The first leg of the day, the Triumph Hurdle, was the one that dealt a devastating blow to the betting pool at Cheltenham in 2018, as just 12% of the original 1,233,439.38 units scraped through into the second leg.
Apples Shakira had been backed by 59% of the pool, so when the horse failed to place it was a huge blow to many punters, leaving 157,491.66 units still in the pool. In the end, it was Farclas (backed by 6.04% of bettors), Mr Adjudicator (6.46%) and Sayo (0.27%) who took the top spots.
Leg 2 was no better for punters, as 1st and 2nd place went to a 33/1 and a 50/1 horse respectively, neither of which were backed by more than 1% of bettors. Whiskey Sour at 7/1 and Chesterfield at 16/1 helped carry a combined 13.48% of the remaining pool through to leg 3.
The Albert Bartlett Novices Hurdle was more forgiving as the favourite, Santini, did manage to place, but still, with 7 horses being pulled up and a few shorter priced runners not performing on the day, only 7,507.50 units remained going into the Gold Cup.
This turned into a competition between the favourite, Might Bite, and the second favourite, Native River, who actually ended up coming first with Might Bite 4.5 lengths behind, closely followed by 33/1 outsider Anibale Fly.
This return to normality saved roughly half of the pool, seeing 3,680.96 units still in with a chance when leg 5, the Foxhunter Challenge Cup, began. There two clear favourites in this race, both heavily backed with Burning Ambition taking 29.87% of the pool and Wonderful Charm almost 20%, but the favourite finished 8th and Wonderful Charm didn’t finish at all.
This latest upset for the pool, in a day filled with them, meant that only 3.64% of the remaining units survived for the final leg, that’s just 134.17 units.
This was still a very difficult one to predict though, because as is usually the case, the final race had many runners, and the pool was split fairly equally between a number of them. One of these, with 10% of the pool was Deal D’estruval, who ended up in 21st place, while the 12% who had backed Diese Des Bieffes only narrowly missed out when he came 5th.
Thus, the original 1,233,439.38 units were whittled down to just 28.06, who shared the £900,410.75 pot with each unit netting a very nice £32,088.70.