Each day of the 2024 Cheltenham Festival this week, the Tote are guaranteeing placepot prize pools of at least £1m per day in a bid to boost dividends for lucky punters.

For several months now on UK and Irish racing, the Tote have been boosting the pools for their flagship placepot bet with a selected meeting each day starting with a £100,000 pool guarantee, and a selected meeting each weekend with a guaranteed pool of £250,000 before a bet is even placed.

For the Cheltenham Festival itself, all four days will have record guarantees of a cool £1,000,000 added, which might be the catalyst, favourable results dependent of course, for a record payout at this year’s Cheltenham meeting.

In 2015 at Cheltenham, the placepot paid a remarkable £91,774.50 for a £1 winning line, a record for the bet at any meeting. In 2019, one lucky punter placed a £2 straight line on the placepot and took home £182,568, after a series of hard-to-call results came through on the day. By having one horsed placed in each race, they collected the winning dividend of £91,283.10 not once, but twice!

Cheltenham Placepot Picks

Each day during the 2024 Cheltenham Festival, our expert team have been making selections in each of the Placepot races. Check out their Day 4 selections on our Cheltenham Placepot Tips page.

How Do I Place A Placepot?

The placepot is a simple wager. Pick a horse in each of the first six races on the card and choose a stake. Typically the stake is £1, and if those horses place in the money, they don’t have to win, then you will receive the winning dividend. The dividend is decided on the number of winning tickets divided by the amount of money in the prize pool.

The easiest way to get involved, if you are not at the racecourse itself, is to have an online account with the Tote. They have a simple platform that allows you to select the meeting, then go through the races in order and make your selections before choosing the stake you wish to play and getting the bet on.

More experienced placepot players will select more than one horse in trickier races, and build what is known as a placepot perm, which allows you to have more selections than just one horse in each race. By doing this, you are choosing to play more than one line. The staking is important as the bet size increases with each additional horse added to the perm.

Simply explained as follows for guide purposes.

Race 1 – 1 Selection
Race 2 – 3 Selections
Race 3 – 1 Selection
Race 4 – 2 Selections
Race 5 – 1 Selection
Race 6 – 1 Selection

You can multiply your selections in accordance with the above to find out how many bets you are placing. In the above example:

1 x 3 x 1 x 2 x 1 x 1 = 6 bets

Your unit stake of £1 would mean this bet costs £6. If you change the stake to 50p per line it would be £3 total and so on.

How Do You Win The Placepot?

Your selection needs to be placed in each race.

Dependent on the number of runners in the race, the places that count, change as follows:

• 4 runners or fewer – the selection must finish 1^st
• 5 runners to 7 runners – the selection must finish 1^st or 2^nd
• 8 runners to 15 runners – the selection must finish either 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd
• 16 runners or more (handicaps only) – the selection must finish 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th

You might also be interested in:

• Horse Racing Betting Sites
• Today’s Horse Racing Tips
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• Free Bets
• Best Betting Apps
• Acca Insurance Offers

Placepot - Handy Tips!

If your selection is a non-runner, it cannot be changed and instead it will be replaced automatically with the favourite in the race, which ever horse is returned as the starting price favourite in the final result. If there are joint favourites, your line will be on the one with the lowest racecard number.

If you have staked less than £1 per line in the placepot, then you will only receive a percentage of the dividend in line with your stake. So, a 50p winning line would return 50% of the announced placepot dividend, a 10p stake paying 10% of the dividend and so on.

If you have two selections in a race and both are placed – your line stake is duplicated – therefore a £1 stake will now be a £2 stake rolling on to the rest of the selections. It can multiply several times if you picked lots of placed horses in the same permutation. 

The Tote Placepot really is a lot of fun, providing an interest throughout a day's racing if you are lucky to find horses that place, and offer a potentially large return for a small stake. 

During next week's Cheltenham Festival, all eyes will be on the dividends to see if a record can be broken, thanks to favourable results and lots of people playing from Tuesday through to Friday.