Bayes Esports Generates Real-Time Betting Odds for Global Video Game Competitions Using AWS

2022

Competitive, organized gaming—known as esports—is a billion-dollar market with millions of viewers. Video game players take part in global tournaments and win million-dollar sponsorship deals, while fans place bets on match outcomes. Germany’s Bayes Esports built a data platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses machine learning algorithms to generate accurate, reliable, real-time gaming odds to support betting for 10,000 global tournaments each year. Using AWS, the company can scale its compute resources to handle spikes in demand for data and deliver the best experience for esports bettors.

Without AWS, our IT team would have to be about 5 times bigger.”

Martin Dachselt,
Chief Executive Officer, Bayes Esports

Competitive, organized gaming—known as esports—has grown from a fringe activity into a billion-dollar market with millions of viewers. Video game players take part in global tournaments and win million-dollar sponsorship deals, while fans place bets on match outcomes. 

However, many league organizers struggle to provide the live data needed to support betting. And the short notice for setting up events and sudden team changes mean that calculating odds is more difficult than for traditional sports events planned months or years in advance. 

Germany’s Bayes Esports built a data platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses machine learning algorithms to generate accurate, reliable, real-time gaming odds for 10,000 global tournaments each year. 

Using AWS, the company can scale its compute resources to handle spikes in demand for betting data and deliver the best experience for esports bettors.  


Managing Spikes in Demand to Generate Odds Fast

The Bayes Esports’ platform, called BEDEX, offers live esports event data to more than 175 media publishers, betting operators, service providers, and community partners.

Building the platform on AWS has given Bayes the flexibility to compete in a fast-moving industry. “There have been more changes in esports in a few months than soccer has experienced in 50 years,” says Martin Dachselt, chief executive officer (CEO) at Bayes Esports. “Our platform helps to professionalize esports data to the standards people have come to expect from traditional sports.”

Bayes runs all of its systems on AWS. To manage spikes in demand—which can often be five times the average on a busy tournament day—as bets are placed before and during esports events, the company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. This helps Bayes quickly process and analyze data to generate odds for its customers, which then pass the information on to bettors.


Getting Ready for Tournaments in Days

Bayes can also handle betting for esports tournaments at short notice. “We sometimes have only a few days’ notice for a forthcoming match. Using AWS, we can provision the necessary servers within minutes, so our team is always ready to analyze data for the event,” says Eren Güven, senior systems architect and DevOps engineer at Bayes Esports. “Once the event is finished, we no longer need the compute capacity, and we also stop paying for it.”

Keeping data flowing without delay is essential for supporting real-time gaming events. Using AWS Regions and Availability Zones, Bayes can run workloads in close proximity to tournament organizers, wherever they are. “If we have a tournament in Sydney, for instance, we can make sure our data is served to the organizers from a nearby data center in Singapore, instead of one in Ireland,” says Güven. “This can reduce latency by as much as 60 percent and helps deliver a responsive experience for our customers.”


Focusing on Innovation with a Small IT Team

As a startup, Bayes needs to continually develop its platform and maintain high availability and security, while keeping costs low. This means having to operate with a small IT team. Using AWS, the team can save time on infrastructure management—for example, it uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud.
 
As a result, it can focus resources on tasks such as product development and architecture design instead of infrastructure management. “AWS takes care of database management and maintenance for us, so we’re free to drive innovation,” says Dachselt. “Our platform is also more reliable than if we maintained it ourselves. Without AWS, our IT team would have to be about 5 times bigger.”

Driving Esports Growth

Bayes sees growth ahead for its business and the industry as a whole. In 2 years, the company has expanded to 60 employees, while predictions for the esports market are that it will be worth $1.8 billion in 2022 and have more than 30 million viewers by 2023. 

The widespread availability of AWS skills among job candidates makes it easy to attract new talent, so Bayes can continue improving its services and be a leader in the esports market as it evolves. “Using AWS, we get scalable, reliable, and secure compute resources—at a price that suits our budget,” says Dachselt. “We can easily tailor our platform to our constantly changing and expanding needs.”

About Bayes Esports

Bayes Esports has been capturing and processing global esports data to generate betting odds with machine learning for 3 years. Its platform supports 10,000 live matches each year, and delivers data to more than 175 data customers, including media publishers, betting companies, and service providers.

Benefits of AWS

  • Scales platform to process match data from 10,000 games annually
  • Provides live esports event data to more than 175 customers
  • Reduces latency by as much as 60% to improve customer experience
  • Frees small IT team for product development and architecture design

AWS Services Used

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 500 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.

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Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL has become the preferred open source relational database for many enterprise developers and start-ups, powering leading business and mobile applications.

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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