HOW IT WORKS

What the server does with your game, and with the pot.

Five mechanisms carry the whole product: escrow and settlement, the clock, handicaps, bots and ratings. None of them asks your browser to be honest.

ESCROW AND SETTLEMENT

The pot is held, not promised

When you open a seat, your stake leaves your balance in the same database transaction that writes the seat. There is no window in which a seat is advertised and the money behind it is not committed — and if your balance is short, the seat is simply never created. When someone takes the seat, their stake is escrowed and the game starts together, in one transaction.

Settlement is driven by the position, not by a claim. Checkmate, stalemate, a drawing rule, a resignation or a flag falling all produce the same thing: one balanced transfer out of escrow, keyed on the game so it can only ever happen once. A drawn game returns both stakes in full and is never raked. On a decisive game the house cut is floored, so the rounding goes to the player.

Every one of those movements is a double-entry line you can read back in your statement. The system's own books are checked to sum to zero, and each account's balance is checked to equal the sum of its own entries.

A player account cannot go negative. It is checked against a locked row and backstopped by a database constraint, so nothing — including code that skipped the application layer entirely — can overdraw one.

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 CLOCK

Time is measured where the moves are validated

Your remaining time is never something your browser reports. The game row carries a server timestamp for the last move, and elapsed time is always recomputed from it as now − lastMoveAt. The countdown you see is a rendering of the server's number, not a second clock that has to be trusted.

A move that arrives after your flag has fallen is a loss on time, not a move: the clock is checked before the move is validated, so a burst of latency cannot be used to sneak one in. And because nobody has any reason to report their own flag falling, the server sweeps for expired clocks on its own every couple of seconds and settles them — which is also the guarantee that a stake never sits in escrow because both players walked away.

THE CLOCKS ON OFFER

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

Initial minutes plus the increment added after each move.

ODDS AND HANDICAPS

A rating gap does not have to be a foregone conclusion

A new pool cannot offer everyone an even game, and losing every game to a much stronger player is how people stop playing. So the stronger side can give away material, clock, or both. Material odds start the game from a genuinely different position — the piece is not on the board — and the rules engine is built around that rather than assuming a standard array.

The traditional ladder is the one club players already know: pawn, knight, rook, queen. The pawn handicap is the f-pawn, because that is the one whose absence actually exposes the king. Time odds are set as the share of the base clock the giver keeps, and they compose with material — a strong player can give a knight and half the clock at the same time.

A handicap game is unrated. The result measures the handicap rather than either player, so it is not evidence about either of you and neither rating moves.

THE LADDER

Pawn (the f-pawn): Lightest
Knight: Middle
Rook: Heavy
Queen: Heaviest
Clock kept by the giver: 100% · 75% · 50%

Giving a rook also gives up that side's queenside castling right, because the rook is genuinely gone.

BOTS AND RATINGS

One is for practice. The other is what makes a fair pairing possible.

Three bots, always free

A bot game starts immediately — no seat, no waiting — and its stake is zero and cannot be anything else. They exist so the whole loop, clocks and premoves and promotion and checkmate included, can be played without a second person.

They are not a strong engine and are not trying to be. The weakest one grabs material and hangs pieces; the strongest sees the reply and makes far fewer mistakes. Engine analysis of your finished games is a separate thing, and it is not built yet.

Glicko-2, not Elo

Elo carries one number, so it cannot tell "1500 and we are sure" apart from "1500 and we have no idea". Glicko-2 carries a rating deviation alongside the rating, which is exactly that missing information: a new player's number moves fast, an established one's moves slowly.

That distinction is what a suggested handicap rests on, and it is why a rating we are still unsure of is shown as provisional and kept off the leaderboard rather than ranked as though it meant something.

WHAT A GAME COSTS

Four stakes, or nothing at all.

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

Balances on this server are play credits: deposits are not charged and withdrawals are not paid out. The FAQ explains what that means in practice and what would have to be true before it changed.

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THE STAKE LADDER

Casual seat: No stake
Staked seat: $0.50 · $1.00 · $2.00 · $5.00
Winner's share of a decided pot: $0.95 of $1.00

Both stakes are escrowed before the first move. A drawn game returns them in full.