How to Use Oddsmonkey to Optimize your Winnings at the 2019 Cheltenham Festival

With the 2018 Cheltenham Festival only a few weeks away we want to get ourselves as prepared as possible for the event.

I wrote a full article of my tips for the Cheltenham Festival 2018 but I wanted to compliment this with a guide showing how we can use the tools available at Oddsmonkey to really make our lives a lot easier.

If you don’t have a Oddsmonkey account yet, then you really should get one for the 2018 Cheltenham Festival alone, but I’ve also written a full Review of Oddsmonkey in a previous article.

I’ve tried to break down the process that each matched bettor will be going through during the festival and given examples of how the Oddsmonkey software is really going to help you during this period:

Finding Offers at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

There will be hundreds of offers available with the different bookmakers over the 4 days of the 2018 Cheltenham Festival.

You won’t be able to play all of these offers so you need to focus on playing offers that match your current skill level, your risk tolerance and also the size of your bank.

Luckily the Oddsmonkey team have thought about this and laid all of the offers that are available on a Daily Offer Calendar 

Each of the offers has the following information:

• Categorisation as Easy, Average or Hard to play
• Indicator of whether the offer is potential or guaranteed profit
• Link to discuss this offer on the forums
• Link to the offer on the bookie’s website

​Understanding the Cheltenham Festival Offers

The next step is to fully understand the terms of each offer and understand how you should approach these offers.

Again, Oddsmonkey have a Horse Racing Guides section, which gives you details of how to play each offer type:

How to Find Close Matches at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

OK, so you’ve got a good understanding of the offers that you want to play, and you understand how to play them.

The next step is looking for close matches so you can quickly back/lay your bets for minimal qualifying losses.

The Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher really takes the pain out of this process for you:

I didn’t have this tool available last year so had to manually compare all of the odds between bookies, whereas in the Oddsmonkey Racing matcher all you have to do is scroll through the races available each day, choose a bookmaker and check if there is an option with a small qualifying loss.

If you click on one of the matches then the calculator will show you the back and lay stakes and also provide you with links through to the bookies/exchanges.

This whole process can take less than a minute, which is key when trying to find close matches.

If you prefer to do this more manually you can also use the Oddsmatcher and filter this to show races just at Cheltenham each day to show you all the matches across the bookies.

Use the Eachway Matcher to line your pockets at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

The Eachway Matcher is going to be another major tool in your arsenal during the festival.​

You can use this in 2 ways:

• Keep an eye on the tool and use this to place bets which will give you a good profit regardless of the result- Use this to benefit from the extra place races.
• Click on the ‘Extra Place Only’ filter, and if there is a close match get on this, and hope that the horse comes in that extra place to bring in the big bucks.

How Should I Use my Free Bets from the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

After the festival has finished, you’re going to find yourself with lots of free bets that you will need to use up in a short amount of time.

The general rule of thumb is that you should be looking to extract 80% from your free bet if possible.

The first tool that you can use to find good matches for your free bets is the Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher

Sort the results by clicking on the ‘SNR %’ column.

The higher the number is here, the better for you, as it shows how much you can extract from your free bet.

Don’t go for a match that is over 100% as this was count as an arb and is likely to get you banned from the bookmaker.

You should be able to use up a lot of your bets using this filter, however, if you want to make sure you can extract 80% of you free bets each time and also stay under the bookies radar then you should read this post, which shows a technique that uses doubles or trebles to extract maximum value from the free bet.

Dutching Extra Place Races

OK, so this is a more advanced technique where you try to capitalise from the extra places that the bookies are offering and relies on you backing every horse in the race and not laying any of them.

Depending on the race, this can lead to big bucks for you and is really worth keeping an eye on the forums to see which races people are advising to look at.

Again, there is a handy guide that you can read, and also links to a number of spreadsheets to use for this technique.

Tracking Your Progress at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

OK, this one isn’t provided by Oddsmonkey but is a spreadsheet that I put together based on my experiences last year and should help you to prep each day for the different races and also keep track of your free bets and winnings. Download the Spreadsheet for free here

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Summary

Whilst you can do all of these different things manually, there is going to be a lot happening during Cheltenham so speed is really important and with the massive selection of tools that Oddsmonkey has to offer then you’d be crazy to miss out if you haven’t got an account yet.

The monthly fee for all of this is £15 and you can sign up hereOf course, if you have an account already, then you’re the clever ones and are going to have an easy time during this years Cheltenham Festival.

Have fun guys!!!