I lost £2.2m at Cheltenham last year and Queen Mother Champions Chase cost me £500k but I didn’t watch a single race

BOOKIE Ben Keith lost a whopping £2.2MILLION at Cheltenham last year – without watching a single race.

Horse Racing fans up and down the country are counting down the days until the iconic four-day festival gets underway next week.

PAThe 2023 Cheltenham Festival gets underway next week[/caption]

PA:Press AssociationThousands of fans will place and lose big bets at the famous racecourse[/caption]

THE SUNBut they won’t suffer the £2.2million loss endured by bookie Ben Keith last year[/caption]

Many will flock to the famous racecourse with ambitions of changing their lives with some big bets.

Thousands of them, however, will end up tearing up their bet slips and going home empty-handed.

But none of their losses will compare to that experienced last year by Star Sports’ Keith, who, despite his vested interest in the results, didn’t watch a single race.

Keith recalled his insane losses during an interview with The Daily Mail saying: “I lost £2.2million at Cheltenham last year.

“In the Racing Post, they had a good laugh and said Ben Keith left early after the Gold Cup! But I only lent them £2.2m.”

Last year’s Queen Mother Champion Chase, which was won by the Willie Mullins-trained Energumene, cost Keith and his firm a whopping £500,000.

Losing an astronomical amount of dough would give most people a mild form of PTSD.

But that’s not the case for Keith, who is looking forward to adding to the millions he’s taken from punters down the years next week.

PAKeith is hoping to make back some of his huge losses last year next week[/caption]

He said: “Every single punter is different and I do a Shane Warne on them. The moment they are predictable and I can predict them I have beaten them.

“I’ve won tens of millions of pounds off some punters. But you would love to be as big a mug as them because they’ve made billions doing something else.

“Because they are used to getting what they want in business they think they can make what they want to happen in gambling.

“They are used to saying to bookmakers I want £50,000 and being told they can have £5,000 on. I go, that’s a bet, do you want it again?

“A wealthy man takes longer to beat but when the fruit machine goes, it goes big.”

Cheltenham is, understandably, one of Keith’s favourite times of the year – even though it’s become less competitive down the years.

He said: “Cheltenham is very hard to win at now.

“I don’t like it. I would much rather be at Royal Ascot. It’s far more competitive.

‘The bookies had it their own way for a long time at Cheltenham but it has changed in the last five or six years.

“I need it to go wrong and a couple of those short ones to get beaten, with the steering going wrong up Cheltenham hill!

“It’s a showcase. It’s not a place to be a bookie now.”