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If you’re a fan of ChalkySticks, we appreciate you sticking around. There is a lot of depth to what we do, many moving parts, endless amounts of work, and very few hours in the day.

The idea for ChalkySticks occurred about 7 years ago when I was with a friend in Midtown looking to play a game of pool during some downtime. Neither of us knew of a nearby place, so I thought, “Why isn’t there a list of places to shoot pool in NY? In the US? Everywhere?” It took a while to get started on design, putting boots to the ground, and hammering things out. It started simply as a small index of places with pool tables that I traveled to one-by-one, then grew to all of NYC, then much further beyond New York.

After that, I wanted to connect players looking for games which became the beacon feature. The app started to evolve and the ecosystem started to exist. Later on, I noticed a popular online pool diagrammer went offline and saw that as an opportunity to make my own. I spent about 1–2 days making the first prototype and that has become the Pad we know today.

There have been many experiments that worked and plenty that didn’t work. We tried out Tournaments for a little while, but eventually decided that needed to go back to the drawing board. An experiment of displaying aiming lines on Pad evolved into Trainer. An experiment with creating a new pool league has been temporarily halted because of a need for management; but it’s not dead. Many experiments, ideas, and discussions have come and gone and eventually turned into what we have today.

A project of this size would ordinarily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but my philosophy as a developer is that some industries need help technologically even though you may not make that money back. We shouldn’t allow money to ransom less popular industries for attention; everything deserves a chance to exist in our new device driven age. It’s a tough pill to swallow knowing, going in, that you’re going to take a major loss.. but sometimes you have to do what you think is right . It helps when it’s an industry you care about personally, but you’re still dedicating hundreds of hours and even more money simply for the cause.

We’re not asking for much other than support and feedback. Eventually we’ll try to find a way to make money, but will do our best to never do it at the cost of the user. No one wants to play a game where a video-ad shows up after each rack. I wouldn’t put our users through that, but that means we’ll need to figure something else out. There are features that may come out in the future that we find intuitive and interesting enough to charge something light for, like $0.99, but that hasn’t happened yet. We’re hoping that when that time comes, our supporters will be able to see that a couple bucks is a very small price to pay for all of the man hours dedicated to making the game of pool a better place to be.

It’s 2019 now and the game of pool should join us.

Here’s a little breakdown of what we offer so far and a little bit of what’s involved:

ChalkySticks App for iOS, Android, and Web

This is the core application that merges news, beacons, locations, tv, and more. It does not include our new Trainer. Beacons broadcast your location which helps you find other players, but the bread and butter of this application is how it lets you find pool halls / bars near you. We have over confirmed 6,000 locations in over 2,000 cities around the world. (That’s a lot) When you get off the plane and want to play some pool, think ChalkySticks.

ChalkySticks Pad

An advanced diagramming tool that lets you layout balls, draw lines, add shapes, and more in a shareable image to either talk about with friends or shoot out on the Trainer.

ChalkySticks Map

The Map is a quick and easy reference that lets you explore the locations we have all over the world.

ChalkySticks TV

The TV is a 24/7 pool and billiards video channel that acts like a real life TV station. You open it up and pool should be playing. We have channels for: mixed, 8, 9, 10, straight, billiards, one pocket, banks, snooker, and trick shots. Note: Due to new changes in browsers that prevent auto-play, you may have to change your web browser settings or click-to-start the video.

ChalkySticks Trainer

This is the brand new training tool for Android, iOS, and web that everyone has been talking about. You can see more about it here.