10+ years with the Czech Republic’s oldest lottery company – from Sazka to Allwyn
Web presentationTraditional Sazka betting, now online
Sazka is the oldest and largest lottery company in the Czech Republic, founded in Czechoslovakia as early as 1956. Generations played traditional games such as Sportka and Šťastných 10 offline. Thanks to the new lottery law, these and other lottery games could move online, and we were there from the very beginning. Today, the company operates under the name Allwyn Česko (since January 2026, as part of the parent Allwyn group’s company-wide rebrand). Individual games such as Sportka and Eurojackpot have retained their familiar names.
What needed to change
In spring 2016, a consultancy approached us looking for a reliable partner to implement a lottery portal for Sazka. The task was clear: implement an online lottery portal and launch it in January 2017, bringing the games that generations of Czechs remembered from paper betting slips into the online environment for the first time. The client had already selected Kentico as the platform, and several other vendors were involved in the project, providing financial transaction processing for lotteries, API monitoring, UX/UI design and other services that our solution needed to align with.
As the oldest and largest lottery company in the country, Sazka could afford neither downtime nor security compromises. This was a platform processing monetary transactions and the personal data of hundreds of thousands of players. At the same time, we had to plan for long-term development: over the years, this included implementing additional lotteries, integrating further technology vendors, refactoring the front end and carrying out a complete redesign with a fully responsive version.
What Sazka needed
• Implementation of online lotteries
• Integration of additional vendors
• Front-end refactoring
• Redesign implementation
• Content personalisation
• 24/7 service support
How we approached it
We built an online lottery portal on the Kentico EMS platform with a Kentico Portal Engine architecture, launched in January 2017 exactly as specified. Since then, we have continued to develop the portal. Projects include implementing additional lottery games (now 12+), integrating additional technology vendors (now 8) and continuously deploying technical changes, of which there have been more than 414 over more than 10 years of collaboration.
One of the latest major projects was a complete redesign of the entire portal, including the preparation of a fully responsive version—a crucial step for a platform on which a significant proportion of players now place bets using mobile devices. To date, more than 10 members of our team have been involved in the collaboration, specialising long-term in Kentico and related technologies.
What the project delivered
We made it possible to play Sazka’s traditional lottery games online, creating one of the country’s largest online lottery portals. We have been working with Sazka since 2016, when preparations began for launching online betting. During that time, we have implemented more than 12 lotteries, integrated 8 technology vendors and carried out over 414 deployments to production.
The company also underwent a corporate transformation: in January 2026, as part of a group-wide rebrand, it changed its name from “Sazka a.s.” to “Allwyn Česko a.s.”, after 70 years of the Sazka brand as its corporate name. Individual games such as Sportka and Eurojackpot retained their established names, so players recognise them just as they did before.
“We have been working indirectly with Bluesoft since 2016, when preparations began for launching online betting. The last truly major project Bluesoft handled very well was redesigning the entire portal and preparing a fully responsive version. What I valued most about the collaboration was the professionalism of communication and their in-depth knowledge of Kentico and the technologies associated with it.”
Services provided
- We don't stop at launch; we continue developing websites according to business needs.
- Design and development of clear, modern website interfaces.
- A major overhaul of the entire portal’s appearance and user experience.
- Refactoring existing code with a focus on speed and stability without changing its functionality.
- Custom solutions developed directly on the Kentico CMS, tailored to the client’s needs.
- Ongoing technical support and availability guarantee according to the agreed service level.
Technology
- Kentico's legacy architecture for quickly creating websites using web parts.
- Standard building blocks of a modern, responsive front end.
- Enterprise Marketing Solution, Kentico edition focused on advanced marketing and automation.
Successful websites of our clients on the Kentico platform
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