How to Bet on Cheltenham Festival: Single, Each Way, Forecast and Accumulator Bets

The Cheltenham Festival is the most eagerly anticipated event on the National Hunt racing calendar. 

Four days of top-class jumps action comes from the sport's most famous amphitheatre, nestled underneath Cleeve Hill in the heart of the Cotswolds countryside.

For those four days in mid-March, Prestbury Park becomes a hive of activity, with more than 200,000 racegoers set to descend on the Cheltenham Festival.

Betting on the Cheltenham Festival can add to the levels of excitement for the action and here's our quick guide for how to bet on the Cheltenham Festival.

Breaking down The Festival

The Cheltenham Festival is a four-day experience - from Tuesday 12th March until Friday 15th March this year. Each day, there are seven races at The Festival, making a total of 28 races across four days.

When betting on the Cheltenham Festival, a good starting point is to set your limits for the week and stake accordingly, so that you have enough left in your kitty to see out the journey - hopefully with some winning selections along the way to top it up!

All bar one of the Festival races come over jumps. The Champion Bumper - the final race on Wednesday - is a Flat race.

For the rest, it is either hurdles or fences - races referred to as 'chases'. The hurdles are more forgiving and smaller in stature, with the fences requiring much more accurate jumping, in theory.

The races are run over a variety of distances, ranging from two-miles and three-and-three-quarter miles.

Check the racecard to see which distance each race is at, and consult the formbook to see which horses are best suited going into each race.

Types of bet for the Cheltenham Festival

Here are some handy references for types of bet you can place on the action at Cheltenham.

Single: A straight bet to find the winner of a given race. The horse you back must win the race.

Each-Way: Essentially, two bets on the same horse – one to win and one to be placed (top three, four or five, depending on the number of horses in the race).

Your stake is doubled in order to make up the two parts of this bet, so a £5 each-way bet costs £10. If the horse wins, you are paid the win and the place, the second part at a percentage of the starting price, often ¼ of the odds. If your horse is 'placed' you are paid on that part of the bet only.

Forecast/Reverse Forecast: In a forecast, you predict which horses will finish in first and second and they must be in the correct order.

A reverse forecast involves picking two horses to be first and second in any order and doubles the stake.

Accumulator: With 28 races to pick from over four days, many punters will be hoping to land a Cheltenham Festival accumulator.

This is where you select the winners of multiple races. To win, all of your selections need to win their races.

Placepot: Placepot betting involves selecting a horse/horses to be 'placed' across a number of specified races on a given raceday. The unit stakes can be as big or small as you want, but this increases the more horses you want to include.

This can also be done as an accumulator bet by selecting multiple horses at The Festival in the 'to be placed' market for their respective races where you can choose anything to eight or nine places per race, depending on how many horses are running.

Lucky15: A popular multi-bet with racing punters is the Lucky15, which is a full-cover bet involving four horses in separate races.

A full cover bet covers all of the possible multiple bets available for a given number of selections, in this case: Four Single Bets, Six Double Bets, Four Treble Bets, One Four-Fold Bet - hence the term Lucky15. Note that a £1 Lucky15 bet will cost £15.

To leave out the 'singles' in a bet of this nature, consider a Trixie (Three selections with 4 bets, 3 doubles and a treble) or a Yankee (Four selections with 11 bets, 6 doubles, 4 trebles and a four-fold).

If you can get multiple winners in these types of bets, the rewards can be handsome!