Why Chalkboard Is the New Must-Have Sports Betting App

In case you miss the swarm of ads that blare during every TV commercial break and festoon every billboard and bus, mobile sports gambling is legal in 28 states and Washington D.C.; eventually, it'll be legalized everywhere besides probably Utah. Business is booming—experts estimate that nearly $8 billion were wagered on Super Bowl LVI last weekend. For the first time, sports gambling has become something accessible and acceptable, no longer solely operated by track-suited Paulie Walnuts-types or your friend of a friend of a friend who fancies himself a track-suited Paulie Walnuts-type because he grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey and has a 5Dimes account. Suddenly, there’s a huge crush of people eager to gamble, but no proper framework to support it; the vibes have shifted faster than the cultural infrastructure has been able to keep up. 

Enter Chalkboard.

Founded by a group of childhood friends, Chalkboard simplifies—and gamifies—all your pre-bet leg work and your post-bet sweating. On a practical level, Chalkboard makes it easy to be a smarter, more conscientious bettor, automatically syncing with major sportsbooks like Draftkings, BetMGM, and Caesars to track your bets. On a social one, Chalkboard allows you to form private group chats with your friends and post to an array of public “boards” where you can pull from the wisdom of the crowd; since its launch in January 2021, Chalkboard has been downloaded by approximately 20,000 users.

Although you can’t actually wager within Chalkboard, it synthesizes all the various auxiliary aspects of gambling into a single app. Here's a one-stop shop where you can manage your bankroll, check scores, convince your friends to fade IUPUI's basketball team because the 2-22 Jaguars only have six scholarship players and are literally begging random students to play point guard, and then subsequently apologize to your friends when IUPUI covers. 

This week, ONE37pm sat down with Ted Mauze, Chalkboard’s Yale-grad, ex-investment banker co-founder. 

ONE37pm: What’s the story behind Chalkboard?

Ted Mauze: I’ve been into sports betting recreationally with my buddies since we were seventeen or eighteen. After we went off to college, we found that our iMessage group became the home for all of our bets and that sharing screenshots of our bets became an important vehicle for us to stay in touch. 

In 2018, I graduated from college and was working in banking. Around that same time, PAPSA had just been repealed, which opened the door for legalization, so me and my friends kind of looked at each other and realized ‘holy crap, we’ve been living this product before it even existed.’ We’d been in iMessage group chats, in GroupMe, in Discord. Naturally, the next thought was: “Can we go build a better version of that? How can we scale and gamify our own experiences into something that other people can enjoy?”

ONE37pm: How does Chalkboard fit within the current moment and growth of sports betting at large?

Ted Mauze: It used to be that me and my friends really only talked about it in our group chat—you would never walk into a sports bar and start talking with other people about what side of the line you’re on. Now, since sports gambling was legalized, it’s become a big part of daily life—it’s part of nearly every sports conversation and even integrated into TV broadcasts. It’s socially acceptable to be a sports bettor. There’s this excitement around sports betting and it’s spilling out into all these different communities on the internet, so Chalkboard gives people a place to have these conversations and connect with creators. 

ONE37pm: What need does Chalkboard fulfill?

Ted Mauze: The things that people do on Chalkboard are the same things that people have done for years. The difference is that you no longer have to toggle between three or four different apps to check scores and track your bets and talk to your friends because all of that stuff is on Chalkboard. Another important aspect is that our Betsync technology lets you easily keep a log of your betting history without having to manually monitor it.

ONE37pm: What are Chalkboard’s next steps?

Ted Mauze: We’re working on a way to make it easier to tail your friends’ bets. Think about how many times somebody’s sent some wild parlay to the group chat that seems interesting, but how often do you actually go and place it yourself?

ONE37pm: I don’t think I’ve ever done that.

Ted Mauze [laughs]: Exactly. So what we’re going to roll out is a feature that when somebody shares a wager in Chalkboard, you can then click on it and it’ll take you into your sportsbook with the bet already preloaded for you to lay down. 

ONE37pm: And beyond that?

Ted Mauze: Our ultimate goal is to become the place to talk about sports.