Melbourne Cup is one of the favourite horse racing events for bettors who appreciate the thrill of a one-day event. If you are looking for a sportsbook to do your Melbourne Cup betting at, check out the list below.
About the Melbourne Cup
The Melbourne Cup is a horse race run every year at the Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, Australia.
It’s run on the first Tuesday of November at 3.00 pm, and for the vast majority of years since it first took place in 1861, Melbourne Cup Day has been a public holiday in Melbourne’s state of Victoria, to celebrate the occasion. It is, after all, known as ‘the race that stops the nation’.
Part of the Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival, it’s been run over 3200 metres ever since 1972 when Australia adopted the metric system; before that, it was run over 3219 metres.
Officially, it’s a quality handicap rather than a pure handicap race, which means that the better horses in it aren’t as heavily penalised as they would be if it were a regular handicap race. Still, the handicap part of it means that the better the horse is, the more weight it carries in comparison to the weakest horse in the race, which doesn’t carry any.
The minimum handicap (there’s no maximum) is 50kg. The weight allocated to the different horses is determined by the VCR Handicapper in the build-up to the race based on the horses' recent performances after the declaration of the weights for the Melbourne Cup.
It's a race open to horses three years or older of both sexes, up to a maximum of 24 runners, and is the richest two-mile handicap race in the world. It’s also one of the most popular sports competitions to bet on in the world.
How We Rate Melbourne Cup Betting Sites
All the best sports betting sites take Melbourne Cup online betting extremely seriously and will have the ante-post winner market open for months before the race actually takes place. Here are some considerations when picking a bookie for betting on the Melbourne Cup, whether it’s the Melbourne Cup 2024, or further in the future.
- The Odds: Look at a sportsbook you like and compare the odds of the Top 5 in the betting, or just the odds of the horse you’re thinking of backing, with the available odds at other Melbourne Cup betting sites. If they’re on a par with the industry average or, better still, higher, that’s a good start.
- Bonuses: As with all big sporting events, the best Melbourne Cup betting sites will have free bets, money-back offers and other bonuses around the race. The more there are and the more value they offer, the better.
- Payment options: You’ll need to get some money into your account for betting on the Melbourne Cup, and if you win on it, or other events, you’ll probably want to withdraw some. So, the betting site needs to have plenty of payment options, process transactions quickly and charge very low fees or no fees.
- On-site content: This could be any form of content, including stats about the horses in the race, analysis by the likes of Timeform or the Racing Post, betting tips on its blog, or even live streaming of the actual race. Anything that increases your knowledge and enjoyment of the race itself.
- Website design and mobile app: You’d also want to be able to easily locate any available bonuses, the banking section, the FAQs and everything else you may need on the sports betting site. If you prefer using your mobile, you’ll want the site to have a great betting app that’s quick, responsive and easy to use, or, alternatively, for everything to be equally good via the mobile web browser.
How to Place a Bet on Melbourne Cup
No two betting sites will be organised in exactly the same way, but here’s how you’d go about betting on the Melbourne Cup at most bookies:
- Login to your account.
- Choose horse racing betting from the list of available sports on the left-hand column.
- Click on ante-post: These are big races that will be run in the mid-term future rather than in the next couple of days.
- Choose Australia or International and then Australia.
- Select Melbourne Cup.
- In the weeks and months before the race, you will only be able to bet on the ante-post winner market. But in the week or so before the race, you’ll be able to bet on other Melbourne Cup online betting markets.
- Choose the Melbourne Cup market you want to wager on.
- Pick the selection you want to back.
- Choose your stake and process the bet.
Melbourne Cup Betting Types
Though most of the money wagered at Melbourne Cup betting sites is done on the winner market, it’s certainly not the only market. Here are a few others to consider.
Each-Way Bet
Here, you’re betting half your stake on the horse to win and the other half on the horse to place. If the horse wins, you win on both parts of the bet. If the horse places but doesn’t win, you win only on that part of the bet.
Normally, Melbourne Cup each-way terms are 1/4 1-2-3-4 (places). That means that if you backed a horse at odds of 20.0 each-way, you’d be paid out at 1/4 the odds (5.0) on the place part of the bet.
To Place (3/4/5)
Rather than focusing on who will win, you’re placing a bet on a horse to finish in the Top 3, Top 4 or Top 5 (the odds will be shorter for the more places that are included). As long as the horse finishes in one of those positions, you’ll be paid out, regardless of the exact finishing position.
Quinella Bet
Punters need to pick the two horses who will finish in the Top 2 in the race. However, they don’t need to specify the exact order in which they finish, just which two will occupy the first two positions.
Exacta Bet
Similar to the above where you need to pick the Top 2 finishers, but in this case, you do need to specify which horse will win and which will finish second. Because it’s much harder to do, the odds on a winning Exacta bet are considerably bigger than what they would be on a Quinella bet.
Trifecta Bet
This is a Parimutuel bet, also available on the Tote in the UK, where you have to predict which horses will finish first, second and third, in that exact order. Because it’s not a fixed odds bet, the fewer people that predicted it correctly from within the pool, the more money you’ll win, though, of course, that also depends on the stake at which you backed your selections in the Trifecta Bet.
Top Melbourne Cup 2024 Betting Strategies
When is the Melbourne Cup 2025? It’s on 4 November this year. Here are some considerations and betting strategies to bear in mind when placing a bet on it.
- The horse’s odds: There have been 164 editions of the Melbourne Cup to date. Just 34 favourites went on to win it, meaning the race has only been won by the favourite 20% of the time. However, 75 times the favourite has finished in the Top 3 (46% of the time), so backing the favourite in the Top 3 rather than to win appears to be a solid strategy.
- Draw bias: Every horse is assigned a stall for the race or, as the Australians call it, a barrier. The barrier numbers are 1-24. Over the last 22 years, five barriers (5, 10, 13, 14, and 22) have produced 13 winners, with 14 (4 wins) and 10 (3 wins) being the best ones to be drawn from. Backing a horse in one of those five barriers mentioned above could, therefore, be an advantage. Since 1924, the year barriers were introduced, the following ones have only ever seen one winner coming from them: 7, 15 and 18. So avoid backing horses in those barriers.
- The horse’s sex: 17 of the 164 winners of the Melbourne Cup have been female, just 10%. Of those 17, 14 were mares (aged three or over), and three were fillies (three or younger) with mare Verry Elleegant the most recent female winner in 2021.
- Jockeys: Bobbie Lewis and Harry White both won the race on four occasions. Remarkably, Lewis won for the fourth time 25 years after winning the first of them. Since 2000, Kevin McEvoy and Glen Boss each won it on three occasions, with Boss doing so three years in a row: 2003, 2004 and 2005. But Mark Zahra has recently won two in a row (2022 and 2023), first on board Gold Trip and then on Without a Fight.
- Trainers: Nicknamed the ‘Cups King’ in reference to his success in the Melbourne Cup, Bart Cummings won the race on 12 occasions as trainer, the last of which was in 2008. However, there haven’t been prolific winners of the race recently, as far as trainers go, with Joseph O’Brien being the only trainer to have won twice (2017 and 2020) since 2006.
