The ground rules.

Castle Gambit helps people play over-the-board chess at local clubs: pairing at club nights, a friendly rating for casual games, and tools for the people who run the room. By using it, you agree to these terms and to our privacy page.

We’ve kept them short and plain. Where a word in them has a special meaning, we explain it.

• You need to be 18 or older to use Castle Gambit: to have an account, guest or member, to be on a Castle’s roster, or to accept a gambit. We ask everyone for a birth month and year first, and keep only whether you’re 18 or over.
• If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we’ll delete it. As with any deleted account, the people they played keep those games, under a name only.
• Guest accounts are temporary: they’re deleted after 30 days unless you save your games with an email or Google.

A club night works because people trust each other across the board. So:

• Report results honestly. Both players report, and a result counts when your copies match.
• Use your own name, or a fair version of it. Don’t pretend to be someone else.
• Don’t try to game the rating: no fake games, no throwing games, no second accounts.
• Be decent to people. No harassment, no hateful names, nothing that makes a room less welcoming.
• Respect people’s privacy: don’t use Castle Gambit to find, follow or contact someone outside the club who hasn’t asked you to. We’ll remove anyone who does.

• The rating is a social rating for casual games. It isn’t a USCF or FIDE rating and doesn’t replace one.
• If your copies don’t match, the Castle’s organizer settles it, and their call stands. A result only one of you reported stands after a day.
• Organizers can correct or void a game. When they do, everyone’s rating is recalculated as if it had been right the first time.
• We may adjust how ratings are worked out as we learn from real club nights.

Starting a Castle makes you its owner. Owners and the organizers they choose agree to:

• Describe the Castle honestly: a real club, meeting in a real place.
• Let people in fairly, and look after who’s a member.
• Add only adults (18 and over) to the roster, under the name they’re happy to be known by, and remove a name when asked.
• Keep the TV link to the room: anyone with it can see who’s checked in that night.
• Settle disputed results in good faith.

What you write about your Castle and your gambits stays yours. You let us show it on Castle Gambit so people can find your club.

• We’ll keep Castle Gambit running as well as we can, but we can’t promise it will never be down or wrong.
• It’s provided as it is. Club nights are run by their organizers, not by us, and we’re not responsible for what happens in the room.
• We may remove a Castle, a gambit or an account that breaks these terms or puts people at risk.
• If we change these terms, we’ll update this page and its date, and tell signed-in members about anything important first.

You can stop using Castle Gambit at any time. To delete your account, write to castlegambit.support@avevue.com (a button in settings is on its way). Your opponents keep the games you played against them, under a name only.