Terms of Service

Gambit is chess played for a stake. Two players put the same amount into a pot, the server keeps the clock and decides the result, and the winner takes the pot minus a small cut. This page is the agreement between you and us. It is written to be read, so it is shorter than it could be and plainer than it usually is.

The rest of this document is the detail. Where something is not built yet, it says so instead of implying it works.

You need an account to play. There is no guest mode, because a stake has to come out of a balance and a balance has to belong to somebody.

You give us a display name, an email address and a password. The display name is what opponents see. It is free text: it is not your legal name, we do not check it, and it is not reserved — two players can pick the same one. Do not choose a name that impersonates somebody else or that you would not want on a leaderboard.

One account per person. Running several accounts is how collusion works, and it is grounds for us to suspend all of them.

Keep your password to yourself. Anything done from a signed-in session is treated as done by you, including staking and resigning.

Casual games are free and open to any account. Staked games are not.

To play for a stake you must be at least 18, be legally allowed to enter a paid skill contest where you are, and not be in a place we have blocked. Paid-entry skill contests are regulated state by state in the US, and a handful of states treat them as gambling however much skill is involved.

We block staked play in fourteen US states: Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. That list is a dated snapshot reviewed on 2026-08-24, not a standing fact, and it covers no country other than the United States.

We do not verify your age. Telling us you are 18 is a promise you make, not something we check.

A Gambit balance is a number of whole cents held in a double-entry ledger. Every movement of it — a deposit, a stake going into escrow, a payout, the house cut — is a pair of entries that sum to zero, and you can read your own back on your wallet page.

A balance is not a bank account. It earns no interest, it is not insured, and it is not a deposit in any regulated sense.

Gambit runs in one of two modes and the mode is a property of the server, not of your account. In play-credits mode a balance is play money: deposits are not charged to anything, withdrawals are not paid out to anyone, and the figures on screen are denominated in dollars only because a play credit is easier to reason about when it looks like the thing it stands in for. In real-money mode the same ledger holds real funds. Every page in the app states which mode it is running, including the top of this one.

The server is the referee, and it is the only one. Move legality, the clock and the result are computed on the server from the stored move list. Your browser runs the same rules engine so it can grey out illegal moves, but it is never asked what the position is and it is never asked how long you thought.

Time is measured from a server timestamp taken at the previous move. 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. A slow connection costs you the time it costs; it does not change how the clock is read.

A game ends by checkmate, stalemate, resignation, an agreed draw, a drawn position, or a flag. Both players can offer and accept a draw. You can resign at any time and that is a loss.

If a player disappears, the game does not hang: a background sweep notices that a clock has run out and settles the game on time. Seats that nobody takes expire after ten minutes and the stake goes straight back to whoever opened them.

Games against a Gambit bot are always free. There is no way to stake against a bot, and there is not meant to be — money staked against an opponent we control is not a game.

Opening a seat moves your stake out of your balance and into escrow immediately, before anyone has joined. Joining does the same to the other player. That is what makes a seat fully funded: nobody can advertise a game they cannot pay for.

When the game is decided, escrow pays out in one transaction. A decisive result pays the winner the pot less the house cut. A draw returns both stakes in full and is never raked.

The house cut is a percentage of the pot with a ceiling — 5% capped at 20 cents as configured today — and it is always rounded down, so rounding favours the players. The stake ladder is 50 cents, $1, $2 and $5. A casual game has a stake of zero and touches the ledger not at all.

Settlement happens exactly once per game. It is keyed on the game id, so a retry, a duplicated sweep or two servers both noticing the same checkmate collapse into one payout rather than two.

This section describes real-money mode. In play-credits mode the same two buttons exist and neither one moves real money: a deposit mints credits and a withdrawal burns them.

In real-money mode, card payments are taken by Stripe on Stripe’s own checkout page. Gambit never sees or stores your card number. The minimum deposit is $10 as configured today, which exists because card processing costs roughly 30 cents plus 2.9% and a smaller deposit loses money before a move is played. See the Privacy Policy for what Stripe receives.

Taxes on anything you win are yours to handle. We do not currently issue tax forms of any kind.

Play your own moves. Do not use a chess engine, a database, another person, or anything else that plays for you. Do not arrange results with an opponent, and do not move money between accounts by losing on purpose.

We record how long you spend on every single move, from your very first game, and we analyse it. Move timing is the cheapest signal there is for engine assistance, and it is useless to start collecting after the fact. We also compare the pattern of results between pairs of accounts that play each other repeatedly, which is what collusion looks like from the outside.

When one of those signals crosses a threshold it produces a flag: a row in a queue that says "a human should look at this". A flag has no automatic consequence. It does not withhold a payout, freeze a balance or ban anyone. Every signal we have is statistical, statistics produce false positives, and taking a pot from an innocent player costs more than the cheating did.

A reviewer decides what happens, and the decision is recorded against their account. If we conclude you cheated we may void the game, reverse the payout by posting a correcting transfer, and suspend the account.

We can suspend an account that breaks these terms, that we believe is cheating or colluding, or that we are required to suspend. A suspension refuses new sign-ins.

You can stop using Gambit whenever you like.

Ledger entries are never edited or deleted. If money moved wrongly, the fix is a new transfer that moves it back, so the record of what happened and the record of the correction both survive. That is also true when the mistake is ours and in our favour.

A player account cannot go negative. That is enforced by the database itself, not only by the code above it, so a correcting transfer can never push your balance below zero.

If a bug credits you money you did not win, we will reverse it and tell you. If a bug costs you money you did win, tell us and we will fix it the same way.

Gambit is offered as it is. We do not promise it will be up, we do not promise a game will not be interrupted, and we may change or withdraw features. If we take the service down for good, we will say so first and hand back balances by whatever route is available at the time.

We may impose limits on how often you can deposit, withdraw or open seats. Those limits exist to stop automated abuse, not to stop you playing.

To the extent the law allows, Gambit is provided without warranties, and our liability to you is limited to the balance held in your account at the time the claim arose.

If something goes wrong, tell us first. Most of what looks like a dispute is a bug or a misread ledger line, and both are faster to fix directly than formally.

Every version of this document carries an identifier, printed at the top of this page. When you create an account we record which version you accepted and when, and the server refuses a sign-up that claims to accept a version it is not currently serving.