Legal
When an entry fee comes back, when it does not, and how long it takes.
In short
In these situations the full entry fee is returned:
There is currently no self-service cancellation. If you want to withdraw from a tournament you have paid for, write to info@chess4prize.com before it starts and say which one.
We will release the seat so somebody else can take it. Whether the fee is returned is decided case by case at the moment, and we would rather say that plainly than publish a deadline nobody has committed to honouring. A published rule — for example a full refund up to some number of hours before the start — is one of the open items below.
If you abandon the payment page without paying, nothing is charged and the held seat is released automatically within the hour.
Refunds are made to the original payment method through Stripe, who process our payments. We cannot send a refund anywhere else — not to a different card, not to a bank transfer, not as credit — because we never hold your payment details and the refund follows the original charge back.
Refunds are created by a person, not automatically. When a tournament is cancelled or an admission fails after payment, the entry appears in an operations queue and somebody issues the refund in Stripe. We are telling you this because it affects how quickly you see the money and because the opposite claim would be untrue.
Once issued, the money typically reaches your account within five to ten business days, depending on your bank. That part is outside our control and we do not control the timing of it.
We have not committed to a maximum time between a refund becoming due and it being issued. That is an open item below.
A refund returns an entry fee. A prize is money you won. They are paid by different routes and on different timelines.
Prize payouts are made by hand, off-platform, after a human review of the result. Chess4prize does not hold a balance for you, there is no wallet, and there is no automatic transfer. How prizes are decided and paid is set out on the prizes page.
Nothing in this policy removes rights you have under the consumer law that applies to you. Where that law gives you more than this document does, the law wins.
EU and UK consumer law generally provides a fourteen-day withdrawal right for online purchases, with an exception for leisure services supplied on a specific date. A scheduled tournament plausibly falls within that exception, but the answer depends on the jurisdiction of the operating entity, and that entity is not yet established. We are not going to state a conclusion here before that is settled — see the open items.
If you believe you are entitled to a refund this document does not give you, write to info@chess4prize.com and say why. We would rather be told we are wrong than have you raise it with your bank first.
If you dispute a charge with your bank instead of contacting us, your entry for that tournament is withdrawn and any prize arising from it is not paid while the dispute is open. This is not a penalty — Stripe reverses the payment immediately on a dispute and we cannot hold a seat that has not been paid for.
Writing to us first is faster for both of us.
At the time of writing, Chess4prize runs Stripe in test mode. No real money is taken and no real money is paid out. The platform refuses to start with a live payment key while this is the case, so this is enforced rather than intended.
Nothing in this document applies to a test-mode payment, because there is nothing to return. This section will be removed when live payments are enabled.
These are facts about the operating business rather than about how the platform works, and inventing them would be worse than leaving them out. They are required before Chess4prize charges a live entry fee.
This document is written by the people who built and operate Chess4prize. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and it is not legal advice. It describes how the platform actually behaves; where something is undecided it says so rather than guessing.
