Leopardstown Christmas Festival Tips 2026: Day-by-Day Preview

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By The Guv'nor · Last updated October 2026

Looking for Leopardstown Christmas Festival tips? The 2026 festival runs from Saturday 26 to Tuesday 29 December: four days of jumps racing in Dublin, with the Savills Chase on day three and seven Grade 1s promised by the course. Below is my preview from nine years of results; my actual selections go to Winners Club members.

Leopardstown at Christmas 2026: dates and the four days' feature races

Leopardstown has confirmed the dates and named each day after its headline race. As of 5 October 2026 the full race-by-race programme for this year isn't published yet, so the races below are the ones run in 2025, taken from the course's own racecards and the official results. Expect most of them back, but check the declarations.

Distances are in miles and furlongs; a furlong is about 201 metres, so 3m is roughly 4,828 metres. Last year had six Grade 1s. In 2024 day one carried a 3m novice chase as its Grade 1 instead of the 2m1f one, which tells you the programme does shuffle. The course says seven for 2026, so expect one more Grade 1 than last year. Full details are on the Leopardstown Christmas Festival page.

The Savills Chase was worth €105,000 to the winner in 2025.

The Savills Chase and what it means for the Gold Cup

The Savills Chase is a Grade 1 over about 3 miles for five-year-olds and up. It was the Lexus Chase until 2016, ran as the Leopardstown Christmas Chase in 2017 and has carried the Savills name since 2018. It's the big Christmas target for Ireland's top staying chasers, so for savills chase tips the real question is how much it tells you about March.

I pulled every running since 2017 and checked what each winner did in the next Cheltenham Gold Cup.

What jumps out:

• Only one of the nine winners went on to win the Gold Cup the same season (Galopin Des Champs in 2024). Eight of the nine ran in it and four of those finished in the first three.
• Only three of the nine favourites won, and six of the nine winners were 11/2 or bigger. For a race full of Grade 1 horses that's a lot of decent-priced winners.
• Look at the other direction too. Four of the nine Gold Cup winners from 2018 to 2026 had run in that season's Savills: Minella Indo fell, A Plus Tard was beaten into 2nd, Galopin Des Champs won it and Inothewayurthinkin was 5th. Getting beaten at Christmas hasn't stopped a horse winning in March.

A Plus Tard is the neat example, and it's hindsight: he won the 2020 Savills and was 2nd in the Gold Cup, then lost the 2021 Savills at 8/11 and won the Gold Cup. Nine runnings is a small sample, so treat this as a pattern, not a law. For the March end of it, see my Cheltenham Gold Cup preview.

The Christmas Hurdle: Leopardstown's three-miler

If you're searching for christmas hurdle tips, check which one you mean. Kempton runs its own Grade 1 Christmas Hurdle on Boxing Day on the King George card, which I cover in the King George Chase preview. Leopardstown's is a staying hurdle, 3m until 2022 and 2m7f80y since 2023 in the published results, and it goes on the same card as the Savills.

That's six favourites or joint-favourites from nine, five Elliott winners and small fields every year. It's a very different race to the Savills for betting purposes. If I am honest, it's the sort of race where I'd rather have a small stake or no bet than force one.

Leopardstown's courses: the inner hurdles track and the chase course

Leopardstown is a left-handed track of about 1m6f a circuit, with a run-in of about 2¾ furlongs to an uphill finish and seven hurdles and ten fences per circuit. The course was laid out in 1888 and modelled on Sandown Park. The jumps track is a fair one, but that testing uphill finish exposes any doubt about stamina, and the three fences down the back straight come up quickly. Hurdle races can be run on the inner course, which is sharper, and the usual line is that it pays to race handy.

Most Leopardstown Christmas racing tips you'll read repeat that line, so I wanted to see whether it held up at this meeting. I sorted every runner at the last nine Christmas festivals by where the official in-running comment put them early in the race.

In hurdles, a horse that was up with the pace early won 11.2% of the time (92 of 825). Everything else won 3.8% (46 of 1,210). Two honest caveats. First, nobody knows the early position until the race is run, so this is hindsight: it tells you to respect likely pace-setters, it doesn't hand you winners. Second, prominent runners do well at most tracks and I haven't run the same numbers elsewhere, so I'm not claiming Leopardstown is special. What it does say is that a hold-up horse needs to be clearly better than the rest to win here at Christmas.

The results don't record which hurdles course each race used, so I can't split inner from outer.

Favourites at Leopardstown: the numbers

Across the last nine Christmas meetings, the favourite (including joint and co-favourites) won 90 of 253 races, which is 35.6%. Backing every one of them with 1 point at starting price lost 46.9 points, about 18.5% of stakes. Here's how it splits by race type.

The festival-to-festival swing is big. Favourites won 5 of 28 races in 2018 (17.9%) and 14 of 28 in 2021 (50%). By day, day one has been the worst for favourites (17 of 63, 27.0%) and Savills day the best (27 of 63, 42.9%). Those are small samples and I wouldn't bet on the day split repeating. The handicap line is the one that matters: 74 races, under one favourite in five winning, and nearly half the winners at 10/1 or bigger. If you're putting together your own Leopardstown Christmas tips, remember that one. For how favourites do across all racing, see how often favourites win.

Trainers: two yards, most of the Grade 1s

Willie Mullins trained 74 of the 253 winners (29.2%) and Gordon Elliott 54 (21.3%), so two yards won half the races. In the Grade 1s it's tighter still: Mullins 26 and Elliott 22 of the 61, 78.7% between them.

Here's the bit people miss. Mullins had 425 runners at these nine meetings and won with 17.4% of them, but 1 point on every one at SP lost 166.5 points (-39%). Crazy right? Elliott's 411 runners lost 78.2 points (-19%). Winning the most races and being worth backing are not the same thing, because the market already knows who the big yards are. Joseph O'Brien, with 16 winners from 143 runners, was the only one of the six yards with the most winners to show a profit at SP (+12.2 points), and that's hindsight on a small number. More on the yards in my guide to the top trainers.

How I approach the Christmas festival

Look, I'm essentially a statistics/maths geek. I used to be a Quantitative Researcher at a Tier 1 investment bank, so I look at a meeting like this as prices and probabilities, not as a list of famous horses. The tables above are the starting point: when favourites lose money in every bucket, the job is finding where the price is wrong, not finding the most likely winner.

That's why I'm not interested in win rate. Anyone can talk about high win rates when they tip odds-on horses all day. A meeting like Leopardstown at Christmas, with big handicap fields and plenty of double-figure winners, is where outsiders and each-way value earn their keep. Even when they only place, we make more profit than an odds-on shot winning.

My newsletter usually has 'Banker' bets, which for me just means the shorter-priced ones, plus outsiders from my system that picks out horses that have won or come close at a weight or mark higher than they're running off today. That's a handicap angle, and this meeting has plenty of handicaps. When I've got stable information or smart money moves in the market, members get those too, and every horse I tip I'm betting on myself.

Staking doesn't change because it's Christmas. Divide your bank into points: 1pt can be £5 on a £100 bank, and if you bet in euro it works exactly the same way, €5 a point on €100. Don't chase, don't go all in on a feeling, and if you're unsure about one, skip it. Four days of racing means losers, and understanding that losers are a thing is the key to being a winner longer term. Trust the process. For more on points, see my staking plans guide.

My actual selections go out to Winners Club members in my morning newsletter.

Price

Price of the service is a fixed £9.99 monthly and that will never change and you can cancel anytime if it's not for you. To break that down for you that's about 32p a day for a whole month or a going to have a McDonalds with a mate. Crazy right?

I've priced it cheap because I want it accessible to absolutely everyone and build a community of winners - If I am honest the £9.99 is just there as a filter if you like so that only serious people sign up. If the paid version isn't for you just yet, then feel free to sign up to the free service.

My promise.

Look, I can't guarantee every tip every day is going to win (anyone that can is a fraudster). But I can promise you that every horse I will tip I am betting on myself and through my data analysis techniques it should be in with a very strong chance of bolting up and winning and over a long enough period you will be profitable.

Here's what some of our paid members have been saying:

Give it a go, what have you got to lose? It's only a tenner a month. Feel free to try out the free version first!

- The Guv'nor

After the festival: what it told us about Cheltenham

I'll update this section within a week of the 2026 festival with what the Grade 1s told us. Until then, here's what to watch for, based on the history above.

• The Savills is a trial, not a verdict. One winner in nine went on to win the Gold Cup that season, but four Gold Cup winners came out of the Savills field, and only one of them had won it. A horse beaten in December can still be the one in March.
• Next stop, the Irish Gold Cup. It's run at the Dublin Racing Festival, back at Leopardstown over the same 3m100y. Last season's Savills winner, Affordale Fury, went straight there. Any rematch on the same track is worth more than the first meeting on its own.
• The novices. The Racing Post Novice Chase and the Future Champions Novice Hurdle are Grade 1s for novices, so they're an early look at the season's better Irish novices. Note who was beaten and how, not just who won.
• The ground. Every Savills since 2017 was run on ground described as good to yielding, yielding or soft (soft to heavy in places in 2023). If March comes up quicker or deeper, the Christmas form can read differently.

The end of the season comes back to Ireland at the Punchestown Festival, which is where the Christmas form gets one last test. For everything Irish in between, my Irish horse racing tips page has the lot, and my big races calendar has the dates for the rest of the jumps season. If you want my premium tips every morning, that's where to start.

Leopardstown Christmas Festival tips: your questions

When is the Leopardstown Christmas Festival 2026?

Saturday 26 December to Tuesday 29 December 2026, four days of jumps racing at Leopardstown in south Dublin. The course has confirmed the dates; the race times and full programme come later.

What day is the Savills Chase?

Day three, Monday 28 December 2026. The course calls it Savills Chase Day, and in 2025 the Christmas Hurdle was on the same card.

How many Grade 1 races are at Leopardstown over Christmas?

The course says seven for 2026. There were six in 2024 and 2025, and seven in each year from 2017 to 2023.

Do favourites win at the Leopardstown Christmas Festival?

About a third of the time. From 2017 to 2025 the favourite won 90 of 253 races (35.6%), but only 13 of 74 handicaps (17.6%), and backing them all at SP lost money.

More in this guide

• Irish racing tips
• Dublin Racing Festival 2027 preview and trends
• Irish Grand National preview and trends
• Punchestown Festival day-by-day preview
• Curragh draw bias by distance