Cheltenham Festival: The ultimate betting guide to the major novice hurdles

The Cheltenham Festival is fast approaching and almost every race is sure to be majorly competitive. With this in mind, betting on the races can be an extremely difficult puzzle. The three most important Grade 1 novice hurdles are the Supreme, Baring Bingham and the Albert Bartlett. Finding the right profile of horse can be key for picking out winners so we’ve created a betting guide which highlights the key stats and trends for these three races. Check out our free tips page for daily content across British and Irish racing.

Supreme Novices’ Hurdle

• Five and six-year-olds have the best record in this race, with 14 of the last 15 winners coming in this age bracket.
• Willie Mullins and Nicky Henderson have by far the best record in this race in recent years. The pair have won the race eight times between them since 2013.
• National Hunt pedigrees have dominated for many years which indicates that plenty of stamina is required to win this race, despite the fact that it’s the shortest of three big novice hurdles.
• Favourites have a patchy record in the last 10 years, with just two favourites and two joint-favourites getting the job done. This means there’s potentially some value to be had!

Baring Bingham Novices’ Hurdle

• This hasn’t been a good race for the home team in the last decade, with only one British trained winner in that time. Ireland’s dominance of this race is representative of the general trend that they tend to perform better than Britain during the Festival.
• Eight of the last 10 winners have been six-year-olds, with only the Willie Mullins-trained pair of Impaire Et Passe (5) and Sir Gerhard (7) bucking the trend.
• This 2m5f event tends to produce either future staying chasers or Champion Hurdle types. There are however a significant number of winners that went on to be slightly disappointing.
• Shorter priced runners tend to fair well here, with seven of the last 10 winners being 3-1 or shorter.

Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle

• One very important fact about this race is that it’s not necessarily won by the best horse but by the horse that possesses the deepest stamina reserves.
• Previous form over three miles is definitely encouraged. Wins are ideal but placed efforts in graded races in testing conditions are also helpful indicators.
• This is the newest of three races and has only existed since 2005. Whilst it started off as a good race for the British, Ireland has again won seven of the last 10 renewals.
• There have only been two winners aged five in the race’s history and six and seven-year-olds have been very dominant, winning all bar three of the 19 renewals.

If you back any of our selections you can watch them live on the free Racing Post app or racingpost.com. Simply log in to one of your bookmaker accounts and click ‘Watch live’ on the racecards.