HotTakes launches new app to deliver "paper trading for sports betting"

There is no certification class for new sports bettors. (That might be a good thing for the bettors and the sportsbooks, actually).

But HotTakes is out to be the next best thing.

Founded in 2022 by three college friends at Western University in Ontario - who happened to have the perfect complementary background for such an endeavor - HotTakes is a sort of onboarding platform for sports betting neophytes.

A social platform and entry point for sports fans interested in becoming sports bettors, HotTakes offers free-to-play contests with real-money prizes available. And a free lesson in whether sports betting is for them. 

“What we're trying to do is create win-wins for operators and users,” co-founder Tyler Amirault told BettingStartups.com on the day that HotTakes launched its brand new iOS and Android apps.

“The main idea and the main way we do that is by offering this really awesome free-to-play experience for beginners that you know are interested in sports betting, but not necessarily ready to throw a bunch of money into an app.

“People can come in and try it for free; we like to think of it as ‘paper trading for sports betting’. That's the idea we've been playing on for a long time and now we think we've gotten it down to a really awesome streamlined experience.”

HotTakes’ founders will take the message global as finalists in the Pitch ICE competition being held next week at the 2025 ICE conference in Barcelona.

The industry has already taken notice, with the likes of bet365, BetMGM and Caesars signing affiliate deals with the company, and B2B gamification provider Incentive Games increasing its investment last summer.

Amirault sees HotTakes as a boon for sportsbooks in the endless cycle of acquiring and, crucially, retaining customers. HotTakes, Amirault said, has so far attracted the type of 20-something consumer that sportsbooks have in the past spent lavishly on to turn into loyal patrons.

In theory, a HotTakes players schooled in the nuances of parlays, odds and teasers in a pressure-free environment are less likely to become a frustrated one-off sports bettor with real money.

“When we send a user, there’s a couple of things that you can assume about that user,” Amirault explained. “You know that user has practiced sports betting. They're not coming in blind. They've used an app with a familiar interface. They're not coming in with absolutely no idea how to place these bets. They understand some of these markets. We try to really in our app offer tutorials and explainers on how these markets work, how odds are calculated.”

Incentive Games CEO John Gordon, who met the founders while they were in college and has since become an advisor, called HotTakes one of his company’s “most important strategic investments to date.”

“I believe HotTakes has what it takes to crack the code on a longstanding problem in the US market: acquiring online betting customers at a cost that is lower than their customer lifetime value,” he said in a release.

Not bad for three buddies’ first job out of college. But in following through, founders Amirault, Kevin Jing and James White are the latest example of universities as gambling tech incubators, whether at Cal-Berkeley or Western.

Amirault and Jing acquired degrees in business and software engineering and White brought business administration and management credentials. They began devising their first of three iterations of HotTakes beginning as sophomores.

“We're each really good at what each other are bad at, so even though me and Kevin both have the business and software background, [White] is much more financially-minded, much better from the finance side,” Amirault said. 

Amirault, 23, admittedly had some reservations about forsaking that sensible, solid job offer he had waiting after school. But White, who graduated a year before his fellow co-founders, had already begun harvesting investors and was able to convince them that HotTakes’ time was indeed then.

“About halfway through our last school year Kevin and I made a decision to sacrifice our corporate jobs we had lined up and commit to come in full-time. And that was right before we completed our first fund-raise,” Amirault said. “So once we completed that raise we said, ‘OK, we're locked in.’

“I think for both me and Kevin, it was around the time that we were thinking about raising money that we really had to say we can't take the money of investors if we're not committed to doing this full-time. We had to pick a lane, so to speak.”

The final rationale sounds very much like the premise of HotTakes.

“We're young,” Amirault said. “If we fail, the experience we get will be so invaluable. I'd rather give it a shot and fail and not give it a shot at all.”

The HotTakes App is now available to download and use for free in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.