racing that takes place over the winter months, unlike flat racing that is predominantly a summer sport.
The two main differences between the forms of racing are that steeplechase races are over longer distances and that the horses also have to leap over jumps or hurdles on their way round.
Towards the end of the jumps season, in March, many of the very best horses who have proved themselves over the previous season, meet at the famous Cheltenham Festival to compete for some of the biggest prizes in the sport.
From as early as January, speculation begins about which horses will be running and the keenest fans start searching for the online sites that will give them the best horse racing odds on their choices. Starting to look early can be a very good idea as the odds for the best horses can tend to get shorter and shorter the closer, they get to racing.
The festival itself lasts for four days in total – in 2022 it will be from Tuesday 15th until Friday 18th March. Each day there are a total of seven different races including one “feature race” which is the one that attracts the best horses and offers the highest prize money. The biggest of these is the Gold Cup that is held on the final day of the festival, and which has a prize fund of almost £470,000 with the winner being awarded over £260,000.
Other headline races include the Triumph Hurdle and The Queen Mother Champion Chase, and they all offer a number of ways to bet on them.
Types of bet you can make
The simplest and most straightforward bet that you can make is for a straight win. This is exactly what it says. You place a set amount of money on the horse that you fancy to win. You can either choose to take the odds-on offer at the time of your bet or hope that they will either not change or will get longer before the race starts. Naturally, there is a chance that they will get shorter instead which could mean less winnings for you if it does come in.
For horses that are at longer odds and not very likely to win, there is the each-way bet. This will generally pay you if the horse comes in the first three or four places in the race, or five there’s a very large number of runners. The way it works is quite simple. You put a bet on the horse to win and an equal amount on it being placed in the relevant position in the race. The first bet will pay you the full odds, the second will pay at usually ¼ of the odds. If the horse actually wins the race, both bets pay out, if it’s placed only the second part does. The trick with the each-way bet is to only place it on horses with long enough odds to make it worth your while.
Then there are the various accumulator bets that you can make. These link a number of races together so the winnings from one race form the stake for the next one. While these can lead to big winnings from a small initial stake, they do rely on every one of your horses winning – or being placed if you go for an each-way accumulator.
Picking your winners
So, they’re the three main types of bet that you can place. The hard part is knowing which horses to put your money on. Again, there are a few ways of doing this, assuming you don’t just go for the names that you like.
The first is to study each one’s form in the past. Look for how it has performed in similar races and if it has already beaten some of the other horses who it will be up against. When in doubt, betting on the favourite in a race is also quite a good strategy with around 33% of them winning on average.
It could also be well worth looking at who the most successful trainers and jockeys have been at Cheltenham because any horse trained or ridden by one of them has got to be a good possibility.
That said, nothing is ever a certainty in racing. But win or lose, Cheltenham always offers you an unforgettable spectacle – and 2022 will be no exception.