Cheltenham Festival Tips 2024 – Matched Betting Tips for Cheltenham

The Cheltenham Festival is the biggest horse racing event of the year.

The week of the Cheltenham Gold Cup gives us the best chance for betting profits.

We achieve insane results year after year. This is thanks to our tried-and-tested success formula.

If you’re looking for betting tips for Cheltenham then you’ve come to the right place.

We will cover absolutely everything in this post.

That includes:

How we prepare for Cheltenham betting…

Our daily schedule…

And much more.

Interested?

Read on to find out every single one of our Cheltenham betting tips.

When Does Cheltenham Festival Start?

Taking place in the same month every year, Cheltenham Festival 2024 will be held from the 12th March to the 15th of March 2024.

This historic festival has been running since 1860 and culminates in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, which always takes place on the final day.

This race is second only to the Grand National in terms of prize money in the UK.

The previous days are also packed with horses of the highest calibre, and the feature race of each day is the Champion Hurdle, the Queen Mother Champion Chase and the World Hurdle.

Whilst horse racing is often exciting, it’s rare that so many top quality horses compete against each other throughout the calendar year.

Tips for BEFORE Cheltenham Starts

In this section, we’ll look at the things we’d advise doing in the lead up to the week of the Cheltenham Festival.

Whilst we would advise doing all of these things if you get the chance to, you can skip straight to our Cheltenham Betting Tips section below if you don’t need to know about preparation.

So, in the weeks or days before Cheltenham Festival 2024 you need to:

Create All Accounts ASAP

If you still have bookmaker accounts that you haven’t signed up to, get this done as quickly as possible!

As in, right now. Well, after you finish reading this post of course.

There are probably bookmakers out there that you’ve not signed up to yet, so make sure you do it.

Most of them will have a sign-up offer for you to exploit, although we would advise signing up even if they haven’t…

You just never know who will come out with the best betting offers for the Cheltenham Gold Cup until the last minute.

A lot of people will wait until the festival begins in order to receive enhanced sign-up bonuses. This is because many bookmakers will give even better deals in the week of Cheltenham.

We wouldn’t advise waiting.

Here’s why:

If you sign up to a new bookmaker and instantly start piling money onto horses, you’re likely to get gubbed.

This is especially true when you’re going to be making profits.

We can guarantee you these profits, if you follow the instructions throughout this post.

We have a range of sign-up offers right here on the site.

Start Mugging

To ensure your accounts are in the best possible shape going into Cheltenham, place a few mug bets.

We’d advise that you place these bets on high profile football matches and opt for reasonable starting stakes (£25-100).

Ensure all of these mug bets are laid off.

Remember to avoid arbitrage betting and if you can afford to invest a bit in qualifying losses at this stage then it would be good for your accounts.

We cover this in more detail in our Guide to Mug Betting.

If you want to know how to keep profitable accounts in good shape then give that a read.

It’s important that you give your accounts a good betting profile because new sign-ups are often looked at very closely by traders during Cheltenham week.

Build a Bigger Bankroll

Using your existing accounts, you should be looking to maximise the bankroll that you have available during Cheltenham week.

This means jumping on a few of the smaller offers and avoiding casino offers temporarily in the lead up to – and during – the festival.

Anything that could ensure you have a bigger bankroll will be a Godsend.

We would never advise being irresponsible with money, however:

If there are ways that you can get your hands on a bit of extra cash, perhaps via an ISA or family, then significantly more guaranteed profit will await you.

Sign Up to a Matched Betting Site

This will be by far the best investment you will ever make.

There are 3 different matched betting sites that we give as our main recommendations:

• Oddsmonkey (click here for free trial)
• Outplayed (click here for free trial)

• Profit Maximiser (£1 for 2 weeks full access available here)

We made over £1,000 via matched betting in our first ever Cheltenham festival, with a small bankroll. It is completely realistic that you could achieve this in 2023.

With the tools and guides available on these sites, you are guaranteed to make serious profit between March 14th-17th, as long as you invest some time and effort.

If you read this and you think you are too late, don’t panic…

You can move onto the tips below – there’s plenty more you can learn.

And remember…

This festival happens every year and you can remember this advice for then!

Better still:

The Grand National is in April.

Whilst it doesn’t have the week-long nature of the Gold Cup, there are still plenty of fantastic betting offers that you can prepare yourself for using the tips above.

There are also other sports every week that you can exploit via match betting.

Now, let’s look at the tips that you should be using during the Cheltenham Festival:

Cheltenham Festival Betting Tips

Below, we look at everything you need to consider whilst the festival is underway:

Making Your Schedule

If you really want to maximise the profits you get, you’re going to have some long days ahead of you.

We would advise early starts, long days and late nights in order to fully utilise the best matched betting week of the year.

The night before each day of the festival, prepare your spreadsheet in advance.

This means writing down the time of each race, and putting in the bookmaker names whose offers you know you will be exploiting. More on that shortly. 

Your schedule will depend a lot on your current situation:

Are you employed? Full-time or part-time?

Do you work from home?

Can you book annual leave?

You will need to consider things differently depending on your current daily commitments.

Now, we’re not saying we’d ever advise you to take a sick day or two from work…

We couldn’t possibly do that…

But are you sure you’re feeling alright?

Even managing to scrape a free day of time would be a huge benefit to you.

The Friday would be best, as that’s the day of the Gold Cup itself and you’ll typically have more offers to make use of.

Once the festival has started, your schedule will adapt slightly too.

You will likely be owed free bets from a number of different sites, so you’ll need to concentrate on ensuring they’re all used before you can move onto earning even more of them.

This can be an extremely time-consuming process!

There will be offers flying around all over the place.

You’ll probably be placing up to 50 bets per day – depending on your bankroll of course.

£1,000 profit for the 4 days of the festival is not out of the question.

Our usual Cheltenham days will start at 6am and we won’t finish until all preparation for the following day is complete…

It’s a tough week!

Managing Your Bankroll

Managing your bankroll is exceptionally important during Cheltenham.

Now, in betting, bankroll management is something a little different to what we mean here:

Typically, this term is used to describe making sure you don’t lose all of your money – or too much of it – in a short period of time.

However, with matched betting we never lose.

The only issue we can face is winning all of the money into the wrong accounts.

This could mean all of your money being ‘won’ into bookmaker accounts, or all of your money being ‘won’ into your betting exchange.

If this happens then you could be out of action unless you use an eWallet like PayPal. This is because you will have to wait 2-3 days for withdrawals to process before you can then redeposit.

If this happens on day 1 or 2 of the festival then you’re unlikely to have enough money available for the Gold Cup race.

Again, much like with your schedule, your bankroll depends on your current situation:

How much time are you going to commit during the week?

And how big is your bankroll?

The answer to the first question should be as much as is physically possible. Social time should be sacrificed. It’s only one week in the year!

Secondly, the size of your bankroll actually shouldn’t matter too much as we will do all of this in percentages.

However, if it is very small (below £1,000) then you should take special care. Pay close attention to the next section in this post where we discuss setting priorities.

For us, we will be looking to invest a maximum of 40% of our bankroll for the first 2 days.

We will stretch this to 50% on day 3.

On day 4, we will look to invest up to 90% of our available bankroll, keeping just 10% at minimum reserved for the weekend’s horse racing and football offers – that’s worst case scenario, of course.

It is extremely unlikely that the worst result for our bank (high odds winners) will happen in every single race of every single day.

Therefore, with a 40-50% max bankroll cap per day, things should be in manageable shape to ensure you can continue generating profits throughout the festival.

Prioritising Races/Offers

This ties in to both your schedule and your bankroll management.

It will come down to a bit of personal preference and also what your targets are for the week.

If you will be more than satisfied with £500 profit for the week then you need to be prioritising the guaranteed profit offers. And £500 is still a great target to have!

One of these guaranteed profit offers is on SkyBet:

During the first race all losing bets (your first bet placed only) will be refunded in cash up to £20.

You can lock-in £19+ profit from this one offer alone.

They usually run this promotion every day of the festival, although currently they haven’t announced what they’ll be doing for days 2, 3 and 4 yet – they’ve just said that they will have first race specials every day.

We said earlier in this post to get all signups out of the way early on.

However, if there are any that you did miss…

…Or a new bookmaker comes along that didn’t previously offer anything special…

…You should also get these done to boost that guaranteed profit.

There will probably be around 10-20 offers running each day from various bookmakers, along with extra places.

Extra places is where we usually make the vast majority of our profit. It is where we will be investing the majority of our time and bankroll each day.

For us, it will be a case of getting the guaranteed profit offers out of the way as quickly as possible.

We will then be looking to back as many horses each way as we can in these ‘extra place’ horse races.

Extra places are harder these days with less bookmakers paying out at 1/4 odds (with many moving to 1/5) but from initial inspections of the races, it does seem that quite a few bookmakers will be paying at least one big race per day at 1/4, with the potential for extra places to be announced. Some bookmakers have already announced extra places, but at 1/5 odds.

If you don’t know what extra places are, or you’re unsure of how to calculate your stakes, then we’d advise using Oddsmonkey for this. We also have an each way odds converter right here on the site.

It can seem slightly tricky at first, but once you’ve done a couple it becomes second nature.

This is totally our preference and yours may be different. After all…

We might not hit the extra place and it will have been wasted time.

However, the potential payout for hitting these places is usually £100+ profit.

This significantly improves once your bankroll is bigger as you can increase your stakes.

Match ALL of Your Bets

Remember at the start of this post when we said we can guarantee you profits during the festival?

Well, we can, as long as you follow the guidance in this post.

The most important thing to do is ensure all of your bets are matched bets.

Whilst it might be a bit frantic, take a little extra time to ensure you’re laying off every bet correctly.

If you need further advice on what matched betting is or how to do it, please check out the rest of our site.

Best of luck!