FAQ

The questions worth asking before you sign up.

Including the ones with awkward answers. If a question below has a partial answer, it says so rather than being left off the page.

MONEY AND THE LAW

What a balance is, and what it is not.

Gambit ships in credits mode. Everything in this section is a description of that mode, which is the one this server is running.

Is this gambling?

Not as it currently runs. No real money moves on this server: balances are play credits, deposits are not charged, and withdrawals are not paid out. With nothing of value staked there is no wager to be had.

The honest longer answer is that the design is wagering-adjacent and the question would be a live one the day real money is switched on. Paid-entry skill contests are regulated per US state, and a handful of states treat them as gambling regardless of how much skill is involved. That is why real-money play is not switched on, and why turning it on is a legal decision rather than a configuration change.

What are play credits?

A play credit is a unit the server mints for you when you "deposit" and burns when you "withdraw". No card is charged, no bank account is touched, and nothing is owed to you in either direction. They exist so the whole money path — escrow, settlement, the rake, your statement — is exercised by real gameplay rather than left as untested code that gets switched on the day it first matters.

Anywhere the app shows a balance as a dollar figure, it also says on the same screen that the figure is not real money.

Can I withdraw money?

No. On this server a withdrawal burns credits and pays out nothing, and the real-money provider behind that path is a stub that refuses every request by design. Nobody can withdraw real money from Gambit today because there is no real money in it.

How does the rake work?

The house cut is 5% of the pot, capped at $0.20, and it is taken only from decisive games. A draw refunds both stakes in full and is never raked, so agreeing a draw costs you nothing but the time. A casual game has no pot and therefore no cut at all.

The cut is floored rather than rounded, so a fraction of a cent always goes to the player rather than the house.

The cap is what keeps the bottom of the ladder playable. A percentage stays proportionate as pots grow, while a flat fee does not: a fee the size of the cap taken from the smallest pot would be a fifth of it, and nobody beats an evenly matched opponent often enough to survive that. So the cut is a percentage with a ceiling — 5% on small pots, tapering as the stake rises.

Where is Gambit available?

Play for credits is not geographically restricted, because nothing of value is staked. Real-money play is a different question and is not available anywhere today: it needs a licensed processor, identity verification and geofencing enforced on the server, none of which is switched on.

When it is switched on, staked play will not be available in fourteen US states, under a blocklist reviewed by counsel in August 2026. That list is a dated snapshot rather than a standing fact — statutes change — and it covers the United States only. Any launch outside the US would need its own review rather than an assumption that silence means yes.

PLAYING

What happens during a game.

The answers here are properties of the server, not policies that could be applied unevenly.

What happens if I disconnect?

Your clock keeps running, because your clock was never in your browser: elapsed time is recomputed on the server from the timestamp of the last move. Reconnecting inside your remaining time puts you back in the same position with the same time left.

If your time runs out while you are away, the game ends on time and settles — you do not need your opponent to notice, and they do not need to claim it. The server sweeps for expired clocks itself every couple of seconds. That sweep is also what guarantees a pot never sits in escrow because both players walked away from the board.

How is cheating detected?

Partially, and the page would be lying if it said otherwise. Two families of signal exist today. The first is move timing: how long each move took, with the opening plies and time-trouble moves excluded, because including them flags every decent player rather than every cheat. The second is collusion — money moving one way between the same two accounts and the games that moved it ending abnormally fast. Either of those alone is ordinary chess; the conjunction is not.

Both produce a score that ranks a game or a pair of accounts for a person to look at. Neither decides anything. Nothing statistical can prove cheating, and a system that confiscated a pot on a timing statistic would eventually take money from an innocent player, which costs more trust than the cheating did.

What does not exist yet is engine move-quality analysis, which is the stronger signal and the one to build next. Move-time data has been recorded on every game from the first one, because that data is useless to add retroactively.

How is my rating calculated?

Glicko-2, implemented from Mark Glickman's specification and checked against the worked example in his paper. Alongside your rating it carries a rating deviation — how sure the system is of that number — so a new player's rating moves quickly and an established player's moves slowly.

While the deviation is still wide, your rating is shown as provisional and kept off the leaderboard. Handicap games are unrated by design: the result measures the handicap rather than the players. A casual game with no stake is still a real game and does count.

Are games against bots staked?

Never. A bot game's stake is zero and cannot be set to anything else, so nothing is escrowed and nothing is paid out. There are three of them, and they are practice opponents rather than a strong engine — the weakest one will hang pieces at you.

What happens on a draw?

Both stakes come back in full and the house takes nothing. Every drawing rule the game supports — stalemate, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule, insufficient material, or agreement — settles the same way.

Still deciding? How it works goes through the same mechanisms in more detail, and responsible play lists which player-protection controls are built and which are not.

Answered? Take a seat.

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