Tomorrow is the first day of the Cheltenham Festival and while I only occasionally bet on horse racing through the year I always like to get involved in the major events and they don't come much more major than Cheltenham.
The prize money for Cheltenham is pretty huge with only the Grand National offering more, meaning it brings all the best trainers with their best horses and the top jockeys in the business. The significance of that is all the horses entered are capable of winning on their day, with the odd exception a an occasional pace setter entered into a race with the sole purpose of riding ahead of the trainers main horse to set their ideal pace and ensure a clear run as it pulls up to get out of the way after a set distance. But those are usually obvious and are priced around 100/200-1.
The favourite has won the Gold Cup only twice in the last 5 years and in 2014 it was won by 20/1 Lord Windermere. While history shows the favourite usually wins the main Grade 1 races more often than not throughout the festivals other races it is a fairly frequent occurrence to see horses with fairly decent odds storming across the finish line first.
However as exciting as it is to see such fine animals in full flow rumbling around the course the number 1 reason why I love the festival is the money making opportunities it brings. The big odds draw in punters and with so much options available to them to bet these days the bookmakers have to sweeten the deal by adding extras in the form of promotions, which then gives us more opportunity to make a bit of cash. Even if you know next to nothing about horses it is still possible with a little bit of effort to come out of the festival with decent profits.
The best way to find out about bookmakers offers is to sign up to them and agree to receive promotional emails, that way they will send you all the details of their offers and may even send you exclusive ones not available to everybody. These exclusive deals can often be the most lucrative if you are interested in making some low risk profit.
Other ways to find out about the offers are by manually visiting their sites and clicking on the promotion pages or by visiting a website like oddschecker or attheraces. Via these types of sites you can look at the race cards and scroll at the top where it says offers, there are usually 2 types of offer. One is "Sign up offers" these are offers for new customers and only available one time when you join up and can be used on any event on the site. The other type are "Special" or "Exclusive" offers, these are the offers specific to that race card or event.
There are many tutorials and guides about how to take advantage of offers that reward you with free bets via matched betting, they explain it better than I ever could so I would highly recommend learning about matched betting, all the info is available for free via google.
Once you know more about matched betting it can make the offers more appealing to you, when bookmakers offer you an offer such as "Bet £20 on the first race and if you lose, receive a refund as a Freebet" with matched betting you can either lay off your original bet to ensure a risk free small return. My personal preference for such offers is to try and bet on a horse I believe to win with decent odds, that way if I am successful I can reap the glory of a big win and if I picked a loser I can then lay off the free bet and cut my loss. I can usually convert a £20 freebet into £16-17 cash depending on the odds at the exchange and that means worst case scenario I got a £20 bet for £4, pretty good value!
For this Festival Skybet are offering such an offer for the first race each day of the festival and Betway are also doing the same for the first and last but for just £10.
Other great offers during the festival are Bet365's promotion offering a free bet in one of the featured races if you stake a bet in one of the other races.
I will be back tomorrow sharing my picks for Day 1 of the festival and hoping to start the week with some profits! If you have any tips on any of the races during the week I would love you to comment! Good luck!