Betting Review: Cheltenham Festival 2018

How was it for you? Over and above the shared thrill and spectacle of another high-quality Cheltenham Festival, most of us are likely to have our own personal stories of triumphs and tragedies – connected to the horses and humans we backed – to help us define just how fondly this year’s event will be remembered.

If you believe bookies’ representatives and some in the media, desperately trying to construct a beguilingly simple narrative, punters win when favourites win and don’t when they don’t. It is as simple as that.

It is not as simple as that, although a succession of short-priced winners is indeed likely to trigger some hefty multiple wins for punters and losses for the “old enemy”.

To play along with that simple narrative for a while, the Festival was something of a game of two halves, with punters getting the better of early exchanges and bookies getting the better of the later ones.

There were three winning favourites on each of Tuesday and Wednesday, two on Thursday and none on Friday. That is just one more overall than par given the number of races.

The odds-on four-timer of Buveur d’Air, Apple’s Jade, Samcro and Altior – priced at 6/1 at the opening of the Festival – went West due to Apple’s Jade’s modest effort: three wins out of four, which is what transpired, was available at 6/4 on Tuesday morning.

The biggest winning Starting Price was 33/1 (three times) which had been a 15/8 chance behind 4/6 “over 33/1”. Aggregate winning distances snuck into the mid-range of 90 lengths to 120 lengths (around 93.6, depending on precisely how short margins were dealt with), which had been the narrow favourite at 6/4.

There had been something of a turn up before things got under way when “heavy” as the prevailing official description for the going for the first race was heavily and successfully backed from 10.5 on Betfair Exchange on Friday, despite one ATR pundit stating emphatically that it “could not happen”.

Cheltenham’s Clerk of The Course then changed the ground to “soft” halfway through that opening day, to the presumed chagrin of supporters of that option.

It took longer for the Prestbury Cup – the contest between Irish-trained and British-trained horses – to be decided, but only just. The general 8/11 on Ireland pre-event was soon looking like buying money and was eventually decided 17 to 11 in favour of the raiders.

The biggest on-course bets reported in the results’ section of the Racing Post were all winners: there may have been some anxiety for the person who had £20,000 to win £12,300 on Buveur d’Air, but little for those who had £14,000 to win £8,000 on Laurina and £11,000 to win £10,000 on Footpad.

Tuesday’s six odds-on in-play losers (including Kalashnikov at 1.13 in the opening race) on Betfair Exchange was eclipsed by Friday’s seven such (including Might Bite at 1.52 in the Cheltenham Gold Cup).

The shortest-priced in-play loser of all was Carefully Selected, who touched 1.04 (25/1 on) in the Champion Bumper before being run down by Relegate, matched at 300. The latter was not the biggest-priced in-play winner, however, with Mohaayed rather surprisingly touching 590 before his success in the County Hurdle.

The transparency of matched totals on Betfair Exchange enable us to see which races proved most popular with layers and backers on that platform compared to previous years (past rank is determined from average totals from 2012 to 2017 inclusive).

The Cheltenham Gold Cup reclaimed its position at the top of the in-play table after three years in which the Mares’ Hurdle in 2015 (think Annie Power), the Ryanair Chase in 2016 and the RSA Chase in 2017 (Might Bite) had usurped it.

An extended distance and quality runners always sees the race high up the rankings, though the relative two-sidedness of this year’s event (no horse other than Native River and Might Bite traded at less than 3.0) meant it got nowhere near the £2.3m in-play of the dramatic 2014 contest won by Lord Windermere.

It is no surprise to see that the Champion Chase shot up the rankings given the changing fortunes which saw Douvan and Min trade short and Altior matched at a high of 8.4 before the last-named asserted.

The identity of the top race for pre-race and in-play combined has alternated between the Champion Hurdle and the Cheltenham Gold Cup in recent years, but the former was only sixth this year and the latter dropped to second behind a Champion Chase which threatened to be something of a non-event before springing back into life in the days leading up to it.

Short-priced favourites may meet with disapproval from purists who believe quality at the Festival is now spread too thinly, but they do provide a simpler and more binary option for many punters: should I back or should I lay?

The Supreme Novices’ Hurdle and the Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle served up two such, with Getabird (7/4 on the books, 3.15 Betfair SP) and Samcro (8/11, 1.81) having contrasting fortunes. Those races broke into the top-five events as a result.

Despite recent adverse publicity, some of it self-inflicted, Starting Prices at the Festival were in a healthy state, with 17 of 28 races coming in at better than par using the over-round formula devised on these pages in 2014, while over-round per-runner (an imperfect measure) was a highly respectable 1.4% across the four days.

The answer to the question that opened this blog – “how was it for you?” – may vary between “wonderful!” (such as the Placepotter who won £96,266.10 for a £3 stake on Friday) and “dreadful” (we won’t go there). But the answer to the question “how was the 2018 Cheltenham Festival for the betting and racing industries?” seems to be “pretty good, thank you”.

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