With four days of fierce sport at the Cheltenham Festival looming in the headlights, and much of the form study complete, now is a great time to think about strategy.
Availing of any bookmaker concessions to which you're still entitled is a no-brainer, and the best I'm aware of to date on that score is the tote's "money back as a free bet if second", which will be honoured on all 28 Festival races. Allied to their guarantee to at least match the industry starting price, it's one I'll be using with some regularity through the week.
The other tote angle I'll be playing all week is swinging at the massive placepot pools - £750,000 guaranteed daily, but likely to be closer to a million quid is my guess. And possibly also a crack at Tuesday's jackpot.
To help think about how to play the Cheltenham Festival placepot, let's start at the beginning...
Getting set up
The first thing you need is a tote account. You'll need that to get the free bet if second concession as well, of course. Most readers will already have a tote account but if you don't yet, you can get yours here. You'll probably be offered some other sweetener(s) to open and play on that account, but obviously always check the terms and conditions.
Once you've got your tote account, it's time to know a bit about the way it tends to shake down in CheltenhamPlacepotLand (that's not a real place, obviously).
The Shape of Cheltenham Placepot Dividends
The nature of the Festival is that some days feel harder to bet than others; and that's mainly, as evidenced by the tables below, because some days are harder to bet than others.
This first table shows the pool size and declared placepot dividend for each of the last twelve Cheltenham Festivals. I've colour coded the 'dividend' column where red is a skinny one and green is a big fat juicy (and almost certainly nigh on impossible to hit) payout.
Realistically, you'd have needed a crystal ball or a very, very, very lucky Mr Felt Tippy to find a placed horse six times in some of those Friday sequences. At the other end of the spectrum, there have been plenty of meh divvies. The sweet spot of gettable and worth getting is in the yellow coloured blocks. Happily, there are lots of those.
Yearly breakdown
In the next two tables, I've broken down these data into Festival years and Festival days. Years first.
Last year was a flattish one for dividends, the average and median closely aligned at a little north of a hundred quid. But the year before, 2023, saw a median of seven grand. (For the non-maths buffs, the mean average is the sum of the four days' dividends divided by four whereas the median is the middle value of the four days' dividends when placed in order - because there isn't a middle number in four days we take the average of the middle two values. Hopefully that makes vague sense at least.)
There has been the odd flat year from a median perspective, but eight of the twelve years rounded out above £200; and in a quarter of the years the median was better than a thousand of your English pounds (or Irish Euros - you can play those, too, don't you know).
Which day is hardest?
Let's look at the individual days now. There have been a few changes to the race programme this year, both in terms of race conditions and sequence, the impact of which cannot be known at this stage. If the changes have served their purpose, field sizes will be bigger, and the implication is that finding placed horses may be slightly more challenging - and therefore dividends may be commensurately higher. That's the theory at least.
Here's how the dozen years looked on a day to day basis:
The means are all over the place due to some massively outlying dividends. Tuesday has a £91,000 for a £1 return on its dance card, for example; that's why median is so useful. We can see that, with a median of just £42, Tuesday is typically the 'easiest' day to hit the placepot.
Following that median column down shows a sliding scale of difficulty through the week, culminating in what I like to call "give back Friday", which of course very much presumes you've anything to return at the end of Thursday!
Anyway, those are the numbers. Tuesday may be a day to go narrow, Wednesday and Thursday are days to sharpen the quill, and Friday might be a day to be lucky rather than good.
Bonus Bunce #1
Value is the name of the game, however you play it. If you play for fun, you'll stretch the fun out for longer if you get value. If you play for funds, you don't need me to tell you about the absolutely necessity of getting value. Me? I'm in for both, and seeing as you're reading this, I'd wager you are, too.
So here are two slices of bonus bunce coming your way this week. Three if you count the tote win 'money back as a free bet if second' concession. I keep mentioning it because it's really very good. Anyway, I digress.
The first bonus chip is Tix, a piece of software I developed with Nige, the guy who built most of the geegeez website, that does smart (and less smart if you prefer) staking on multi-race bets like the placepot. Tix saves, literally, hours of faff if you want to cover the most likely permutations without shelling out a gazillion escudos. And - here's where the bonus comes in - winning tickets get paid 5% extra.
If five percent doesn't sound that much, keep in mind that at the end of the punting year it's comfortably the difference between winning and losing overall for a big chunk of the type of literate racing players found ambling across the verdant plains of a site like this one.
In plain English, if you're playing placepot and you're not staking optimally and you're not getting extra money when you win, you're doing it wrong. Don't do it wrong.
Tix is easy to use and if you have a tote account, you've got all you need to get started with it.
1 If you need to, get your tote account from this link
2 Then watch the two minute Tix explainer video here
3 When you're ready to play, go to the app here
4 Put your top fancies in the 'A' column, with lesser hopes on 'B' and perhaps 'C'
5 Cheer them home
6 Get 105% of the dividend on your winners
Bonus Bunce #2
As well as the above, Tix players will be automatically entered into a competition where one (or more) lucky 'potters will share £100 each day. The winner(s) will be the person who gets the highest stake-to-return multiple. For example, if your ticket cost was £2.40 and the return was £240, your stake to return multiple would be 100 (£2.40 x 100 = £240).
We'll do all the sums so you don't need to worry about that. Just know that I chose this approach because it makes it accessible to all players, whether you stake a couple of pounds (or less) or hundreds. We all bet differently and to different stakes, and that should never matter. So the stake to return method makes it a game for everyone to play.
A couple of admin lines on the comp:
- In the event of a tie, the prize will be shared between all tied players. There are no tie breaker provisos.
- Only bets placed via Tix on Cheltenham multi-race pools (placepot, jackpot, quadpot, Scoop6, placepot 7) will count.
- The judge's (my) decision is final - I'm sure it won't come to that.
- Prizes will be credited to winners' accounts on the morning following racing, e.g. Wednesday morning for Tuesday's winner(s).
Please do enter if you're into placepots, jackpots, quadpots and the like. Your first spin on Tix might be a bit confusing but you'll very quickly get the hang of it. And if you want to simply play the same bet you always do - but with 5% extra when you win, and the chance to cop £100 in the competition - just put all of your picks in the 'A' column, and choose 'x1' on the 'TICKETS' tab - see below.
It's simple once you know how. You can play for a little as penny stakes, so feel free to have a practice run today. Here's the link to TIX again.
If you have any questions, just drop them in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer.
Now, let's get this party started - good luck!
Matt
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