The action gets underway at Cheltenham 2020© Photo Healy Racing
The Cheltenham Festival is the pinnacle of National Hunt racing. Set across four fantastic days, 28 races bring about tons of betting opportunities with tens of millions traded online and at the track.
Cheltenham’s importance means, regardless of whether you are neophyte or professional, you need access to proper information on the track, the horses, the races and all the horsemen involved.
With that in mind, cheltenhamguides.com has been designed to offer as much information as possible to Cheltenham punters in advance of the Festival which begins on Tuesday, March 16th.
The Cheltenham Festival is incredibly important in thoroughbred sporting circles, but for the vast majority of the public, it is all about huge betting opportunities.
There are plenty of links to the big boys which are easy to find; offers for bet365, Unibet, Coral and many more are not hard to get hold of. However, these tend to simply be each firm’s new customer welcome offer and not a specific Cheltenham deal, though we assume when bookmakers release Festival offers, they’ll be listed here.
Very much the best part about the links to bookmakers’ offers at cheltenhamguides.com is that they can be found in different ways. The A-Z links list offers by bookmaker, while you can also easily find different offer types such as ‘best odds guaranteed’, ‘non-runner, no bet’ etc.
Regardless of your reason for looking up the Cheltenham Festival, whether betting or simply sporting fascination, what you need first and foremost is information on the potential runners and riders.
With that in mind, we’d love to see a link to this right on the main page. While the homepage looks very good and behaves well, there are three nicely designed green boxed links to ‘live streaming’, ‘free bets & sign-up offers’ and ‘bookies odds’. Instead, we’d love to see priority given to the horses involved.
Bettors should keep in mind that final fields are not declared until 2 days before each race, but it’s good to get some detailed information about the horses being aimed for certain races.
Here, click on ‘The Festival’ link, then choose your day, then your race. At that point, potential runners are described as ‘tips’, but really this would be a better resource for people to pick their own horses using well-researched information on horse’s form etc.
While a few things could be added to the site, navigating it is very easy. Six main links are placed at the top of the screen, heading to ‘Bookie’s Offers A-Z’, ‘Free Bets & Promotions’, ‘Betting Guide & Tips’, ‘The Festival’, ‘Other Events’ and ‘News’.
All these links are very quick, easy to navigate and take you to plenty of subcategories giving out a good deal of relevant information and betting offers for the Festival.
Even better is cheltenhamguides.com’s mobile site. Slick with a very good interface, the site is arguably easier to move around than the main desktop site.
However, it becomes even more prevalent with this layout that we are missing quicker links to the horses, so on the mobile site it would be great to see names and info on some of the Festival’s stars right there at first glance.
Horse racing punters are unique versus, say, slots and casino players, as no matter the extent of their knowledge they always like to have an opinion and make their selections themselves.
Cheltenham action© Photo Healy Racing
Many therefore will use official pages for Cheltenham information; industry sites, trade papers, sports websites, bookie sites and those attached to the track too. The ideal thing then would be for cheltenhamguides.com to pull as much information as possible provided by these sites into one site, but it just doesn’t quite do that yet.
In order for the site to be a real, all-encompassing Cheltenham Festival guide, we really need to know the latest news on the runners, why they are fancied and a little about how they rank versus their rivals. News of injuries, trainer quotes and latest form would all be a plus.
Updating horse racing news in general without being at the track or in training centres is admittedly very tough. But, updates on Cheltenham contenders when circumstances change really should be happening on any guide site.
In conjunction with having more detailed information on potential runners, when those horses have run in advance of the Festival or their trainer has given an update, this should be reflected in the cheltenhamguides.com ‘News’ section as quickly as possible.
There is a lot of info on bookies and their offers available, but no site should assume this is enough for punters. Many make their own choices, so giving info on the form, trainer quotes and news with then a link to a relevant offer would be the perfect combo.
If you want to make your own choices, then we could do with some more comprehensive information on Cheltenham runners. However, tips and ‘top tens’ are available on the site, are well written and in an easy-to-read format.
In order to get the best out of your bet, some really strong betting offers are given on the site too which you should definitely take advantage of.
What this site will help you with most of all is working out which type of bookie offer to accept. There are so many listed here, all displayed clearly, so once you have an idea of who you want to back you should tailor your bet to the promotions and offers linked on the site.
The main question here will always be whether or not Cheltenham Festival punters can use this site to pull together all the information they need in order to make an informed decision on their bets.
While some news on contenders and more detailed information on form would be a bonus, there are tips handed out alongside some excellent bookmaker offers. For amateurs and beginners especially then, there is enough info to go on in order to place a Cheltenham bet.
In the main, cheltenhamguides.com is professionally run, easy to navigate, slick looking and contains plenty of relevant Cheltenham Festival information.
