2009 Cheltenham Festival Betting Tips

To get started on your Cheltenham Festival betting you’ll need to determine the runners for the different races, get access to a form guide and open an account with an online sportsbook. With that done you’re ready to get started on your betting.

Here are some basic Cheltenham Festival betting tips and guidelines.

• Form: Unless you’re betting on the novice races at the Cheltenham Festival, form over the previous two seasons is the single most reliable indicator of a horse’s prospects in any given race. You’ll find that the majority of winners in all the Cheltenham Festival races either won or showed at the race immediately prior to the Cheltenham Festival event.

• Going: Many, but not all, racehorses show a preference for specific track conditions and will tend to rack up the majority of their wins in specific conditions. The track condition is described as the going and ranges between firm and heavy. The track at Cheltenham Racecourse is consistently described as good, which means you’ll need to pick out the horses with no preference for either harder or softer tracks.

• Distance: The fact that events like the World Hurdle and Champion Hurdle draw such different fields points to the fact that horses tend to specialise over certain distances. If you see a horse on the card for a 4 mile race that has never raced over a distance greater than 2½ miles, chances are it won’t have much of a chance against the more experienced runners in the field over that distance. The reverse holds true with stayers often unable to handle the demands of the shorter, quicker races.

• Racecourse: One of the often unacknowledged Cheltenham festival betting tips is the importance of venue. Like participants in many other sports, racehorses often have a preference for a particular venue for competition. This may sometimes be the result of a surface preference, but can’t be overlooked if you find that a horse consistently excels or fails at Cheltenham racecourse.

• Novices: The novices races at the Cheltenham Festival provide some of the toughest 2009 Cheltenham Festival betting opportunities. With the horses new to the format it can be easy to forget that these horses often come from careers in flat racing, as the retirement age in flat racing is usually the age at which national hunt careers get underway. This means that a novice’s flat racing record can provide a valuable resource when attempting to predict a novice’s performance in any of the novice events.

For more 2009 Cheltenham Festival betting tips relating to the Cheltenham Festival’s most popular races, don’t miss out on the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Queen Mother Champion Chase, Champion Hurdle and World Hurdle pages on this site.

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