Cheltenham Festival Betting: Races and Markets

The Cheltenham Festival is the championship meeting of National Hunt racing, held at Cheltenham over four days in March. The Jockey Club, which owns the racecourse, describes the meeting as "4 Days and 28 Races".

This guide covers what the meeting is and how its races are organised. It carries no selections, no prices and no runners: those change every year, and a page that listed them would be wrong by the following spring.

The Four Days and Their Feature Races

Counting the Grade 1 races on the published card gives thirteen across the four days. What follows is the race the racecourse makes the focus of each day — two of them fall on the Thursday, which carries three Grade 1s in all. The distances are the racecard lines from the Jockey Club's own event schedule, which gives each race's official title and distance:

• Champion Day, the Tuesday — the Champion Hurdle, the two-mile hurdling championship. The schedule lists it as "2m abt 1/2f".
• Ladies Day, the Wednesday — the Queen Mother Champion Chase, listed at "Abt 2m".
• St Patrick's Thursday — two of them. The schedule says so itself: "You have two feature races on the day the 15:20 Paddy Power Stayers' Hurdle (Grade 1) & 16:00 Ryanair Steeple Chase (Grade 1)". The Stayers' Hurdle is listed at "Abt 3m", the Ryanair Chase at "2m 4 1/2f".
• Gold Cup Day, the Friday — the Cheltenham Gold Cup, listed at "3m abt 2 1/2f", which the racecourse calls "the premier race of the event".

A note on the names. Most of these races carry a commercial sponsor's name in their official title and the sponsors change, so each is named here by the part that does not. The Ryanair Chase is the exception that proves the difficulty — the sponsor's name has become the name people use, and the schedule itself calls it the Ryanair Steeple Chase.

Championship Races and Handicaps Are Different Problems

The distinction that matters most at this meeting is between the Grade 1 championship races and the handicaps, and it is not about prestige.

A championship race is run on level weights for age and sex, so it is a straight test of which horse is best, and the fields are correspondingly small. A handicap assigns weights with the intention of giving the field an equal chance, so a large field converges and the race is harder to predict by design. Several of the meeting's 28 races are handicaps, and a long price in one of them reflects that design rather than an oversight.

The Markets Usually Offered

Each-way betting splits a stake between the win and a place. The number of places paid and the fraction of the odds applied to the place part are set by the operator in its own rules, not by the racecourse, and two operators can offer different terms on the same race — which makes them worth reading before the race rather than after it.

Non-runner no bet concessions return an ante-post stake if the horse does not run; without one, a withdrawal is a lost stake. Without-the-favourite markets price a race as if a dominant horse were absent. Trainer and jockey markets run across the whole meeting rather than one race, settled on winners accumulated over the four days.

Where It Is Legal to Bet on This

Availability depends on where the reader is: a licensed route exists in some countries, no licensing regime exists in others, and betting is prohibited in several. The country guides give the position market by market, with the regulator and its register for each. Jumps racing covers the discipline itself and the racing section the other codes.

The Fixture Moves Within March

The dates change each year and the Jockey Club publishes the fixture and the race times. The 2027 running is listed as "Tuesday 16 - Friday 19 March 2027".