On Broadway off 104th Street sits Tap A Keg, a friendly Upper West Side bar with a competitive pool scene. Several days out of the week, they host league competitions, and on random late nights, you might find Matt “John” Kenefick perfecting his game.
The coding and pool savant created Chalkysticks, an app that uses user data and secret analytics to help map every billiards table in the world.
The Lull
Since the early 2000s, the number of pool/billiards tables across the city has started to dwindle — either because bar owners removed them, or watering holes offering them shut down altogether, like The Bridge on Broadway in the Bronx and the R Bar on Meeker Avenue in Brooklyn.
One day, Kenefick was watching a friend’s regional pool match in Midtown and tried to find a place nearby to shoot a few games when he realized there was no comprehensive search.
“I thought, ‘I can’t be the only person who wants this and it doesn’t exist, so someone else must want it,’ and I like to make stuff, so that was what I made,” Kenefick said of launching ChalkySticks in 2013, which has since mapped nearly 10,000 tables from Manhattan to Madrid and places in between. “I like pool and I like encouraging pool and I want pool to grow and so, anything that I can do to help facilitate that, is what I’m working on and so that’s kind of how ChalkySticks evolved.”
Kenefick, a technical creative director with 30 years of software experience, first played pool as a child on a plastic Fisher Price table and developed a passion for the game at a young age. Much like Del Sim, host of the podcast “Talking English,” and pool player extraordinaire.
Born in South London, he first played the game at 2 years old, when his father purchased a table for Sim’s older brother on his 12th birthday. Sim immediately fell in love and was winning adult competitions by age 6, charting a path to professional glory.
He moved to New York in 2015, and while doing his research, he came across ChalkySticks and emailed Kenefick. The two met at Steinway Billiards in Queens and became instant friends. Kenefick began sponsoring Sim in some of his games and even sponsored him for citizenship.
“It’s definitely the trainer for me,” Sim said of his favorite feature of ChalkySticks. “As a player for me, if I see a tricky layout, I can’t wait to take a picture and just be like ‘oh, let me run this out on the app first and see what the variations are.’”
Chalkysticks allows users to create profiles, watch professional games, add spots that are missing on the app, include photos of locations, and feature the “pad,” which lets players take a picture of a difficult shot and then imagine the shot over and over from different angles. The trainer is a 3D simulator that allows the user to actually shoot the ball and is only available on Chalkysticks.com. Kenefick hopes to integrate the two soon.
When the pool list gets too long at Tap A Keg, “A Hell of a Joint” at 2731 Broadway, they switch to Killers; a fast-paced game of winner-takes-all where everyone can play simultaneously.Photo ET Rodriguez
The Comeback
Following the mass closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, those cool-colored felts are making a comeback.
“I think there is a resurgence,” Stuart Scheer said, Manhattan league operator of the American Poolplayers Association of New York who began the NYC chapter decades ago. “I’ve seen it since COVID because [bars are] trying to differentiate themselves and people, especially young people, want something to do. They don’t only want to sit there and drink all the time.”
Andrew Neesley, operating manager of Jake’s Dilemma on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, echoed those sentiments. The bar removed its table before the pandemic and brought it back this year.
“The crowd that enjoyed the pool table changed, aged out of the bars, disappeared, and came back. Fewer people of drinking age are going to bars to consume alcohol. So, we like to offer people value-added things to do,” Neesley said.
Following that trend, more people are playing the game, and unlike other sports, with pool, you’re more likely to leave with a bruised ego rather than an actual contusion. And all skill levels can have fun.
Alicia Haydon, who uses the app and plays on amateur teams, picked up the game during her years at the University of Chicago. She met Kenefick at Tap A Keg when she moved to the city in 2018.
“When I first started playing pool, like the only way I really knew how to look for bars was just, you go in a bar and see if there’s a pool table. But this makes it so much easier to discover places that I had no idea were right next to my apartment,” she said.
Last year, Dan Tran launched Pooltables.nyc, but it has no interactive features and only maps tables across the Big Apple. ChalkySticks has tables worldwide.
Kenefick puts almost 40 hours a week perfecting the app, and after more than 10 years, it’s in full swing (with more features to come,) and hoping to monetize in the future.
“This economy sucks, and we all don’t have money, and no one wants another subscription,” Kenefick added. “But at the end of the day, I need food, my dog needs food. I want to allow people to find the information that they need. Like, if they want to find a pool table, I don’t want to get in the way of that. One of the primary guiding lines that I have for myself is I want to keep a lot of it free.”
Wherever you are, you can add your favorite tables to ChalkySticks and help build a worldwide community for pool players like you.
