Guide to The Cheltenham Placepot

Making a placepot bet is very popular at Cheltenham and can pay large dividends.

Here we explain what a placepot is, how to make your Cheltenham placepot bet and some tips and advice for winning a Cheltenham placepot.

For our best Cheltenham tips check out our main Cheltenham tips page or for tips on each of the individual races click on the links in the left menu.

Cheltenham Placepot Payouts

The Placepot is an excellent value bet and often returns large dividends. To win the Placepot you have to select a horse to be placed in each of the first six races at a meeting. As well as being great value it gives you an interest in a large number of races for just a potentially small investment.

Finding a horse to place in six consecutive races is obviously not going to be easy, especially at the Cheltenham Festival, but if you do manage it can really pay big dividends! The 2009 Cheltenham meeting returned the following amounts for a £1 stake;

Tuesday £122.50
Wednesday £753.20
Thursday £537.00
Friday £656.50

How to make your Cheltenham Placepot Bet

Placepots are run by Totesport. All stakes are added to a pool and this forms the total from which the winning amount is declared, after some deductions. You must stake at least £1 for a single line but most people place a number of lines or “perms”. A rising multiple of at least 10p is used, providing a minimum total of £2 is staked.

You can select more than one horse in each race to give you more chance of successfully landing the bet. So, for example, you might want to have two selections in five of the races with one race covered by one horse that you think should be a banker to make the frame. The bet then looks like this;

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 = 32 bets

Or if you want to have more selections in some of the races you could choose;

4 x 3 x 3 x 2 x 1 x 1 = 72 bets

If you are new to the Placepot you might want to try a large number of selections in a permutation for a smaller stake, say, 10 or 20p.

In the second example above, with a stake of 20p, the total stake would be £14.40.

To work out the cost of your bet just multiply the number of selections in each race by your stake.

Cheltenham Placepot Tips

When making your selections it's best to keep in mind that you are trying to obtain a large reward from a relatively small stake so it may be best to not always focus your selection on the favourite in each race. Obviously, if the favourite is placed in each race this will increase the number of outright winners and therefore lower the return. The larger returns are usually found when some of the horses at bigger prices have been placed – not usually a problem a Cheltenham!

Non Runners in Placepots

It also pays to make a note of non runners before placing your bets. Often punters will not bother to check if their selections have been pulled out at the last minute and this then means their bet is transferred to that race's favourite. In the event of joint favourites, the
selection becomes the market leader with the lowest racecard number.

Completing a Placepot Online

The golden rule of Placepots is to make sure your online form has been completed correctly. This may seem a patronizing thing to say but most punters have a hard luck story somewhere in their history where they have not checked that the numbers they have completed on their form correspond with the horses they actually want to make the frame.

A mistake could cost you thousands!

Cheltenham Placepot Daily Tips

If you are looking for tips for your Tote Placepot then click on the races in the left menu. Or see a summary of our best Cheltenham Tips

Place your placepot now at Totesport