Robert McCall spent years hitting the same wall inside blackjack tournaments and poker rooms. There was no clean way to settle who could actually pick games well. Sportsbooks don't rank you—they just take the other side and limit you when you win. That gap is what became McCall’s company: The Sharps.
The Sharps is a skill-based, peer-to-peer sports prediction tournament—poker mechanics applied to sports, with no sportsbook on the other side of the bet. Players buy in from $10 to $10,000, start with an equal chip stack, and use props, parlays, and same-game parlays to climb a live leaderboard over a set window. The flagship is a weekly $100 tournament running Tuesday to Monday night, mapped to the NFL schedule, with prizes paid to the top 20%. A free-play league hands everyone 10,000 chips to practice. "If you don't like us, you don't like us. But you gotta give it a shot if it's free, right?" McCall said on The BettingStartups Podcast.
The most distinctive, and most contested, feature is the Sharps Score. It's a rating built from roughly 20 metrics like closing line value and ROI that grades each player and exposes every pick after it settles. McCall wants it to become the sports-handicapping equivalent of a golf handicap or a chess ELO rating. The pushback has come from an unexpected corner, the sharps themselves, some of whom don't want their edges visible or their picks scored. He's leaning in anyway, framing exposure as the point, saying “athletes train with better athletes to get better," he said.
The build itself is part of the story. McCall put the platform together himself—self-funded, with no programming background, in about 12 weeks—leaning on AI tools and running multiple models to audit each other. "I don't do social media, I'm not tech-savvy at all, but I believed in the product," he said. He frames the approach as a preview of how companies will increasingly be built, with the era of punting $100M into marketing on its way out.
That conviction is what put him on stage at SBC Summit Americas in June, where McCall was one of five startup founder finalists, roughly 60 days into the build. For a founder who describes himself as reluctant to seek the spotlight, getting up there turned out to be the hard part. "That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, was put myself out there. I'm not that guy," he said. What he took away wasn't the win but the reps—learning to communicate the product to the industry rather than to customers, and a jolt of recognition he says he still hasn't had time to absorb.
Navigating a patchwork of rules is familiar ground. Before this, McCall worked in the cannabis industry during its legalization push, and The Sharps runs on the same jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction logic. A geolocation matrix adjusts the app by location—full tournaments where permitted, free play where not—which he says puts the product in 173 countries.
McCall is resisting the urge to sprint into NFL season. The stretch before kickoff is about functionality and security, not user-count vanity, and he's in talks with potential partners about the next stage. Twelve months out, the goal is simpler than scale. He wants The Sharps established and the Sharps Score recognized as something the industry takes seriously.
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