Hong Kongers love to gamble. It’s a serious business over here, and one that can generate at least HK$100m (£8.5m) in turnover from every race.

That money goes to the Hong Kong Jockey Club, a venerable institution formed by the British in 1884 to promote horse racing, which has a monopoly on betting in the city-state.

Every season, from September to July, the Club hosts hundreds of races, with nearly six million bets processed on a typical day – an environment which creates its own unique challenges around managing massive amounts of real time racing data and betting transactions securely and efficiently.

Happy Valley is a place of sensory overload. On Wednesday evenings during the racing season locals flock to the venerable venue – first established here by the British on a cholera-infested swampland back in 1845 – in their thousands to make a fortune. Make no mistake, gambling is serious stuff here. The papers are filled with pages of form guides, studied in minute detail by the mainly male, chain smoking “old timers” before each race.

Several giant floodlit stands circle the west side of the ground while Hong Kong’s irrepressible neon-tinged skyscrapers loom large to the north, south and east.

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