The Cheltenham Festival 2025 was, as always, a glorious assault on the senses and a searching test of constitution across four days. The thrilling sport has been covered in detail elsewhere on site and so in this post I'll ask and answer this: 28 races later, how did it go from a wagering standpoint?
The tl;dr is "pretty bad", and now, if you're not from the TikTok generation, allow me to flesh out that two word 'too long, didn't read' summary.
I've been tracking my P&L publicly for many a moon, very definitely not because I enjoy basking in the glory: there is rarely much of that even in positive ledger years. No, it relates more to 'walking the talk'. I set up geegeez.co.uk as a site for racing punters because I am a racing punter. I didn't like the tools available at the time (or the price of those that were half decent) so I built my own. The bare-faced arrogance (and, yes, stupidity) of it!
As ever, it bears repeating at the outset that the numbers are completely irrelevant. Lots of people bet more, lots of people bet less. We are, or should be, all be betting within our means and that's the only context we each need to be personally accountable against. I'll never have a life-changing Cheltenham at either end of the profitability spectrum, and that's perfectly fine.
But the cerebral challenge and the ongoing engagement of the ups and downs as an ante post portfolio is assembled are, for me, life-changing on a day to day, week to week, basis. Most people in our special little world get that, most outside of it don't. How lucky we are to have these little endorphin hits that punctuate the year-long Cheltenham narrative and enrich in a small but meaningful way our general existence? Even when the results are shitty!
Because here's another thing: it doesn't matter how good or bad we are at punting. Luck, and variance, will at times make us look better or worse than our reality, whatever that is.
When Majborough walked through the second last; when first Constitution Hill and then State Man, five lengths clear at the final flight, fell; when Jonbon thought there were no fences in the back straight; when Ballyburn did... well I'm not actually sure what Ballyburn did; when the Aintree-bound non-staying too-old Bob Olinger turned up at Cheltenham and defied his years to outstay the champion; when the 'unbeatable' top two in the Triumph market got chinned by a 100/1 shot that's never jumped a hurdle in public; and when the invincible Galopin Des Champs got hammered by a supplemented interloper in the Gold Cup...
Individually we might - indeed, should - expect these things to happen. But, in concert, they were akin to a wagering - and, for those more, and at the same time less, fortunate than us, ownership - black swan event. But these micro disasters (when horse and rider return unscathed) are the very reason we can get a bet on at the Festival. In spite of the one-eyed half-cooked dogma of most of the preview circuit, there are no certainties here. And hallelujah to that. Except when I've backed them, obvs.
Here's how those horses sent off at 11/4 or shorter at the 2025 Cheltenham Festival fared:
The record of short priced favourites (11/4 or shorter) at the 2025 Cheltenham Festival
As can be seen from the summary at the bottom of that image, five of 20 won for an ROI loss of worse than 40% at starting price (the red line denotes the odds-on / odds-against watershed: just two of seven odds-on shots won).
Feel free to grimace at your own dropped pies there. And, once you've done that, you may indulge in a bit of good old fashioned schadenfreude at my expense. Here we go...
So the question now is, "what will I do differently next time?"
And the answer is, pretty much nothing. The game is all about beating the odds: if you can find a way to consistently beat starting price (or, more accurately, exchange starting price) with your wagers, you will win. Period. That's the simple mathematical universal truth, and it's one that every ante post player knows.
25/1 Majborough sent off 1/2 means a 4% chance became a 67% one. But not 100%. There are none of those, as we were so ruthlessly reminded last week.
The record of horses priced 11/4 or shorter at the Cheltenham Festival 2021 to 2025
Beating the odds is the name of the game. We all have specialisms and weaknesses within that framework. My Achilles heel is a desire for 'action' which manifests in too many bets in races where I already know I don't know (the handicaps and Champion Bumper most notably). But paying the 'stupid tax' to get that action is an acceptable price for me; I generally hope to claw back action losses from the Graded races.
And if I don't, so what?
It's never going to make me rich or poor. Some years I'll be a little richer, and some - like this one - I'll be a bit poorer. But every year I get to engage with a fantastic sporting spectacle, and to marvel at the brilliance of the horses and riders and trainers - and the dedication of myriad staff, and to take the value test.
The Cheltenham Festival is a tiny microcosm of a punting year, but the keenness of focus makes people arrive at disproportionate and often plain wrong judgement calls on their betting approach.
The best thing to do, in my opinion anyway, is to helicopter out and ask questions about whether you found value. And, more fundamentally than that, whether the whole process of looking in the big book of form and wiling away carefree hours trying to locate an angle, an edge, a horse, generated the most important value proposition of all: a bit of fun, and an escape from some of the humdrum of life.
If the answer to that is yes, then you, like me, were a winner before the Festival even started.
Matt