At its peak, OpenBet processed 85,000 bets per minute during this year’s Grand National, with 48 million bets being placed via its platform across the three-day festival.

Operator customers Sky Bet and William Hill share how OpenBet, one of the global leaders in sports betting entertainment, helped them stay at the top of their game during this year’s race.

“We know that the Grand National represents the busiest 10 minutes of our year,” said Gary Mason, Head of Operations at Sky Bet.

“Preparation starts immediately after Christmas. It’s a long process with lots of involvement from the technical teams, service management, operations. It’s quite an exciting time.”

For the four-month build-up, Sky Bet and William Hill work alongside OpenBet to conduct thorough load testing to ensure their platforms stay fast, effective and withstand the boom in betting volume ahead of the world’s most famous steeplechase.

Sky Bet looks at capacity for its oxy services, feed handles and all mechanics that support bet placement and settlement, engaging with OpenBet to optimise the customer experience.

William Hill also use OpenBet’s load testing and app scaling expertise as a key part of its Grand National preparations – to ensure its site meets the increased load of customers around the 5.15pm rush.  

Dale Foster, Site Reliability Engineer at William Hill, said: “Load testing is a really key part of Grand National prep to ensure that the site is ready to meet the demands of the increased load of customers. Grand National it spikes quite heavily on the big race at 5.15pm.

“OpenBet helps to make sure that we are able to deal with that really huge spike of load and ensure that the site remains stable and as fast as the customer expects.”