STAKED CHESS

Two players, one pot, a server that keeps the clock.

Pick a stake, take the seat, play it out. Both stakes leave both balances before the first move and sit in escrow until the position is decided. The result settles itself — no claims, no disputes, no waiting on the other side to agree.

Create an account How it works

The pot is held, not promised
Both stakes leave both balances before the first move and sit in escrow until the game has a result.
The server keeps the clock
Time is measured where the moves are validated, so a slow connection is not a lost game.
Every cent is an entry
Stakes, payouts, deposits and withdrawals are double-entry lines you can read back in your statement.
Cards are handled by Stripe
Payments are taken on Stripe’s own page. Gambit never sees or stores your card details.

ONE POT, WORKED THROUGH

5%, CAP $0.20

Each player stakes: $0.50
Pot held in escrow: $1.00
House cut on a decisive game: −$0.05
Winner is paid: $0.95
If the game is drawn: $0.50 back each

The cut is 5% of the pot capped at $0.20, and it is floored — rounding goes to the player, never the house. A draw is never raked.

THE TWO INVARIANTS

Everything else in Gambit defends these.

They are not slogans. Each one is a property the code holds, and each one is the reason a specific class of dispute cannot happen here.

The server is the only authority

Move legality, clocks and outcomes are all computed on the server from stored history. Your browser runs the same rules module only so it can grey out an illegal move; it is never asked what the position is.

Elapsed time is always recomputed as now − lastMoveAt, from a server timestamp. No client ever reports how long it thought it took, and a move that arrives after the flag has fallen is a loss on time rather than a move — the clock is checked before the move is validated.

Money moves only as balanced, double-entry transfers

Integer cents everywhere, never a float. Every transfer's postings are checked to sum to zero before anything is written, and every transfer carries an idempotency key derived from the business event — a game has exactly one settlement, so a retry, a duplicated timeout sweep and two servers both noticing checkmate collapse into a single payout.

A player account cannot go negative. That is enforced against a locked row and backstopped by a database constraint, so even code that bypassed the application layer could not overdraw one.

WHERE THE MONEY GOES

A pot you can follow line by line.

Three transfers, in this order. Each is a row in your statement, and each one either happens completely or not at all.

The stake is escrowed in the same transaction that writes the seat, so there is no window in which a seat exists and the money behind it does not. If you are short, the seat is never created.

1You open a seat
user:you −50 → system:escrow +50
Your stake leaves your balance the moment the seat is advertised, not when someone takes it.
2Someone takes it
user:them −50 → system:escrow +50
Their stake is escrowed and the game starts in one transaction. Colours are drawn at random.
3The position is decided
system:escrow −100 → winner +95, rake +5
Checkmate, resignation, a flag falling or a drawing rule — the server settles from the position, not from a claim.

WHAT YOU CAN PLAY

A small board of choices, and all of them real.

Nothing on this list is a mock-up. Each of these is in the lobby today.

Three clocks

Bullet: 1+0
Blitz: 3+2
Rapid: 10+5

Initial minutes plus the increment per move.

Four stakes, or none

$0.50 · $1.00 · $2.00 · $5.00

Or casual, which escrows nothing and pays out nothing. A casual game is still a real game of chess and still counts toward your rating.

Odds and handicaps

Give away a pawn, a knight, a rook or a queen, and up to half your clock. A rating gap that would be a foregone conclusion becomes a contest.

Handicap games are unrated: the result measures the handicap, not the players.

Bots and ratings

Three practice bots, always free and never staked. Ratings are Glicko-2, so a new player's number moves fast and an established one's moves slowly.

A rating we are still unsure of is shown as provisional and kept off the leaderboard.

WHERE THIS STANDS TODAY

The part most sites leave off.

Gambit is built to hold real money and is not yet holding any. Here is exactly what that means, stated before you sign up rather than after.

PLAY CREDITSNO REAL-MONEY LAUNCHPARTIAL INTEGRITY TOOLING

Balances are play credits

Deposits are not charged and withdrawals are not paid out. The real-money payment provider is a stub that refuses by design, so there is nothing to lose and nothing to win.

Real-money play is not switched on

It needs a licensed processor, identity verification, server-side geofencing and per-jurisdiction legal clearance. When it is switched on, staked play will not be available in fourteen US states, and the list is a dated snapshot rather than a standing fact.

Cheating detection is partial

Move-timing and collusion signals rank games and pairs of accounts for a human to review. Engine move-quality analysis — the stronger signal — is not built yet, and no statistic here ever decides anything on its own.

The FAQ answers this in full, and responsible play says which player-protection controls exist and which do not.