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Cheltenham Betting
The four top bookies listed on this page are
best for all your Cheltenham betting. Below we compare betting odds on the
Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle, 2011.
Cheltenham
Festival betting punters' favourite
The four day Cheltenham
Festival in March generates the sort of volume of betting revenue that could
influence the most robust of City financial markets. Most of it is placed
with the top online bookies such as
Bet365.
An estimated half
billion of Cheltenham betting wagers are placed on the twenty six races that
comprise the Cheltenham Festival.
Unlike the Grand National which brings
non-gamblers out of the woodwork just once a year to have a tiny tryst with
fortune, the Cheltenham Festival is a magnet for serious gamblers and jump
racing enthusiasts ready to put their betting money where their mouth is.
It is not just the
bookmakers that benefit from the betting frenzy – some 260 of which are
present at Prestbury Park to gain their share of the fifty million pounds that changes
hands on course during the Cheltenham Festival. Another fifty million
pounds is
generated for the local Gloucestershire economy from the two hundred and
fifty thousand potential
punters who will attend the Festival. It is divided between the local
hotels, pubs, clubs, taxi firms, liquor sellers and even sandwich shops as
visitors make it a week to remember.
Gloucestershire in general
and Cheltenham in particular is not without a full and varied calendar of
other events ranging from the literary to agricultural, but their impact is
dwarfed by that of the Cheltenham Festival.
Jump racing enthusiasts
worldwide converge on Cheltenham for the Festival, often staying for the
week. Worldwide is a slightly misleading term. An extremely large percentage
of the invasion is Irish – two hundred thousand bottles of Guinness are consumed during the
Festival.
One well known budget
airline schedules an additional thirty flights each day during the four day
festival to facilitate the pilgrimage of the Irish to the high church of jump
racing.
It is not just the Irish
people that come to the Festival, they bring their best horses. While some,
like Beef or Salmon, never quite delivered the quality of performances
executed within the Emerald Isle at Cheltenham, others have scooped a large
percentage of the total of over three million pounds of prizemoney. Irish horses have
won The Champion Hurdle 7 of the last 11 occasions.
In 2006, Irish horses
claimed the three most highly acclaimed prizes that the festival has to
offer and fielded the first three in the Gold Cup, led by the appropriately
named War of Attrition, which just happened to fall on St Patricks Day. In
that year the Irish celebrated an impressive ten victories.
The rivalry between the
Irish and the English contributes to the unique atmosphere of the Cheltenham
Festival. It was Cottage Rake’s hat trick from 1948 to 1950 in the Gold Cup
that helped create growing impetus behind the Irish invasion of Cheltenham
to deny the English of victory on their home turf.
Who knows the impact of the
Irish on the Cheltenham Festival betting revenues? There is a story that,
in 1998, one Irish man won enough on Istabraq in the Champion Hurdle to pay
off his mortgage but then lost his house on Dorans Pride in the
Cheltenham Gold Cup betting forays.
Afterwards he is said to have been pragmatic about the outcome as “it was
only a small house.”
To win at Cheltenham horses
need to be experienced - 22 of the past 26 Champion Hurdle winners won last
time out and 16 of the last 21 winners had won at Cheltenham before. While
they gain this experience there is substantial ante post betting activity,
particularly in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and
Champion Hurdle betting. For racing
fans, one downside of the Cheltenham Festival is the tendency of racing
journalists and commentators to see every race after the turn of the year as
a Cheltenham trial. Good quality hurdle and steeplechase races attracting
highly rated runners are often virtually dismissed in their own right and
are talked of purely as a Cheltenham trial. The connections of winning
horses may well just want to enjoy whatever success they can get.
The first Cheltenham
Festival was a two day meeting in 1902. 1924 saw the inaugural Gold Cup with
Red Splash claiming the £685 prizemoney. Three years later the Champion
Hurdle was established as part of the festival calendar with £365 going to
the winner. By 2009 the race offered total prize money of £370,000.
Such is the popularity of
the Cheltenham Festival that certain horses that have won the Gold Cup more
than once have become household names. Dorothy Paget’s Golden Miller managed
five consecutive wins in the 1930s. In 1963, Arkle’s hat-trick of Gold Cups
created a legend. Best Mate subsequently became the nation’s favourite
racehorse with three consecutive wins in 2002-2004. His death at Exeter was
reported on the BBC news.
The current obsession of
the battle between the Paul Nicholls trained heavyweights, Denman and Kauto
Star (literally in the case of Denman who is nicknamed ‘The Tank’ at
Nicholls’ Ditcheat yard) for the Gold Cup has generated enough column inches
to scale a pyramid.
From the punters’
perspective, prices of recent Gold Cup winners have not been astronomical.
The longest priced winner ever was back in 1990 when Norton’s Coin brought
home the spoils for Welsh dairy farmer and owner trainer, Sirrell Griffiths.
In the past ten years five of the winners have been favourites, succeeding
at prices varying from 8/11 to 4/1. Similarly, in the Champion Hurdle, 17
of the past 19 winners have started in the first six of the betting. When
it comes to Cheltenham betting, it probably pays not to be too greedy.
The other big betting race
of the Cheltenham Festival is the championship for the two-milers, The
Champion Chase. First run in 1959, there have been many multiple winners of
a race that suits specialist two-mile steeplechasers. These include triple
winner Badsworth Boy and dual winners Pearlyman, Barnbrook Again (trained by
Desert Orchid’s trainer David Elsworth), Viking Flagship and more recently
trainer Paul Nicholls’ Master Minded.
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