Cheltenham Festival 2025: Best Bets for Day 2

With Style Wednesday scheduled for - you guessed it - Wednesday, BettingLounge's racing expert Conlan goes through some of his favourite bets for the day, and puts them in one place for you. So, let's dive in!

You can also check out all of his selections for the day, written before declarations, so prices may have changed.

🥇 Best Bet

For Day 2, which is known as Style Wednesday given the Festival's initiative to celebrate sustainable fashion and style choices, my Best Bet is Ballyburn in the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase.

This impressive Flemensfirth gelding has shown immense improvement over the last 12 months, particularly since progressing from hurdles to chasing, having only lost out once over a shorter 2m trip at Kempton to the impervious Sir Gino, who unfortunately misses out on this year's festival due to injury.

He stepped up in trip lto at the Dublin Racing Festival over 2m5½f and soared to Grade 1 Novice victory in a five length shake-off of Croke Park, and a further 10 ahead of Impaire Et Passe.

This time around will be a step up in trip for him as he is unexposed over 3m, but it’s a step up which I think he’ll handle with relative ease.

Ballyburn has been around here before, finding an incredibly comfortable 13 length victory over Jimmy Du Seuil in the Gallagher Novices’ Hurdle at last year's Cheltenham Festival. The Irish have a particularly strong record in the Brown Advisory, taking four of the last renewals with Willie Mullins taking merit with three of those.

He will be hoping that his star chaser will only add to this record in his bid for Top Trainer yet again.

🥈 Next Best

Behind Ballyburn, my next best bet for Day 2 of the Cheltenham Festival is Nicky Henderson’s Jonbon in the Queen Mother Champion Chase.

Despite being the more experienced and proven horse out of my selections for today, Jonbon’s Cheltenham Festival record can certainly be scrutinised, failing to take the win at the Festival in two attempts, finishing 2nd both times behind El Fabiolo and Constitution Hill who certainly aren’t competition to turn your nose up at.

However, I think third time will be the charm this time around, with the JP McManus gelding winning each of his three starts this season, twice in Grade 1 company and the other in a strong Grade 2, showing he is at the peak of his performances going into this race.

The presumed good to soft going conditions shouldn’t be a problem for him as he’s proven on multiple occasions that he goes well on any ground and is incredibly versatile, and Nico De Boinville should be able to get the best out of him without much trouble from the rest of the field.

👀 Longshot

My longshot of the day will appear in the Weatherbys Champion Bumper in the final race of the day, this being Fortune De Mer. This race can be a difficult one to call due to it being formatted as a flat race for future jumps horses, but the gelding out of the Skelton yard has been talked up massively by his trainer as one that is being largely overlooked by the majority of punters.

He has run in two bumpers previously around Cheltenham, the first one finishing 2nd behind Block Rockin Beats in a Class 2 in October, before reversing the form in the next Class 1 in November.

It appears that punters have begun to take heed of this information, as he has now seen his price shortened from over 25/1 into 14s. The form around here puts him in good stead ahead of the others in the race, and I think he has a great chance of getting into the places.